This article first appeared on the American Enterprise Institute site.
We of the foreign policy community have been following reports about potential secretary of atate candidates with vertiginous focus.
Romney? Rohrabacher? No! Petraeus? Bolton? Corker? Giuliani…?
Notwithstanding the head shaking from self-appointed sages in our community, Mr. Trump's search is all to the good. This is a big job, senior-most in the cabinet. And it is one of the most challenging in the U.S. government.
Now, I hear you thinking (yes I do) there are many challenges greater than national security. Of course, you are wrong, and that's only a semi-parochial answer.
Related: Rudy Giuliani's Flimsy Foreign Policy Credentials
Regular readers of my columns will know all too well my concerns about Syria, Iran, China, Russia and more. But there's another challenge, and that is the management of the national security bureaucracy of the United States.
The more or less 25,000 employees of the Department of State alone (not including foreign service nationals) are a unique breed, more than most persuaded that while political appointees come and go and presidents are mere temporary denizens of the White House, they are in the game forever.
Their view, as a senior Clinton administration official once told me, is that the executive branch is a democracy, and not the benign dictatorship our Constitution intends.
In light of this fact, the secretary of state requires special skills. He must:
– Be a bureaucratic navigator extraordinaire
– Be a leader, not a tyrant
– Explain the president's positions with care, doing his utmost to ensure such policies are executed
– Understand all the while that behind the scenes there will be many who seek to unravel the president's best laid plans
– Be a manager, more than a diplomat
– Have a vision about how to execute the president's priorities
– Be a modest and self-effacing leader, rather than a self-promoting peacock nurturing dreams of Nobel peace prizes
– Care most about the American people, and our values, our needs, our priorities and our national security above all else
That such things need to be said is a reflection of the failings of successive secretaries of state, who have met few of these criteria. Good luck, Mr. Trump.
Danielle Pletka is senior vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
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