Looking Ahead

In 2020 Ambassadors William Burns and Linda Thomas-Greenfield wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs about a “badly broken US diplomacy” brought by destructive actions of the Trump presidency and “decades of neglect, political paralysis, and organizational drift.” This declaration by two top diplomats and President Joe Biden’s election led to wide-ranging assessments of US diplomacy with consequences yet to be realized. The chapter begins by examining challenges to practitioner communities during the Trump and Biden administrations. It discusses ways of thinking about change: iterative micro-strategies, cross-category knowledge, leveraging comparative advantages, and a reckoning with America’s past. It assesses proposals for achieving change in US diplomacy’s public dimension through creation of learning cultures, a diplomacy reserve, a diplomacy research and development center, and elimination of Foreign Service career tracks. Observations about the quantum turn in diplomacy studies and value of practice theory precede the book’s closing comments about two paradigm shifts. The first, societization of diplomacy, has generated a large literature and important questions about the need for boundaries between diplomacy and other forms of social interaction. The second is the challenge of powerful new technologies that are transforming diplomacy’s public dimension.