Matt Armstrong is an extremely smart and forward looking foreign policy thinker. He knows more, and has thought more creatively, about public diplomacy than anyone I know. So when I see him writing that it might be time to abolish the State Department as we know it, I have to ask myself if my immediate reaction — wow, that sure is fucking crazy – is actually blinkered and regressive. But I don’t think so. When I asked Matt if recreating State was realistic, he replied, "Has to be, status quo doesn’t work." But that of course doesn’t follow. 

It’s not that Matt doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He knows more about the State Department than I do. And he’s completely right to be frustrated with persistent State ineffectiveness, lack of capacity and chronic militarization of foreign policy. He writes:

If change is necessary, are the Secretary of State’s authorities and leadership enough to push the necessary changes without creating a paralyzing backlash from within? Must change come from Congress in a modern (and more sweeping) version of the Goldwater-Nichols Act (which would beg the question of who would be the modern Goldwater)?

 As the joke goes, though, this is assuming a can opener. There is no congressional constituency in Congress for destroying the State Department to create some fantastical super-totally-capable-New State Department. If there’s a constituency at all for destroying the State Department, it’s a constituency that wants to weaken diplomacy as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. See, for instance, Newt Gingrich’s long-forgotten 2003 rant about the State Department representing a fifth column within the Bush administration. (Time‘s Tony Karon — I’m walking down memory lane here, I admit — said it "matche[d] McCarthy for hysteria.") But not even Gingrich said it was time to just legislatively gut and redesign the department. And not even the fringes of the House Republicans are as batshit is Gingrich. And they don’t come close to commanding a majority. House Democrats would politely back away from this idea if they heard it expressed. Matt’s alone with his can opener here.

But should he be? After all, you can read Jim Locher’s authoritative book about Goldwater-Nichols — yeah, you’ve been wonk’d, playboy! — and come away marveling at how key congressional defense reformers and their staffs built a constituency for integrating the military services and reforming the Pentagon’s supervision for them pretty much from scratch. But with Goldwater-Nichols, many, if not most, of the ideas about what do about structural military imbalances and poor command structures and lack of integration had been incubating for years and even decades.

That’s just not the case with the State Department. Locher writes a lot about how the legislation that became Goldwater-Nichols worked hard to address the structural reasons why the Defense Department was a series of semi-autonomous fiefdoms and Renaissance-Italian city-states. I see no parallel effort to do so with the State Department, and not much effort at finding one, outside of urging Congress to demand that the State Department be… better. If Matt’s concerned with mid-tier department officials trying to undermine Clinton’s efforts at reform, just wait until Congress tries to force an Armstrongian reform effort down the department’s throat. And I don’t even understand what exactly Matt wants to do.

My suspicion is that overhauling the State Department will miss the point in the same way that the post-Vietnam era military purge of counterinsurgency capabilities missed the point or the period calls to abolish the CIA miss the point. With the case of the post-Vietnam armed forces, the Army leadership famously reasoned that if it broke all the tools for getting involved in small wars, then policymakers wouldn’t ask them to take on such arduous tasks, because who in his right mind–

And then along came George Bush. The issue is what the political climate will allow. Building institutional capability for rebalancing the civilian and military components to national security is a demand-side problem as much as it is a supply side one. Progressives have to build the constituency for that around the country, and members of Congress have to appropriate money for the State Department and support efforts at non-traditional and expeditionary diplomacy that people like Hillary Clinton and, yes, Condoleezza Rice want. Without that, all the structural overhauls of the State Department in the world won’t stop the militarization of foreign policy.