I have been pleased to see several stories making the same point that I did in my previous post on the killing of Ambassador Stevens - that American diplomacy cannot function with a bunker mentality. The New York Times Magazine ran a longer piece making this point. A similar post ran on The Daily Beast as part of an interview of former Secretary of State Albright and Ambassador Crocker. In the Daily Beast piece Ambassador Crocker gave some good quotes like "If it's risk avoidance, there is no point in being there." He also said "We have to be prepared as a foreign service to take those risks . . . and if some of us pay the ultimate price that's simply part of the life."
I wholeheartedly agree. Obviously, it is easy for me to agree as the likelihood of me deploying overseas, especially to a dangerous part of the world, is next to zero. However, someone like Ambassador Crocker has run that risk and knows what it means to say that the foreign service must be prepared to take the risks.
It would be my hope that whomever President Obama chooses to succeed Secretary Clinton is aware of this problem and makes it a priority. I have my doubts that this will happen. The easy path is to ramp up security and rhetoric about the protection of our brave diplomats. It is much harder to have a reasoned discussion about how foreign service officers need to connect with the countries they are posted to and how excessive security makes that task harder. It is even harder to acknowledge that dialing back the security for our diplomats raises the likelihood that more of them will likely die in the service of that outreach. Given the current political outrage that is still burning following the death of Ambassador Stevens, it seems unlikely that any President or Secretary of State will willingly pay the political price necessary to state openly that the risk of more American deaths is a necessary price to pay.
Our democracy does not do well with admitting that sometimes sacrifices are made in the service of a higher goal. I do not see that changing any time soon.
