The Counterrevolution: Tom Shannon on America’s Retreat from the World – Soft Power, Hard Choices, and the Hollowing Out of U.S. Diplomacy, by Bill Wanlund
Tom Shannon rose through the State Department ranks before retiring as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 2018 after 34 years at the State Department. In a recent Steady State podcast, he told interviewer Lauren Anderson that we’re in the middle of a “counterrevolution” in foreign policy – and not in a good way.
Shannon said that, after nearly two centuries of relative isolationism, “the real revolution in American foreign policy took place in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United States decided that our hemisphere was not enough to secure ourselves. We needed security, political and economic alliances, and global engagement that not only promoted our political values and our prosperity but would also convince people that our peace and our prosperity can be theirs also by partnering with us.”
But recent events – including the 9/11 attacks followed by the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the larger war on terror– “eroded this understanding of how we conduct foreign policy. Americans now tend to regard national security elites as not thinking about American values and interests,” Shannon said. This led to what he calls the counterrevolution – a rejection of the alliance-based system in favor of something that had prevailed until World War II: “An ‘America first, America by itself’ foreign policy that doesn’t see us as situated among allies and partners but operating independently and taking advantage of our power. President Trump has been one of the most effective articulators of this kind of foreign policy,” Shannon declared, warning, “like quicksand, once you step into it, it’s very hard to get out.”
“Military power and raw economic power command people’s attention and convince people to either stay away from you or to partner with you. But one reason that the U.S. has played such a fundamental role in shaping global agendas over the last half of the 20th century was not hard power. It was soft power – the power of our values, of our political systems that showed they could solve tough problems peacefully and within the structure of a constitutional order - which generated this remarkable culture and generated technological and scientific advances that have had profound impact on how people live,” Shannon said.
Continuing, “During World War II, we probably at most killed 10% of the German army, but we won the war, not just because of hard power, but because of the political strategies employed, alliances built, and our ability to convince our adversaries that there was no way out but to work with us. In the end they understood that our purpose was not their destruction.”
Interviewer Anderson introduced the hot-button issue of immigration and how soft power could address it. Shannon (who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs 2005-09 and later as Ambassador to Brazil) replied, “In the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, we focused on building common political values through democratization, and building common economic understandings through trade…to help our hemisphere engage with the rest of the world as democracies and as free markets and political entities.”
“Obviously our goal was to expand prosperity and, in the process, to convince people that there is a Brazilian dream and a Mexican dream and a Salvadoran dream that can be as attractive for their citizens as the American dream. Sometimes we’re successful in this, sometimes less so. But you can’t stop immigration at a frontier; you have to stop it well in front of that frontier. Some of that is security related, about proper policing and ensuring that people are passing through legal and orderly checkpoints. But a lot of it is about convincing people that life can be better” where they are.
“When John F. Kennedy creates the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps, and when the United States begins to understand its political engagement in the world as not just government-to-government relations, but also society-to-society relations, it’s powerful, because no other country has done that,” Shannon says. But, “as we make our foreign policy more mercantile and transactional, we’re convincing people we’re not a reliable partner because we aren’t prepared to make a commitment to them as a people and as a society; we’re only there for what we can get out of it in the moment.”
Anderson, while working in embassies during her FBI career, had identified candidates for the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP), which brings host country individuals with promising careers to the U.S. for short – up to three weeks – but intense, professionally-focused, visits to the U.S. She’s a fan, and asked Shannon for his view.
He said, “One thing I discovered is how many of the leaders, especially in my experience in Africa and Latin America, had been part of IVLPs. How many presidents, how many prime ministers, how many members of the national legislature had been part of this. It’s a hugely effective program, one that connected us to these societies and left lasting impressions on political leaders that served for our benefit as well.”
Anderson noted that, even in cases where the U.S. “may be in conflict or in strong disagreement with another country,” if you’re negotiating with someone who’s been through an IVLP, “you’re going to find a willingness to…find common ground” that might not otherwise be possible.
Shannon agreed, adding, “in a world where we often treat our adversaries as caricatures of who they really are, we can present ourselves in a way that’s not a cartoon. We can present ourselves in a way that whoever is sitting across the table from us remembers the time that they were with a family in Wisconsin, or had gone to a fish fry, or had listened to wolves howl in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan…and they’ve come away with a much more sophisticated, much more nuanced understanding of who we are.”
New York Times journalist Ezra Klein’s April 10 podcast provides another take on many of these issues, with a fillip of Iran included. If you’re interested, listen to or read Klein’s interview with political analyst Fareed Zakaria here.
A personal note: I worked with Tom when he was political counselor and I was press attaché at Embassy Caracas, 1996-99. In our first (of many) interviews with Venezuelan political journalists, I quickly realized that the best role I could play was to make introductions, ensure the reporter understood the ground rules, then sit back and learn from Tom. I consider him the best Foreign Service Officer I have known. And now, a quarter of a century on, I’m fortunate to still call him friend.
Bill Wanlund is a PDCA Board Member, retired Foreign Service Officer, Contributing Editor of PDCA's Public Diplomacy Today, and freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area. His column, Worth Noting, appears occasionally in PD Today and the PDCA Blog; it seeks to address Public Diplomacy and related topics of interest to all.