Richard Pearson
State Department’s Focus on Generalist Diplomats Undermines U.S. Interests, Wastes Resources, and Limits Foreign Service Effectiveness.
In 1928, a young Foreign Service Officer serving in Hamburg, having concluded that his education was inadequate, began the process of resigning. Aware that this was a promising junior diplomat whose departure would be counter to the national interest, State Department officials in Washington offered him an opportunity to participate in a newly-established initiative to train diplomats in languages few Americans at the time studied – Arabic, Chinese, Russian, and Japanese.
Already fluent in German and with a strong background in European affairs, the young diplomat - all of 24 years old at the time - decided to study Russian and to remain in the Foreign Service. He was duly sent for three years of Russian language and area studies training at the University of Berlin and practical training at the American Legations in Riga and Tallinn - at the time listening posts on an inaccessible Soviet Russia.
The officer – George Kennan, as readers will have realized - eventually became not only the Foreign Service’s most famous officer – in part for having drafted the X Telegram and “Sources of Soviet Conduct” article in Foreign Affairs, documents that laid the foundation for containment and eventual victory over the USSR -- but a career expert on the Soviet Union and Russia contributing his expertise from perches in government and academia.
Kennan’s emergence as the U.S. government’s leading Russia expert was made possible by a publicly funded training program. The Russian training program trained, in addition to Kennan, such Russia hands Charles Bohlen and Edward Page, Jr. Those young Russia specialists became - alongside their State Department colleagues dubbed the China Hands, the Arabists, the Chrysanthemum Club, the Germanists, and other regional specialists – key American diplomats with outstanding language skills, thick Rolodexes, and detailed knowledge of and relationships in their countries of focus. Kennan, Bohlen, and others were selected for this opportunity on merit given their records and promise and not because of any immutable characteristics.
Over the course of his long life – he died in 2005 aged 101 – Kennan would serve, amongst other positions, three tours at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow including as ambassador, and as the first Director of Policy Planning. Kennan ultimately spent roughly four decades in government service largely in roles for which his expertise and language training were directly relevant.
Contrast Kennan’s long career and the solid return on the taxpayer investment of his training with today’s State Department where cultivation of the generalist Foreign Service Officer rather than the career regional expert is prioritized.
FSOs who want to be like Kennan have little chance in the new Foreign Service. Instead of experts who spend years developing extraordinary expertise in certain regions, the State Department has transformed them into generalists who develop thin expertise in a wide variety of issues. This is detrimental to U.S. foreign policy goals and the national interest.
Since the 1990s, the State Department has increasingly embraced the Generalist ethos. It has been present much longer, but then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton set the tone for making assignments and promotions increasingly dependent on punching generalist tickets. Of course, most who join the Foreign Service do so as generalists and know they can be sent anywhere to do almost anything, but this principle was not widely applied, on the grounds that regional expertise was respected and rewarded. The principle is also not wrong, as FSOs need broader experience as they rise in the service, so careers spent on a narrower range of issues do not prepare them for leadership positions as well as do those with wider and more varied service. The Obama and Biden Administrations took this diversity principle to the extremes, elevating it in assignments to an unprecedented level and promoting officers only after they had checked many generalist boxes. This has reached the point where it is almost impossible to imagine a Kennan in today’s Foreign Service.
Unfortunately, the language training provided to outbound American Foreign Service Officers in most cases fails to equip them to function at levels appropriate to their duties representing the United States. As generalist State Department officers are moved regularly between countries, regions, and languages, their language training experience resembles a lunch buffet - two years of Vietnamese, a year of Italian, two years of Korean - more than an in-depth training of regional experts. Few emerge capable of doing more in the language than making simple conversation. As the officer moves on to new assignments and new languages, those skills – expensively acquired by the officer and paid for by the taxpayer – naturally atrophy.
Since the generalist became the ideal in the 1990s, it is not unusual for a Foreign Service Officer to receive intensive training in three or more languages over the course of a career. At over $100,000 per year in tuition payments alone as well as salary and benefits, housing, and various allowances, this results in the government spending potentially millions of dollars on training for one officer with no guarantee, requirement, or even expectation that that officer will use those expensively acquired language skills after a single 2-to-4-year-long assignment. An officer having, for example, received two years of costly fulltime training in Mandarin Chinese to serve in Beijing could continue to serve in China or Taiwan afterwards or could, just as easily, decide to never serve in East Asia again and embark instead on learning Turkish, Amharic, or Hungarian from scratch.
As if intending to make a bad situation worse, the government continues to lower its own standards. In January, the Foreign Service Institute ceased testing officers on their reading abilities. Going forward, can we expect that American diplomats in Paris will be unable to make heads or tails of Le Monde and Le Canard enchaîné?
Insufficiently preparing our diplomats for their duties results in a U.S. foreign policy apparatus that is overly reliant on locally hired foreigners to read the local press, translate conversations and discussions with host country officials, and monitor the scene in locations around the world. Relying on what local staff choose to translate or what the foreign governments decide to make available in English puts America at a significant disadvantage.
Contrast these practices with those other countries both allied and adversarial. The diplomats of China, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan to pick four countries, generally have years of exposure to the language and region of their career focus and have often earned graduate degrees from universities in those countries.
The U.S. Government needs to demand a sustained regional focus from more of its Foreign Service Officers while also providing the requisite training. A career in the Foreign Service should come with the expectation of committing to serving in a particular language area or region of the world and to preparing oneself linguistically as needed and to continuing to develop those skills over one’s career.
Ultimately, the hurdle is not the academic resources that are available. As a country, we know how to create effective training programs. Appropriate language schools and graduate programs exist here and in countries of interest abroad.
Outside of the Foreign Service there exist small programs aimed at developing a greater depth of regional expertise amongst civil servants and military officers. Since 1959, the Olmsted Scholar Program has provided promising young military officers foreign language training and graduate studies in the relevant country. The Mansfield Fellowship has for 30 years trained a core group of public servants as Japan hands through a rigorous program of Japanese language training and professional placements in Tokyo. Congress should take note that similar programs need to be stood up in short order for Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Korean, and Indonesian.
The core challenge is changing the general mindset within the State Department and other foreign affairs agencies on how they cultivate talent, where they invest resources, and to what extent they are willing to limit individuals’ choices in the interest of developing the deeper expertise that the government needs.
Many years ago, a now retired friend of mine joined the Japanese Foreign Ministry. After his first week of training, he was told that he would be developed into a career India specialist. His English already strong, he received intensive training in Tamil and Hindi first in Tokyo and later in southern India. My friend went on to a distinguished career spent between the South Asia Desk in Tokyo and Japanese missions in South Asia. I once asked my friend how his Ministry would have responded if, all those years ago, he had protested and stated that he wanted to focus not on South Asia but on Latin America, Central Europe, or East Africa. According to my friend, the response would have been simple - “Sir, the door is over there. We have plenty of candidates eager to take your place and ready to serve where we need them.”
While that Japanese diplomat’s 30-year South Asia-focused career path was largely dictated by the needs of his Ministry rather than his own preferences, the Japanese taxpayer did get a solid return on the investment made in his training those many years ago.
While the Japanese system may be too prescriptive for American tastes, surely a middle ground can be found between that method and our current linguistic training buffet and focus on generalists.
Author: Richard Pearson formerly served at the Export-Import Bank and the Department of Commerce – most recently as a Foreign Commercial Service Officer at the U.S. Consulate-General, Shanghai, until 2025.
