"What is more important is that Foreign Service Officers understand business, about the needs of U.S. business and how to help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad"
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A diplomat telling diplomats to think like dealmakers is a quiet revolution disguised as bureaucratic guidance. Eagleburger’s line pushes against the old romance of the Foreign Service as a guild of raconteurs and crisis managers. The intent is bluntly practical: U.S. diplomacy should be judged not only by treaties and communiques, but by whether it can translate access, intelligence, and relationships into tangible advantage for American firms abroad.
The subtext is where the pressure lives. “Understand business” isn’t a neutral competency; it’s a mandate to recalibrate loyalties inside the state. Foreign Service Officers are being asked to treat corporate needs as national needs, to see market entry, regulatory hurdles, and local power structures as part of their core portfolio. The phrase “help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad” is doing extra work: it frames influence as networking, the hard edge of geopolitics softened into the language of introductions, receptions, and “relationships.” It also quietly normalizes a selective use of government clout on behalf of private actors, raising the unspoken question of which companies get that help and why.
Context matters. Eagleburger came up in a Cold War State Department that increasingly saw economics as a front in strategic competition, then watched the 1990s turn trade and globalization into the new arena of power. His argument anticipates the modern fusion of diplomacy and commerce: export promotion, investment courting, sanctions as market engineering. It’s less a slogan than an institutional directive: adapt or become irrelevant in a world where influence is measured in supply chains as much as speeches.
The subtext is where the pressure lives. “Understand business” isn’t a neutral competency; it’s a mandate to recalibrate loyalties inside the state. Foreign Service Officers are being asked to treat corporate needs as national needs, to see market entry, regulatory hurdles, and local power structures as part of their core portfolio. The phrase “help U.S. companies make the right connections abroad” is doing extra work: it frames influence as networking, the hard edge of geopolitics softened into the language of introductions, receptions, and “relationships.” It also quietly normalizes a selective use of government clout on behalf of private actors, raising the unspoken question of which companies get that help and why.
Context matters. Eagleburger came up in a Cold War State Department that increasingly saw economics as a front in strategic competition, then watched the 1990s turn trade and globalization into the new arena of power. His argument anticipates the modern fusion of diplomacy and commerce: export promotion, investment courting, sanctions as market engineering. It’s less a slogan than an institutional directive: adapt or become irrelevant in a world where influence is measured in supply chains as much as speeches.
Quote Details
| Topic | Business |
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