ARTICLE: Battle Brewing Over Five-Sided Diplomacy, By John M. Donnelly, CQ Weekly, June 11, 2007, Pg. 1727
State is broken and becoming more irrelevant with each passing year. The Hill does nothing to correct this, and neither does this administration (much like the last). Our SECSTATES have gotten weaker and weaker in both talent and power, with Baker still the last serious player).
Having said all that, asking DoD to play down to that level won't work.
The reality is that State is mostly incompetent in pursuing the key foreign policy task of our age: getting countries from disconnectedness to connectedness, from war to peace, from instability to stability, from Gap to Core.
Waiting on State's revival is like waiting on the UN's reinvention.
That's why I advocate the third way leading to the Department of Everything Else: let DoD be DoD and let State be State. Both will be bankrupted by their own inefficiencies trying to cover this middle ground. It simply won't work.
Til that time, get used to such headlines.
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