 Welcome to the US Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. 1989 was a revolutionary year in the world. The year began with Europe and Germany divided. The year ended with Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania having left the Soviet block and a process having been launched that would lead to German unification and the end of the Cold War. This was truly a major change in the world order. What was equally interesting was this was not being driven by war or military forces. The US military had, of course, set the stage for US success in the Cold War. However, in this point, the driving force was the striving of the people of these five countries for freedom and independence and to live in a free Europe. But it was also backstopped by some very creative and dynamic diplomacy. Diplomacy that is frequently underutilized and underappreciated. Hello, my name is John Cloud. I'm a professor in the National Security Affairs Department and this is NWC Talks. So what is diplomacy? Well, at the Naval War College, we often talk about the tools of US power as being the acronym the dime for diplomacy, information, military and economics. And diplomacy is the part of the dime that is used to persuade people not to use military force but to persuade people to support the United States or to see what the US goals are as their own goals. So a diplomat will discuss with the present prime minister of a country going down to lower levels of the government, members of the parliament, media and public, of what the US is looking for, what we are trying to accomplish and try to get them to support us in doing that or at least not to oppose us. Get them to see that our interest is the same as their interest. Now in this military force can help diplomacy. We can see that example in Iran today where we are using all these tools that I discussed to try to get the Iranians to come under a stricter nuclear regime and to stop being such a disruptive force in the region. And right now military may be the dominant one in that interaction. In other cases you would have more diplomacy being the dominant one. And that's because diplomacy is the low cost, low risk tool that we have. However, diplomacy is not a perfect solution. As Henry Kissinger said, diplomacy is, quote, the accumulation of partial successes, unquote. Diplomacy is also frequently used to manage issues. The issue may be too difficult to solve today, but if we can manage it, if we can keep it from exploding, it might be easier to solve in the future. And a prime example of this might be Israel-Palestine relations where we have tried to work with the Israelis over many years working with the Palestinians to see if there are solutions that can be found that would meet both sides' needs. Of course, that is a very difficult issue and we have not succeeded in finding such solutions. Former Deputy Secretary of State William Burns defined diplomacy as, quote, short of or diplomacy is the main instrument we employ to manage foreign relations, reduce external risks, and exploit the opportunities to advance our security and prosperity. When you look at that definition, though, it comes to one of the problems that diplomacy has. When diplomacy succeeds, often nobody knows. When a crisis is averted, it is less captivating, particularly on things like cable news than military action might be. You just don't have the same visuals that you do with military action. There are two basic types of diplomacy. There's multilateral and there's bilateral diplomacy. Multilateral is, of course, the action of many countries. Bilateral is your relationship with one other country. Large countries, including the United States, have an affinity for bilateral relations because we're such a dominant player. We assume we will be more successful in bilateral. We worry that sometimes with multilateral, the others will seek to balance us. We'll team up together to try to balance the United States. However, we have been historically very successful in multilateral relations. We were able to get the UN Security Council to approve our actions in Iraq in 1991 and our actions in Libya in 2011. To me, this debate on multilateral versus bilateral is sort of a shallow debate. The important thing is using which tool will help you succeed, will help you accomplish your goal, will help you advance the national interest. And that is the one that you should use. You shouldn't get hung up on, well, we don't like multilateral or we don't like bilateral. You should use whatever is the most effective tool. And the reality is you frequently have to use both of them. The Department of State is the primary instrument of U.S. diplomacy. The Department of State has the U.S. Foreign Service, which is composed of talented patriots who are willing to serve anywhere in the world to advance U.S. national interests. I may show some bias there as I'm a retired Foreign Service officer. But State does not have a monopoly on diplomacy. And in fact, our chief diplomat is the President of the United States. The Secretary of State is probably our second most important diplomat. As we see now, we're Secretary Pompeo traveling the world. But other cabinet members and other U.S. government officials, including, for example, the regional combatant commanders of the U.S. military, are extraordinarily important diplomatic officials to go along with what may be their full-time job. One outcome of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the way we fought those wars is that many American military officers had a diplomatic function in their jobs and gained an insight into diplomacy while they were fighting those wars. Another issue with diplomacy, another problem it has, is it can be extraordinarily labor-intensive. And frequently, much more labor-intensive than senior U.S. government officials have the time to commit. If we go back to the example of German unification and the end of the Cold War, President Bush and Secretary of State Baker committed incredible amounts of time to having a success there. And the success for us was defined as German unification with Germany remaining in NATO. But one thing that I find extraordinary is that after these great diplomatic successes that we had with German unification and the end of the Cold War, with the building the coalition to fight the Gulf War in 1991, ending the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, diplomacy seemed to go out of fashion. U.S. officials seemed to become overwhelmed with the reality that diplomacy includes these partial successes I talked about. They seemed not to want to invest the time in diplomacy. They looked at the imperfections of this tool but didn't look as much as at the imperfections of some of the other tools. Let me turn to three final thoughts. The first is diplomacy should be the first thing that we do and we should exhaust diplomacy before we go particularly to military action. And there's a simple reason for that. Diplomacy is the low-cost, low-risk tool that we have. We can engage with that. It doesn't preclude other options. That leads me to my second point, which is diplomacy may not be enough. But if it isn't, we can go to these other tools, whether they be information, military, or economics. We are not blocked in if we go with diplomacy first. The third thing I want to leave you with is something that Secretary of State Schultz used to talk about when he was secretary, which is the reality that you can't turn on and off diplomacy. Schultz would talk about the need to tend the garden, that you need to continually work with your friends, your allies, and your adversaries so that when you need them for diplomacy, you have already built the base for cooperation. So let me end there. Again, my name is John Cloud, a professor in the National Security Affairs, and this is NWC Talks.