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380 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1968)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0380 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD This volume is about diplomacy, a subject not much thought or written about but constituting, nevertheless, our principal alternative to war. We do not discuss diplomacy in a dictionary sense, such as that so widely propa- gated in this country by Sir Harold Nicolson's eloquent little book, Diplomacy, but in a modern, real-world sense, with particular reference to its practice by the United States. A final article essays to define the nature of diplomacy, synthe- size views expressed by contributors, take issue with some, and fill in a few crevices. As do the other papers, it points to deficiencies in our practice of diplomacy and suggests improvements. Most participants in our government's conduct of foreign affairs, like most scholars, are enamored of foreign policy. The participants want to make foreign policy, the scholars to analyze it. The participants want to be where the action is, not always aware that, if properly prepared, they are where the action should be. Their eyes, however, like those of journalists and scholars, are centered on the seventh floor of the State Department, where the Secretary of State and many of his close associates work; on the White House; and on the Executive Office Building, where the staff of the National Security Council is located. But decisions of the President and the Secretary of State and advice of the National Security Council have a mystifying way of dribbling away to disappoint- ing results. This is not simply because their decisions concern other governments and international conditions beyond our control. It is also because our diplomatic resources for the execution of these decisions are inadequate. We are trying to make do with conceptualizations and criteria, organization and procedures more appropriate to the dictionary definition which Sir Harold Nicolson popularized than to the demands of the world. This suggests what some of us in the diplomatic establishment have long observed, namely, that right decisions of the President and the Secretary of State and sound advice of the National Security Council preparatory to those decisions- all of which necessarily must be confined to a very limited number of subjects-are not enough. The people below them, who must carry out those decisions and imaginatively supplement them with all sorts of initiatives, serve as a filter, permitting only waves of certain frequencies to get through, not the combination originally intended. When Presidents and Secretaries of State are wrong, this is a good thing. But when they are right, their decisions are only partially effective. We have given wholly inadequate attention to the quality, education, and train- ing of the people who must carry out our foreign policies; the kind of organiza- tion that they need for effective conduct of diplomacy; the criteria and procedures by which that organization must operate; and the working conditions of the diplo- mats if they are to be at all times well informed and resourceful. These are factors which help determine the quality, and indeed the content, of our foreign policy, for, in a realistic sense, foreign policy is what we do. ix

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