Giuliani-Style Shadow Diplomacy: Par for the Course for U.S. Presidents realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…
Most media have treated Giuliani’s efforts as sneaky and suspect because he acted at the personal behest of the president and not as an official representative of the bureaucracy. The New York Times, for example, claimed Giuliani was conducting “a shadow foreign policy campaign.”
In fact, presidents since George Washington have turned to individuals without formal government positions to pursue foreign policy interests and objectives. Private citizens, often acting as special envoys, have helped negotiate issues ranging from trade to war.
While critics deride such efforts as “back-door,” “secret,” or “shadow” undertakings, many presidents have found it useful to dispatch people they trust, who can think and operate outside the constraints of official channels in handling delicate matters.
Franklin D. Roosevelt called kitchen cabinet adviser Harry Hopkins “the perfect ambassador for my purposes” after sending Hopkins on wartime missions to Great Britain and the Soviet Union. “He doesn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘protocol,’’’ FDR added.
In modern times, Jesse Jackson pursued freelance foreign policy for decades before President Clinton made him Special Envoy for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa. Armand Hammer used his far-flung business interests to facilitate his “citizen diplomacy.”
Although Hammer was particularly solicitous of the Soviet Union, presidents including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan tolerated – or more than tolerated -- his personal diplomacy. Reagan once wrote Hammer, ''I value your insights on our policy toward the Soviet Union.”
Clinton turned to Congressman Bill Richardson to be his “informal undersecretary for thugs,” as Richardson jokingly referred to himself, negotiating with dictators in places such as Iraq, Cuba, North Korea, and Haiti.
February 1978, President Carter sent not just a private envoy to Cuba but one who had personal business interests in normalizing relations between Washington and Havana. The unofficial diplomat was Carter’s old Georgia friend and booster, J. Paul Austin, the CEO of Coca-Cola.
Austin had already been to Havana in the summer of 1977 where he “met with Fidel Castro to discuss the possibility of opening a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Cuba” – a literal instance of what was jokingly called “Coca-Cola diplomacy.”
Before Austin returned to Cuba in 1978 on behalf of Carter, the president first sent him in 1977 on a mission to Egypt. There he acted as an unofficial presidential envoy, engaging in “wide-ranging talks with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.”
Carter used Austin in part because official government entities were busy trying to further their own policy agendas instead of promoting the president’s goals. Austin’s 1978 mission to Havana came amid Cuba’s expansion of its influence in Africa:
The “State Department and NSC [were] battling over how to respond.” Carter wanted an envoy who would represent him, not Foggy Bottom.
“I asked Paul to go down as my emissary,” Carter said to LeoGrande and Kornbluh. “I felt that this would be a good way for me to have a direct assessment of what Castro’s commitment was.”
Austin overdid it. He proposed to Castro not only a summit in the United States but that the Cuban dictator come join the Carters for Christmas in Plains
That may be the prime liability found in a century of independent diplomacy – what a president gains in nimbleness and flexibility he loses in organized, consistent policy.
But the bigger problem for the Trump administration is that the president has had so little trust (and with good reason) in his official advisers and factotums that he has had to turn to outside loyalists.
