The State Department is the least understood and most consequential civilian institution in the federal government. Its decline is one of the most significant governance failures of the last generation.
The State Department's Functions
The State Department performs functions that no other institution in the federal government can substitute for: the management of diplomatic relationships with the 190-plus countries with which the United States maintains formal relations; the negotiation of the treaties, agreements, and understandings through which American interests are advanced without military force; the management of the consular services through which American citizens abroad receive assistance and foreign nationals obtain visas to enter the United States; and the provision of the foreign policy expertise — the deep country and regional knowledge, the language capability, the institutional knowledge of foreign governments — that effective diplomacy requires.
These functions are performed by the Foreign Service — the professional diplomatic corps that provides the institutional continuity and expertise that political appointees cannot — and by the Civil Service employees who staff the Department's domestic operations. The Foreign Service's career structure, its rotation through hardship posts, and its culture of professional expertise distinguish it from both the political appointee system and the military's own institutional culture. This distinctiveness is the source of both its institutional strength and its persistent vulnerability to the political pressures that see its expertise as an obstacle rather than an asset.
The Decline
The State Department's institutional capacity has declined significantly over the past generation, through a combination of budget constraints, political hostility to professional diplomacy, and the progressive transfer of foreign policy functions to the Pentagon and the intelligence community. The result is a diplomatic institution that is increasingly outgunned by the military and intelligence institutions that compete with it for foreign policy influence — not because diplomacy is less effective than the alternatives, but because the alternatives have more institutional resources, more political support, and more effective advocates within the interagency process.
The State Department's decline is the governance cost of a foreign policy culture that values military capability over diplomatic capacity. What is lost is not visible until the moment when the problem that diplomacy could have prevented has become the crisis that only military force can manage — at much greater cost and with much less certain outcomes.
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