Josef Burton
The Nation / December 19, 2024
The foreign policy proletariat needs to stop filtering its dissent through official channels and start taking more radical action.
Public resignations. Repeated leaks to the press. A torrent of desperate dissent cables. Government institutions in internal revolt against a president taking US policy off the rails.
No, this is not about the forthcoming Trump administration. It’s about Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and the US foreign policy apparatus they oversee. Over the past year, a series of sanctioned and unsanctioned revolts has erupted among foreign policy and intelligence agencies in protest of the Biden administration’s complicity in the Gaza genocide.
This phenomenon has been concentrated heavily in the middle ranks of America’s imperial administrators. No cabinet-level official has broken with the administration. No ambassador has tendered their resignation. The highest-ranking State Department resignee was a director in the arms transfer office; the highest-ranking military officer to resign was a major in the Defense Intelligence Agency. An associate deputy director at the CIA was disciplined for pro-Palestine Facebook posts, but did not quit.
But the further down the ranks you go, the more pervasive the anger at the US’s complicity in mass slaughter becomes. An entire contingent of junior White House staffers, for instance, made up a “staffer bloc” in pro-ceasefire demonstrations in Washington, DC. As a former US diplomat, I know that many people have resigned quietly and anonymously over Gaza. Many want to quit but literally don’t know what other work they’d be qualified for. These administrators—the ones who make up most of the foreign policy bureaucracy that the Obama administration derided as “the Blob”—are the ones angriest about American policy in Gaza. They are also the ones who can do the least about it, and they know it.
Now that Biden is on his way out, the rank-and-file functionaries who don’t depart with him will greet a second Trump term feeling more angry and alienated than they have ever been. So why don’t they do something?
It’s important to understand that the source of these staffers’ moral indignation and their lack of radical action are deeply intertwined. A ceaseless drumbeat of dissent from within Washington’s ranks is not, and structurally cannot be, an actual check on US foreign policy. This is due as much to the class position of policy workers as anything else. The way they came to their posts limits their political horizons more closely than what they do.
When we imagine the people who carry out US foreign policy, there is often an image of a pallid, gray-haired, and blue-blooded senior functionary capable of wielding a significant amount of personal power. For decades, this perception was largely correct. Throughout the Cold War, the US foreign policy establishment was an undiluted elite space. The CIA, the State Department, and DC’s then-modest number of think tanks and policy institutes were stuffed to the gills with the old model of the “pale, male, and Yale” foreign policy decision-maker—which is to say Northeastern, independently wealthy, produced by Ivy League schools, and in a position to influence or change policy via personal opinion alone.
The Dulles brothers were white-shoe lawyers. E. Howard Hunt was a well-heeled novelist and Guggenheim Fellow before he joined the CIA. Legendary strategist Paul Nitze was an independently wealthy financier. None of them had any sort of specialized education in foreign affairs.
The NSC-68 policy paper that was Paul Nitze’s magnum opus was 66 pages long, drafted by nine wealthy white men, and defined US policy for the entire Cold War. These men never felt any conflict between their own personal position in the world and US foreign policy because they came from the class that saw America’s interests as interchangeable with its own.
This is not who most of the workers in DC are anymore. Since the end of the Cold War, the dream of a global liberal consensus and the reality of American unipolar power has gelled into what is now called the “rules-based international order.” Cold War institutions like NATO were no longer just military alliances; they were both the creators and symbols of shared values, and mechanisms for simultaneously enacting and justifying American hegemony.
The dream of an American-ordered world gave birth to the idea of a more diverse, inclusive cadre of administrators managing a more diverse and inclusive planet. Not slippery operatives pursuing national goals, but global citizens chipping away at making things better for everyone. The War on Terror—with its mass immigration screening, multi-decade occupations of entire countries, endless global manhunts, and the collection of colossal amounts of intelligence information—followed on the heels of this utopian post-1991 moment and created a demand for tens of thousands of functionaries to work for a project they needed to serve but which they could never possess or direct. That demand still exists today.
Such experts do not simply walk in off the street. If you want to reach beyond an inadequately tiny handful of elite schools, you need to create them. The Pickering fellowship in 1992 and the Rangel fellowship in 2002 were two State Department programs explicitly aimed at diversifying the diplomatic corps and trying to move away from the “Pale, Male, and Yale” reputation.
During the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the National Security Education Program and Critical Languages Scholarships were rolled out to provide the US with language and cultural experts by the thousands. Lower-middle-class kids from state universities were cut checks to travel the world and study Arabic, Mandarin, and Farsi if they’d sign on to a career in government. (This decades-long effort to build a cadre capable of managing a new American century would be dismissed as a “DEI” venture if proposed today.)
These programs were not centered around Kissingeresque indoctrinations into the Machiavellian goals of American power. The people who made up the policy machine were hearing and believing the same line the US was selling to foreign populations—that cultural understanding and following the rules could be a win-win for everyone.
I do not mean to imply that there is any great wave of racial or gender diversity that has arrived to change the fabric of who makes America’s foreign policy—the statistics on both counts remain abysmal. But the presence of these programs has demonstrated that there is a set of values and beliefs that are intended to be the institutional norm, at least on the surface.
Policy has become a middle-class vocation. You get an area studies or international relations degree and go to work for 20 years in a specialist position where you contribute to a Presidential Daily Briefing report. Most of the work is internal, focused on generating reports or monitoring the performance of existing policy, and functionally quite important. The US collects more information, administers more and more different types of programs, and has a bigger civilian presence abroad in more parts of the world than ever before. During the Cold War, promoting clean air monitoring in India or tech education in Niger or minority rights in Bangladesh would have been understood as targeted interventions in another country’s affairs, pursued in order to achieve a specific policy goal. In the rules-based international order, such interventions have become an openly administered part of “soft power.”
This work is not meaningless, though. These are the sinews of American power. The endless series of reports produced by this apparatus—from the daily intelligence estimates that move through dozens of agencies to the Oval Office every morning to the yearly country reports on human rights and religious freedom that assess the conditions in literally every country on earth—are taken incredibly seriously. This is not just confined to soft power activities or the performative liberalism of civilian agencies. Every American arms control and security assistance transfer is subject to what is called Leahy Law vetting, which on paper would block arms transfers to any specific unit that violated human rights. Allied military activity is closely monitored to ensure compliance with every batch of weapons. We spy on our friends to make sure the rules are followed. American foreign policy is embedded in a deep nest of legal tripwires that on paper should ensure that the rules-based international order functions according to, well, rules.
This brings us back to Gaza, a horror that violates every supposed rule in the US book, as well as any kind of basic morality. These midlevel officials know that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, and they know the White House is breaking US law to facilitate it. They know this because they were trained and paid to know it. They take that part of their job seriously. They don’t lack a moral compass or empathy. The scholarships, the study abroad opportunities, and the expertise you must develop to qualify for these jobs does change you on some level. I’ve known Foreign Service Officers with an almost academic knowledge of Frantz Fanon, and Army military attachés with a startlingly emotional investment in the success of the Turkish left. Your average CIA officer with Middle East experience is likely to be significantly more suspicious of Israel than the average congressperson.
The problem with this internal dissent is that it comes from a cadre of people who think—or thought—that if they give the system accurate information, it will follow its own rules. Maybe another memo to Antony Blinken will make him do the right thing! The Iraq War generated similar levels of dissent, but that war of aggression is still spoken of by officials as a failure by leadership to listen to the experts and heed accurate intelligence, rather than a deeper ideological misdeed.
The Blob knows what is going on, but it doesn’t call any of the shots. Its members have earned their class status via expertise, and now they are being told their expertise doesn’t matter. They aren’t even in the room. Wealthy and well-connected guys like Tony Blinken and Brett McGurk regularly go against the suggestions of the entire diplomatic and security apparatus to facilitate Israel’s wars.
To work in DC now is to understand that the genocide in Palestine is not a mistake. The people actually in charge are doing this. Your job is a farce. Your work means nothing. The very top echelons are shredding everything you stood for. You will never afford a house in Washington. If you have a catastrophic health emergency, even you will need to turn to GoFundMe, and every day when you open your phone you see children mangled alive with weapons that you know legally should not be delivered.
This is a moment of deep, deep alienation. The Blob can choose genuine rebellion or a type of cognitive dissonance that, more than Iraq ever did, will untether it from reality. It could become a class not entrusted with building a slightly better world but with the manufacture of a world where the Gaza genocide either didn’t happen or is somehow OK.
Gaza has presented the Blob with a generational moment of moral self-questioning and filled the lower ranks with genuine anger, but a second Trump administration is going to make attacks upon them that are less moral and more quotidian. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are openly mulling firing half of all federal government employees. The class picture of this workforce matters because they have highly specialized educations and are inculcated to think of themselves as only prepared and suited for government work. This is not the 1950s, and they are not Princeton lads with a law practice to return to.
If mass job cuts are threatened, these will not be years of resistance, trials, and holding the ship of state together. These workers arrive at this moment cynical, exhausted, and unsure of what they can do to change things.
If the individual members of the Blob want to choose some way of existing other than dissociation and trying to keep their heads down, then they can’t labour under the illusion that their dissent can be channelled upward. It needs to go outward, outside the institutions, to meet with and work with and learn with and from the mass politics in the streets. They cannot accept that foreign policy is a vocation like any other. They have to face the inherent politicization of their way of life.
Josef Burton is a former US diplomat
