John Kerry: Face-to-Face With the New Actors of Social Diplomacy
John Kerry will take over as Secretary of State, succeeding Hillary Clinton in the position. Clinton has been a veritable hub for innovation. She has overseen the craft of the American foreign policy agenda being developed into a malleable tool shaped by a new set of actors, traditional and less-traditional. It is a revitalized Department of State that – not without tries and errors – is now a much better fit to the ongoing shift of power seen around the world, from hierarchies to social actors.
Clinton’s State Department has been solidly nurturing a true engagement with the world, transforming foreign affairs in to a participatory process where top-down policies often find bottom-up solutions. It is a new diplomacy that Secretary Clinton calls 21st Century Statecraft, an innovative approach that embraces technology and communications tools while reaching out to new players.
Moving beyond traditional diplomacy is the true challenge that awaits Senator Kerry. Traditional diplomacy is characterized by “an excessive faith in the potential benefits of ‘engagement’ with rogue regimes and dictators,” as the Washington Post recently put it. Rather then dealing exclusively with governments, Secretary Clinton opened the engagement to the masses, the people, civil society, think tanks, the business sector, and the growing communities of innovators and coalitions.
Secretary Kerry will have to face this new way of actuating foreign policy in a world where governments are not the only interlocutors. Let’s call it social diplomacy, where social actors play as important a role as Presidents and Prime Ministers.
This shift is partly linked to the spread of technology and how innovation – not just technology per se – has changed the way we now see the world. Social media and mobile communications have increased the speed of the information cycle as well as how widely available news and information have become. They have also empowered citizens making their voices louder while bringing change all around the world and bridging the gap between the people and the democratic structures they want.
We’ve seen it the importance of technology in foreign relations in what is now known as the Arab Spring. From the town of Sidi Bouzid, where the 2010 Tunisian Revolution originated – spreading out to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – to the protests in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria.
Technology was not the cause of these movements, rather it accelerated the process: as Ambassador Tom Fletcher, the U.K. envoy to Lebanon, explained in a recent blog, “they showed the power of the best of old ideas allied with the best of new technology – iFreedom.”
As technology for the sake of technology is not the final objective, the focus should be on complementing traditional diplomacy with new tools and a clear vision on the road ahead.
The latter is where John Kerry, whose “life seems like audition for Secretary of State – as titled back in December by CNN – excels. “Serving as chairman of the [Foreign Relations] Committee since 2009, Kerry is widely respected in many parts of the world and seen as someone good at building relationships,” CNN wrote.
“In a sense, John’s entire life has prepared him for this role,” President Obama said of Kerry, when he announced his pick to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Kerry has traveled around the globe on behalf of the Administration to mend frayed relationships and has played a central role in every major foreign policy debate for nearly 30 years.
“I’ve appreciated John’s partnership in helping to advance so many of my foreign policy priorities, including the ratification of the New START Treaty,” as Obama highlighted. “I’ve called on his talents and diplomatic skills on several occasions, on complex challenges from Sudan and South Sudan to the situation in Afghanistan. And each time he has been exemplary.”
But Kerry’s high profile diplomatic skills will have to face a new balance between the old and the new, between tradition and innovation, between the power of policies and the power of ideas.
Today’s State Department, as shaped in the past four years by Secretary Clinton, works on different fronts. It has incubated innovation and ideas to create a better balance between what Princeton University’s Anne Marie Slaughter, a former Director of Policy Planning, calls the “Billiard Ball World” and the “Lego World”.
The first is “a world in which states are reduced to their heads of state, their foreign ministry, and their army, and they interact with other states almost entirely in terms of power,” Slaughter explained in her remarks at Penn State University in March 2012. The second is “a world in which states come apart […] and have the ability to network or partner or make an alliance with social actors. […] It is a horizontal world. There are no ladders because there are no hierarchies. It is a web. Power still exists in a web, but it is exercised from the center, not the top.”
In other words, rather then focusing only on policies – most times forged at the White House and actuated at the State Department – Secretary Kerry will have to familiarize himself with a world in terms of “Lego” bricks and to harness the power of innovation. It is a challenging task that Clinton was able to address quite successfully – but not without set backs and criticism – thanks also to a great team of advisers and innovators, first and foremost her Senior Advisor for Innovation Alec Ross.
Clinton and her team initiated a veritable revolution in the way diplomacy is implemented, not only in the United States, but also all around the world. They have been to diplomacy and foreign policy what Jane Jacobs represented for urban planning in the Sixties. With her community-based approach, Jacobs inspired generations of urban planners and activists around the globe to focus more on a neighborhood-centered city structures and social interactions rather than massive power structures and large scale developments that would have undermined the development of our society. “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings,” Jacobs wrote in her 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”
In the same way, Clinton helped re-focused the State Department to better understand – as well as interact with – Slaughter’s “Lego World” and actuate the Administration’s foreign policy priorities in new innovative ways. And the State Department experiment is now used as an inspiration by many other governments.
“I do believe we’ve significantly changed the way that people think about foreign policy,” Ross said in his keynote address to the 2012 Project Revolution conference. “I think before, foreign policy was perceived to be just between people sipping coffee at a mahogany table behind closed doors with flags flying in the background, having one-on-one government-to-government communications. I think foreign policy has been wildly opened up and I think we’ve played a meaningful role in that.”
While John Kerry is very familiar with the behind-closed-doors diplomacy, he’s not a novice when it comes to technology and harnessing innovation. In his 2004 Presidential campaign – following the trend set during that year’s primaries by Vermont Governor Howard Dean – he embraced Friendster, a precursor to Facebook, trying to attract younger voters and more donations. “The Kerry campaign seems to have grasped the usefulness of the Internet as a fundraising tool,” Ezra Klein wrote back in 2004 in an article on Joe Trippi and his book “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
Kerry has everything in place to forge a new era at the State Department and leave a long-lasting imprint in American foreign policy. Innovation and ediplomacy are part of Hillary Clinton’s legacy. What will Secretary Kerry’s be?
Andreas Sandre is a Press and Public Affairs Officer at the Embassy of Italy in Washington DC. The views expressed in the article are the author's only and do not necessarily reflect those of the Embassy of Italy. On Twitter: @andreas212nyc
