Negroponte Advises New Diplomats to Seek Challenging Posts

Thom Shanker
NYT, February 21

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — Entering his first full week as deputy secretary of state, John D. Negroponte on Tuesday urged a graduating class of new diplomats to seek overseas assignments in challenging, difficult and even hazardous posts.

Mr. Negroponte, only the third career Foreign Service officer to hold the deputy position, said the diplomatic corps was shifting its weight from historic centers of politics and policy to increase the American presence in world capitals more subject to turmoil.

Potential assignments in Iraq were very much on the minds of many students at the Foreign Service Institute, where 4 members of this class of 75 will go to work in Baghdad or with provincial reconstruction teams throughout the country.

Mr. Negroponte’s comments will resonate across the diplomatic corps because of an animated interagency debate here in Washington about the proper way to share the burden among the government’s civilian agencies and the military to carry out the Bush administration’s new Iraq strategy.

“The impact of our presence at some of those remote places, pound for pound, is really much higher than if you are in Western Europe or somewhere where you kind of blend into the scenery,” Mr. Negroponte said.

Mr. Negroponte, who served in 2004 and 2005 as American ambassador to Iraq, a hardship assignment in which family members are not allowed, told the class that in his new position he intended “to make sure that the State Department is doing the best it can, is doing its share, in contributing to our efforts in Iraq, and doing it in the most efficient and effective way possible.”

He said “one of the things we are going to have to reflect on, considerably, in light of our Iraq experience is, going forward, how best should we organize to respond to these types of situations, these situations in the future.” And he added: “We are just working this out. And I think it is going to take time.”

Mr. Negroponte moved to the No. 2 job at the State Department after spending nearly two years as director of national intelligence.

In an interview after his remarks, Mr. Negroponte said his policy focus in the new job would be on Iraq, on Northeast Asia, in particular China, and on Latin America, even as he tends to the day-to-day management of the State Department bureaucracy that is the deputy’s historic responsibility.

He said a global shift in diplomatic assignments begun under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would move just under 300 of its 6,000 Foreign Service officers from traditional embassy posts to more far-flung locations, and not just Iraq, where new threats challenged American interests.

“I would not call this a radical shift, but it is a shift nonetheless,” Mr. Negroponte said. “It is one that maybe was a while in coming.”

Mr. Negroponte, 67, spoke at length of the personal satisfaction he had taken in the fact that all of his overseas assignments during 41 years in the Foreign Service were in the developing world, except for two tours: one, a stint in Salonika, Greece, and the other at the Paris peace talks to end the war in Vietnam.

Mr. Negroponte had extensive experience in Vietnam during the war, arriving in the early 1960s on his second foreign posting.

Mr. Negroponte made clear that he recognized that the yearlong, unaccompanied assignments to posts in Iraq are challenging, both for diplomats and for family members left behind. And he pledged that the State Department was paying careful attention to the professional and personal needs of those Foreign Service officers sent into harm’s way.

“I don’t wish unaccompanied assignments, at least not in too-large doses, on anybody, having just done one in Iraq,” Mr. Negroponte said. “It is always stressful.” But, he said, “I think we all came into this business with our eyes open.”

The changes in emphasis described by Mr. Negroponte already are being felt at the Foreign Service Institute, where enrollments in Arabic language training have quadrupled to 450 since 2001. The institute also has increased enrollments in Chinese and Persian.

The largest State Department presence overseas today is in Iraq, with more than 140 Foreign Service officers in Baghdad and more than 50 others in provincial reconstruction teams. That number is to grow by about 350, to include Foreign Service officers and State Department contractors with specialized skills, under the new Iraq strategy that calls for doubling to 20 the number of teams.

Recalling his own diplomatic experiences in Asia and Latin American, Mr. Negroponte said junior Foreign Service officers in these less-traditional posts would have far higher profiles than if they were serving in London, Paris or Rome.

In the interview, he discussed what he considered realistic goals in his new role, having become the State Department’s No. 2 officer in the final two years of an administration.

“It is quite different than coming in at the very beginning, when the latitude, if you will, for new ideas is probably greater, the scope for new ideas is probably greater,” he said. “You’re not a caretaker. There are big issues out there. But radical new departures? I think it would be unrealistic.”