ambassador rudolf v. perina - Association for Diplomatic Studies and ...

strategic, theoretical thinker. He was respectful of Policy Planning Staff papers that we
sent him but he rarely elicited them. His strength was in operations and management,
where he was probably the best Secretary I have worked for. The second Director of
Policy Planning during my time there was Stephen Krasner, a professor of international
relations at Stanford who came in with Condi Rice. He was a very serious, critical
thinker. But Condi Rice focused strongly on only a few major policy issues, such as Iraq
and the Middle East, on which the whole government was focused. She saw the Policy
Planning Staff more as an office for special projects. She assigned Steve Krasner the task
of preparing a study of the U.S. foreign assistance apparatus, to which he devoted a lot of
effort. He also traveled quite a bit which kept him out of the office. So I would say that
the influence of the staff in my time was mixed and probably about average.
Q: Were people concerned at how the Iraq situation was developing?
PERINA: The invasion of Iraq came while I was still Special Negotiator and before I
joined the Policy Planning Staff. While I wasn’t working on Iraq at that time, I do recall
thinking how strange it seemed that within the State Department there was so little debate
on the decision to invade. The tipping point came imperceptibly, and suddenly everyone
just assumed we would invade. It was almost a given. I think in retrospect that one of the
reasons for this was that there had been so little debate about the Afghanistan invasion
also, and it appeared to have been successful. So everyone somehow hoped that it would
be the same with Iraq and did not want to question policies that seemed to be working.
By the time I came to the Policy Planning Staff, about a year after the invasion, the
situation was already very different. Everybody was recognizing that things were not
going as planned and that there was a problem. Even the political appointees on the staff,
who were obviously strong supporters of the Administration, admitted this. So yes,
people were worried but no one on the staff had any brilliant ideas on how to fix the
situation. We really only had one person working directly on Iraq and about four out of
the 20 staff members working on the broader Middle East region. It was difficult to
second guess the hundreds of people who by then were in Baghdad or elsewhere closer to
the issue. We focused more on the broader issue of dealing with failing and renegade
states through what Condi Rice called transformational diplomacy.
Q: Could you explain what that is?
PERINA: A lot of people think that transformational diplomacy is just a fancy term for
something that has always been on the foreign policy agenda, and they are basically right.
On the other hand, giving something a new formulation is sometimes a legitimate way of
giving it policy focus and priority. I think that is what Condi Rice was trying to do. I once
asked Steve Krasner where the term transformational diplomacy came from. He said he
thought it was coined by Condi Rice herself. I always thought that unlikely but really do
not know the origins of the term. Perhaps it did come from Condi Rice. The term had
different interpretations but they all stemmed from the notion that in the post-Cold War
world weak and failing states were the chief threat to regional stability. I always
interpreted transformational diplomacy as the process of developing tools to transform
such failing states into successful ones through promotion of economic development,
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