Lately I have found myself beginning speeches about the foreign policy challenges facing the next president this way: “I want to speak today to all the parents in the room: Mom, Dad, if your son or daughter comes home from college and says, ‘I want to be the U.S. secretary of state someday,’ tell them: ‘Honey, whatever you want to be is fine, but please, please, don’t be secretary of state. It is the worst job in the world. Secretary of education, secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce — no problem. But promise us that you won’t become secretary of state.’”
The reason: The job of running U.S. foreign policy is far, far harder than most Americans have ever spent time considering. It’s a near-impossibility in an age when you have to manage superpowers, super-corporations, super-empowered individuals and networks, superstorms, super-failing states and super-intelligence — all intermingling with one another, creating an incredibly complex web of problems to untangle to get anything done.
In the Cold War, heroic diplomacy was always within reach. Think of Henry Kissinger. He needed just three dimes, an airplane and a few months of shuttle diplomacy to put together the historic post-1973 October war disengagement agreements between Israel, Egypt and Syria. He used one dime to call President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, one dime to call Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel and one dime to call President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. Presto: tic-tac-toe — Egypt, Syria and Israel in their first peace accords since the 1949 armistice agreements.