Carol Giacomo is a Fall 2020 Fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. An award-winning journalist and writer, she was a member of The New York Times editorial board from 2007 to 2020 and has served as a diplomacy correspondent for Reuters. With an extensive background in national security and foreign policy, she has interviewed dozens of world leaders and traveled to more than 100 different countries.
Harvard Political Review: What trends or patterns have you noticed in the foreign policy realm? Is there a prevailing ideology or ideologies? Have some leaders resonated with you more than others?
Carol Giacomo: Well, those are two very different questions. First of all, in the 1990s, democracies seemed to be gaining strength, and they were emerging in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. We seemed to have a growth in democracies, and now we’re seeing a retreat. Freedom House, which conducts research on democracy and human rights, has some astonishing statistics about the democratic backsliding of the last 14 years or so. An alarming number of countries have regressed from democracy, including our own. So, that’s the first concern of mine, and a trend that I think about a lot, because I think it’s important to reverse that trend — the rise of authoritarian leaders, which goes hand-in-hand with the weakening of democracy.
It’s very dispiriting to see people like Viktor Orban in Hungary, who was given scholarship money by George Soros — a leading advocate of democracy — and educated at Central European University, which used to be based in Budapest. And now he has taken Hungary in a totally different direction. That’s extremely alarming because Hungary is a member of NATO. Poland, another NATO member, is also moving in the wrong direction. So these are serious problems that are affecting the strongest democratic [countries].
Regarding leaders that have inspired me, I met Nelson Mandela briefly after he became the leader of South Africa. He was in jail for many, many years, and I covered the reaction to him being in jail and his fight for equality in Apartheid South Africa. To meet him in South Africa was quite an amazing experience. I also was lucky enough to meet Barack Obama. When Obama was president, he would on occasion invite editorial writers to meet with him at the White House. And about half a dozen times, I was part of a small group that went and talked to him about the issues of the day. I think he was committed to doing the best that he could for this country. He knew that he was playing a balancing role as the first Black president. He was very concerned about governance and wanted the country to function well on behalf of all its people. If he didn’t agree with you, he would make it clear. He pushed back and seemed to enjoy the give and take. And so I thought the discussion was pretty honest, and you learned a lot about him in those situations. I appreciate that kind of experience, which certainly helped me understand his perspective, and it allowed me to bring greater clarity to my writing as a member of The New York Times editorial board.
HPR: How would you characterize the Trump administration’s approach to American foreign policy?
CG: President Trump’s foreign policy in general has been extremely damaging because he has weakened, attacked, and undermined alliances — in particular our ties to NATO. Say what you will about NATO — yes, it probably needs to be reformed more than it has been. Yes, the European Union probably needs retooling as well. But regardless, those kinds of relationships, and the transatlantic relationship at large, has helped keep the peace for 75 years. And our alliances have been a strategic force multiplier for our country. So to the extent that Trump has spent so much time undermining these relationships is a huge disservice to our country and for the cause of democracy in general. My colleagues and I were willing to give him a shot at the beginning of his presidency to see whether he would grow in office and whether he could meet the challenge of leading America today. And he has not. Trump tried this very unorthodox strategy with North Korea, by reaching out personally to Kim Jong Un. And, I would say, okay, go for it — if you’ve got an idea and a plan for what you’re going to say when you go. If he made a plan, maybe his strategy with Kim Jong Un would have worked, but he didn’t think it through. Trump tried to freelance with Kim Jong Un, and the meeting resulted in a stalemate. There are people in the Trump administration who really tried to put together a process by which the United States and North Korea could begin a negotiating process that might lead to some kind of mutually beneficial solution. But Trump always wanted the maximum position. He was unwilling to negotiate, unwilling to compromise, and he basically wanted North Korea to do everything that he wanted as a first step before the United States would reciprocate. It was always a crapshoot to see whether the North Koreans could ever be serious about negotiating, but Trump never knew how to take his initiative. Today, there’s no war between the U.S. and North Korea, which is great, but the North Korean nuclear program is bigger and better today than it was when Trump arrived in office. So that is a policy failure on Trump’s behalf.
HPR: Let’s talk about the international role of the United States in terms of diplomacy. What has been your impression of American diplomacy and this notion of collective action in the past decade or so?
CG: Well, I would say a couple things. One, the United States has really let its diplomatic skills atrophy. Diplomacy is a process, and you need to have a skilled cadre of professionals to carry out a country’s diplomacy on a daily basis. I would say that the State Department has been under-resourced for a very long time. And we can argue why that’s happened. Part of it is that there were terrible battles in the last decade or more over its budget — there was a Budget Control Act that severely limited the extent to which spending could increase. This made it very difficult to resource the government properly. We’ve also become overly reliant on the Pentagon to solve problems. We’ve been at war for 20 years, and during that period, the Pentagon has gotten more and more money. And even when troop levels started to go down overseas, we’ve still been putting more and more money into defense spending. I think the whole thing is out of whack. Then, Trump came along and proposed an even more draconian cut in the State Department budget. He appointed Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, who was a very weak secretary — he got rid of many mid-level diplomats and made the whole institution so dispirited. Now, with Mike Pompeo, some of his behavior has been so questionable that more people are leaving, so you’ve been losing a lot of skilled middle management State Department career officials. And assistant secretaries in the State Department are really the work horses in terms of policymakers, and the Trump administration left a lot of these jobs vacant for a long time. Then they put career people in the jobs, but didn’t have them confirmed by the Senate. So there are many structural problems right now that have weakened the State Department.
HPR: Do you think that the journalistic community has the respect of the foreign policy community? Should efforts be taken to strengthen that relationship? What is the dynamic like right now?
CG: I think there is more mutual respect and less controversy between the foreign policy community and reporters who cover foreign policy. It’s less contaminated by the political divisions of today. People who cover foreign policy tend to be more straightforward, I think. And we’re not doing all that much foreign policy reporting lately. The whole year and certainly the last half of Trump’s term has been so focused on domestic politics and our own divisions. And so you’ve seen fewer foreign policy stories. And yet there have been a fair amount of stories recently about Secretary Pompeo and some of the things that he’s done that either have been of questionable legality or questionable policy. But I would say, in general, there is more mutual respect within the foreign policy community. I don’t mean to criticize my colleagues in other spheres of politics. I just think that the foreign policy space is less frayed with political division, at least at the moment, than domestic politics. And so there’s more of a space to have an even-tempered discussion, if you’re talking about the future of Iraq versus what Trump is going to do about the Supreme Court.
HPR: Do you have any final thoughts or considerations? What should younger generations take away from your work?
CG: There were times in our history when the American people understood more than they do now why we need to be engaged in the world and why we should care about the world. Whether it was World War Two or Vietnam, there were troops going overseas to fight. When our troops are overseas, people are compelled to care about the world. I think as time goes by, a smaller percentage of the population has connections to the military. I want to say it’s about 1% of the country that has any connection to the military at all. There’s no draft — and there hasn’t been a draft for a long time — so most Americans have no stake in what the military does. And, to a great extent, the condition exists in Congress where so few members have been in the military or have been associated with the military in some way. As a result, Americans don’t always understand why we need to be involved overseas, whether that’s supporting a health care program in Africa or sending ships to the South China Sea. In the future, we will need to make the case — and this will be up to your generation — why normal Americans should care about what’s happening in Syria, China, Hong Kong, or wherever. The world is interconnected, and we’ve got people in almost every city in the United States that either import items from other countries or sell goods to other countries. And so people have to understand that we are interconnected — and that is a good thing. I think we’ve lost that connection, and we have to realize that there’s a reason why we are involved in the world — whether it’s an alliance or a trading relationship. So that would be my pitch.
Image Credit: Princeton University Humanities Council
