Why Most of Diplomacy Involves 'Gardening'
The Gaza ceasefire and the Russian oil sanctions need persistent nurturing to succeed.
Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz often likened diplomacy to gardening — like plants, he used to say, foreign relationships need to be tended and nurtured. This is, in fact, what most of diplomacy is about — and the part least visible to the public. Unlike high-level summits and high-stakes negotiations, it almost never gets media attention.
“Gardening” relationships while carrying out their country’s foreign policy is what diplomats do every day. That includes routine duties, such as writing cables and delivering démarches — formal requests or demands from one government to another. Career diplomats are rarely the public faces of breakthroughs like ending a war — politicians tend to bask in that glory — but they are best positioned to ensure that agreements are implemented as intended.
Four senior Trump administration officials, including the vice president and the secretary of state, flew 12,000 miles to Israel and back last week to prevent the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire from collapsing. But they can’t keep doing that every time there is a problem. It’s time the White House started trusting the Foreign Service.
The news that the ceasefire was violated again today was hardly surprising. If the administration is as serious about peace as it claims to be, it must draw on the expertise of the career diplomats serving in Israel, throughout the Middle East, and in other countries with a stake in the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That may not guarantee the prevention of future violence, but the well of knowledge and experience these professionals possess can make a meaningful difference.
Although the administration has set up what it calls a Civil-Military Coordination Center to monitor the ceasefire and help stabilize Gaza, it’s heavily dominated by the military. Yes, a diplomat was tapped to be the civilian lead, but given the complexity of the center’s work, it needs a much stronger and more empowered diplomatic component.
Similarly, if the administration is serious about enforcing the unprecedented sanctions against Russia’s oil sector it imposed last week for its refusal to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine, it needs all the help it can get. And there is no group of people more experienced at monitoring sanctions implementation than the Foreign Service anywhere in the world.
As Washington has grown increasingly addicted to economic penalties as a policy tool, U.S. embassies and consulates have become its eyes and ears globally. The targets of sanctions inevitably explore workarounds, and diplomats help to close loopholes and counter creative efforts to evade or bypass various sanctions regimes.
But wait — aren’t economic sanctions a coercive instrument of hard power? Why am I mixing them with diplomacy? It’s true that using a country’s economic might to punish other countries for actions that have nothing to do with economics counts as hard power, as the late Joseph Nye, who coined the term “soft power,” told my students at the Washington International Diplomatic Academy in 2022.
Ensuring sanctions’ effectiveness, however, is the work of diplomacy. And contrary to popular belief, “diplomacy” and “soft power” are not the same thing. When persuasion fails, diplomats sometimes resort to coercion and threats. The most skilled among them recognize when and how to use these tools in the service of national interests, without destroying long-term relationships.
Beyond the follow-through on the Gaza ceasefire and the Russia sanctions, the Trump administration can use diplomatic expertise on many other fronts, including in negotiating trade agreements and even in what it claims is an anti-drug-smuggling campaign in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Blowing up boats without proof of wrongdoing and with no accompanying diplomatic element is more likely to exacerbate the problem than resolve it in the long run.
Wars are won on the battlefield, but the peace that follows is shaped at the negotiating table. Diplomats’ job is not only to protect and advance national interests, but to understand others’ interests well enough to find common ground. That’s why true diplomacy is relational, not transactional. It relies on credibility, consistency and care. Personal relationships between individual political leaders are important, but not sufficient.
Even though the Trump administration hasn’t treated career diplomats well, they are able and ready to work hard to bring an end to the war Ukraine, help ensure a lasting truce in Gaza and support the devastated strip’s reconstruction. The administration should let them show what they can do — but it should provide clear instructions to make sure everyone is on the same page from the start.
Diplomacy’s success is often measured not by moments of drama, but by the absence of crises. When an alliance endures, when a trade dispute is defused, or when a potential flashpoint never makes the news, it’s often because diplomats pruned a misunderstanding before it could take root.
Another former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, described diplomacy as “the patient accumulation of partial successes.” The cultivation of ties may take years to bear fruit, but neglect is costly. When the garden is ignored, weeds grow — and eventually, they demand far more attention than steady maintenance ever would.
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Nicholas Kralev is the founder and executive director of the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, and a former Financial Times and Washington Times correspondent. His books include “Diplomatic Tradecraft,” “America’s Other Army” and “Diplomats in the Trenches.”