BENGHAZI, LIBYA—The State Department is often its own worst enemy. Professional diplomats argue their presence is necessary and valuable to developing intelligence, but then the State Department puts its diplomats in cities like Winnipeg, Halifax, and Lyon rather than where they really matter. The latest fad is to station diplomats next door to where they are assigned for the sake of safety and logistics; hence, the U.S. embassy to Libya is in Tunisia and the U.S. mission to Yemen is in Saudi Arabia, even though portions of Libya and Yemen are safe. Setting up and securing consulates in Aden, Benghazi, or Sirte would be easy.
The latest fad is to station diplomats next door to where they are assigned for the sake of safety and logistics; hence, the U.S. embassy to Libya is in Tunisia.
That said, even when the State Department does station diplomats where they are needed, the Regional Security Officers whose job it is to protect diplomats often misinterpret their role as achieving zero risk rather than managing acceptable risk. Hence, in Beirut and Baghdad, U.S. diplomats remain locked down as if both Lebanon and Iraq were in civil wars. A diplomat might be stationed for a year or two in either city and never walk along the corniche, sample each city’s coffeehouse culture, attend concerts, or shop for food in the local supermarket.
Diplomats from not only adversarial countries like Iran or Turkey but also European allies operate under no such constraints. While American diplomats must give security officers 72 hours advanced notice to leave U.S. Embassy grounds in Baghdad, their German counterparts have free rein to travel to certain neighborhoods with minimal notice and only basic security and need enhanced measures only if they seek to travel to neighborhoods further afield.
The self-imposed isolation and deliberate blindness has a cost. Consider Benghazi, site of the 2012 murder of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. Nearly 14 years later, it is a completely different city: tolerant, militia-free, secure. While Greece, Italy, and Turkey have consulates in the city, the State Department is essentially absent without leave.
Greece has a consulate in Benghazi. So do Italy, Egypt, and Turkey. Their presence makes sense. Field Marshal Khalid al-Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces now controls 81 percent of the country, including Libya’s important oil crescent. Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s special envoy, seeks to negotiate a unified government between Tripoli and Benghazi, but without a State Department presence in Benghazi, the advice U.S. diplomats give and the intelligence they gather get distorted. Essentially, the State Department’s absence trades intelligence for spin and rumor.
The same problem exists in Somaliland. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has doubled down on the Hillary Clinton strategy of prioritizing and promoting Mogadishu, never mind that the chance of Texas rejoining Mexico is probably greater than Somaliland reuniting with Somalia. Fair enough; policy is policy. But while the British, Turks, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Djiboutians, Danes, and Taiwanese operate officers or consulates in Hargeisa, and Israel now has an embassy there, Rubio has shut down Senate and Pentagon urging for the State Department to at least open an office. Doing so would not recognize Somaliland as a state; it would only operate in the realm of reality. The alternate is to operate blind, especially given the security parameters under which the U.S. Embassy in Somalia operates, with diplomats locked up within the Mogadishu airport.
U.S. foreign policy is also at its strongest when the Secretary of State or special envoys calibrate it to reality rather than wishful thinking.
The only bitterness in Benghazi is that the State Department defaulted on any payment for the building they had leased until the 2012 attack. The militia attack was not the landlord’s fault. Benghazi sacrificed thousands of people to drive the militias out, and the State Department should make good on its debt. If Trump and Rubio were truly upset about Stevens’s murder, they would not tolerate Tripoli-based Prime Minister Abd al-Hamid Dbeibeh’s sheltering of some of the murder suspects, let alone offer via Boulos to extend Dbeibeh’s term another five years.
The State Department is right that diplomacy matters and that a presence bolsters American intelligence. U.S. foreign policy is also at its strongest when the Secretary of State or special envoys calibrate it to reality rather than wishful thinking. How strange it is, then, that in so many countries of concern or interest, Rubio chooses blindness and the prioritization of fantasy over fact.
