There is no shortage of activist and special interest groups in Washington these days, but few reach the elite height of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the collective representative for America’s cadre of diplomats.

So when the president of the AFSA sends a message about the declining vitality of the foreign service and the ill health of the U.S. State Department, the alarm bells echo loudly throughout the 24,000-strong membership of the diplomatic community.

ADVERTISEMENT

Career diplomats who have retired from the State Department after decades of service, many of whom completed their tenures in the Obama administration, have

cited the Trump factor

as the primary accelerant of this downward trend in Foggy Bottom’s ranks.

But to pin the exodus entirely on Trump or Secretary Rex Tillerson Rex Wayne TillersonGary Cohn: 'I haven't made up my mind' on vote for president in November Kushner says 'Alice in Wonderland' describes Trump presidency: Woodward book Conspicuous by their absence from the Republican Convention MORE’s reform efforts reeks of partisan politics and is in fact disingenuous. For it misses the big picture — that departments and agencies of the U.S. national security apparatus outside of the Pentagon have been deprioritized for more than a decade and a half as U.S. grand strategy has gotten more militarized, interventionist, and liberal in terms of which conflicts U.S. policymakers are willing to commit precious American resources.

While budget figures don’t tell the full story of this change, they are a quantitative indicator of how much influence the Pentagon has acquired in the U.S. foreign policy process since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

From fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2017, Congress authorized and appropriated approximately $509.2 billion (including money appropriated in the Overseas Contingency Operations account) for State and foreign operations functions around the world — an average of $50.9 billion every fiscal year.

The sum is a pittance compared to the $5.5 trillion the Defense Department has been provided over the same time period. Add OCO costs from fiscal 2008 to fiscal 2017 ($1.2 trillion) to that total, and the American taxpayer has shoveled $6.7 trillion to the Defense Department over the previous nine fiscal years. The Pentagon spent more money in its off-the-books OCO account last year ($58 billion) than the State Department and its partner agencies spent in its entire regular budget ($57.5 billion).

Operating the world’s finest military and fielding the most professional soldier on the planet, of course, are expensive endeavors. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines undergo a rigorous training schedule every year, as do the aircraft carriers, carrier strike groups, long-range bombers, fighter aircraft, and tanks employed for war games and military exercises. We also can’t forget that a huge junk of the Pentagon’s operating costs have been devoted to a war on terrorism that continues to expand and an ever-growing back office bureaucracy.

The Pentagon has come to dominate U.S. foreign policy to such a height that non-military departments and agencies that should be co-equal partners within the inter-agency are instead treated as if they are scrubs waiting to take a few snaps at the end of the game when the first-string quarterback gets pulled after a blowout. There remains a general mood in Washington that Foreign Service officers and professional diplomats come in when the troops are finished cleaning up the mess.

The State Department’s work is under-appreciated and sometimes seen as unimportant or not as important as what the men and women in uniform do on a daily basis. The same lawmakers on the national security committees who argue like clockwork that the defense budget needs to increase are often quiet as mice when the time comes to debate the foreign operations budget.

Unfortunately, the problem is not confined to the State Department. Indeed, if it State Department funding was the issue, members of Congress could address it by simply appropriating more funds.

At the end of the day, the issue is far more systemic — that U.S. grand strategy has become interconnected and in many cases driven by our political leadership’s reflexive support of American primacy. The notion that the U.S. must be everywhere and anywhere at any given time, the first to resolve even the most minor sectarian or ethnic disturbance in the Middle East, lends itself to promoting military-centric solutions to internal political problems in distant lands.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment remains wedded to the peace dividend concept of the 1990’s, a period of time when Washington was the world’s only superpower and could largely succeed in dictating American terms to countries that were weaker economically and fragmented internally.

Administrations became enamored with the idea that the United States was the indispensable nation that could not only extinguish conflict before it spread, but could also leverage the might of the American armed forces to compel foreign leaders to do what we demanded — whether it was pressuring Slobodan Milosevic to sign the Dayton Peace Accords or toppling Saddam Hussein to remake the Middle East into a democratic parodies.

In general, international conflicts have gotten more complicated to solve. There are exceedingly fewer nails in the world today that the U.S. military hammer can effectively solve. Not one of the world’s crisis points — not the North Korean nuclear problem, not the war in Afghanistan, not Iran’s regional ambitions and ballistic missile development — should be or indeed can be resolved through the use of force. Good statecraft, guided first and foremost by the need to protect and defend the American people, has ceased to be about utilizing the U.S. military. And yet America’s grand strategy remains tethered to an earlier time when the international system was defined by the wants and desires of Washington.

Diplomacy and other non-military tools in America’s toolbox, in other words, have become vital to how the U.S. defends and promotes its national security interests. As Defense Secretary James Mattis James Norman MattisBiden courts veterans amid fallout from Trump military controversies Trump says he wanted to take out Syria's Assad but Mattis opposed it Gary Cohn: 'I haven't made up my mind' on vote for president in November MORE himself said to the Senate Armed Services Committee four years ago, “If you don't fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.”

The American people agree with the sentiment. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 61 percent of Americans surveyed believed good diplomacy is the best way to ensure peace — 31 points higher than the number who said military strength is the most important. Diplomacy as a second-tier foreign policy tool could partly be why 41 percent of veterans in a Charles Koch Institute/RealClearPolitics survey think America is less safe than it was 20 years ago.

It is time for the foreign policy elite in this country to catch up with what the American people have already recognized. Which is an effective foreign policy that relies on a balanced deployment of national power, leveraging our economic and diplomatic influence to achieve positive outcomes and reserving our military for the missions that most seriously impact American security and prosperity in a negative way.

The U.S. must have a focused, reinvigorated State Department to implement this 21st century model for American leadership and engagement in the world.

Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy organization focused on promoting a strong military to ensure security, stability, and peace.