All Episodes
Nov. 28, 2017 - Steve Pieczenik
05:13
Opus 32
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachank and this is Steve Talks. this is Dr. Steve Pachank and this is Steve Talks.
Hello, I'm Dr. Pachank.
Pachanik.
Today I want to talk about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his request to decrease the number of Foreign Service officers and the number of civil servants.
Let me say up front that I'm in full agreement with this President and with Rex Tillerson.
I think he's doing an excellent job.
I think this is a man who was suited to be Secretary of State as head of Mobile Exxon Oil.
A $400 billion corporation.
He knew every one of the players in the Middle East, the Far East, and in Russia.
But more importantly, there's another issue at hand.
The State Department has been a bloated bureaucracy for well over 40 to 50 years.
And I have been in four different administrations.
Under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Carter, and Bush Sr.
I've been in and out, and I've had a lot of respect for the Foreign Service officers.
Right now we have 3,000 Foreign Service officers and 11,000 civil servants.
Overall, the bloated bureaucracy is over 70,000 people overseas.
That's a lot.
For the most part, the Foreign Service has really not been trained in the very essential elements that somebody like Rex Tillerson has been, both in substance, process, in particular psychology, national character, and most importantly, they have not been trained in transnational cooperation and negotiations.
With transnational corporations and other governments.
In fact, I had to go to the RAND Corporation in order to develop a transnational cooperation, transnational negotiation format for our secretaries of state and our state department so that they could be able to negotiate with Muslim countries, with China, with Japan, and Russia.
Those textbooks that were developed as a result of my strategy and tactics were delivered to the United States Institute of Peace.
I don't think they ever went to the Foreign Service officers.
Equally important is the understanding that 40% of the ambassadors at the State Department are not Foreign Service officers.
They are political appointees.
Let me say that again.
In both Democratic and Republican administrations, 40% of the ambassadorial slots which should have gone to Foreign Service officers are political appointments.
Some are good, some are bad, and some are awful.
Equally disturbing is the fact that I don't know of one Foreign Service officer with whom I've served as a Secretary of State.
Let me be a little more specific.
Dr.
Kissinger came out of academia.
Vance Carter came out of the law firm.
Bush people, Baker in particular, came out of the law firm.
Schultz came out of academia.
So on and so forth.
Now, one of the individuals who was Secretary of State ever became a Foreign Service officer or really was elevated from a Foreign Service officer, the closest that it came to that, So what do we have?
We have an institution of 70,000 people who are involved in process and And meetings.
And that's really what it's all about.
Process and meetings.
And let me tell you right now, we do not need another institution that really does not produce an end product.
Most of that process and meetings can be co-opted by either the CIA, military intelligence, any one of the other intelligence units among the 16 intelligence units that we have, as well as the military.
In particular, every one of our generals in SOCOM, SouthCOM, CentralCOM, are all invested in transnational negotiation, our experts in diplomatic affairs.
So we can co-opt the entire State Department right through the military and the CIA. Let me quote Donald Trump, who said that Hillary Clinton ran the State Department as her personal hedge fund, where she allocated policies and implemented outcomes that were related to the amount of money she received from the dictators.
If you gave her millions of dollars, she would accommodate your wishes.
In short, she made the State Department an institution which was called Pay to Play.
Export Selection