Elizabeth Shackelford - The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age

IN 1971, THE US DEPARTMENT OF STATE ESTABLISHED THE Dissent Channel, an official avenue for expressing dissent within the department. Disappointment and disgust with our foreign policy during the Vietnam War had led to hundreds of resignations, revealing unprecedented levels of professional discontent. With the White House shaping foreign policy decisions to influence narrow political goals and domestic policy ends, career diplomats felt helpless, watching a barrage of far-reaching consequences unfold. But the administration had no intention of changing its direction. The Dissent Channel was the bureaucratic solution. The Foreign Affairs Manual outlines its purpose and process:

It is Department of State policy that all U.S. citizen employees, foreign and domestic, be able to express dissenting or alternative views on substantive issues of policy, in a manner which ensures serious, high-level review and response.

It is considered an option of last resort, to be used after all other routine channels have been attempted.

In an institution staffed with polite professionals tasked with minimizing conflict and managing discord (were diplomats, after all), its use is rare. As it is a carefully guarded internal tool, its public discussion is even rarer. If youve heard of it at all, it was probably from the leaked dissent cable in 2017 opposing the Muslim travel ban, which more than one thousand State Department employees signed. Or in 2016, when a few dozen diplomats signed a dissent urging strikes against the Assad regime in Syria.

Usually, however, dissents are conducted quietly, politely, within the walls of the department, all protocols observed. Diplomats who have filed a dissent can tell themselves theyve done everything in their power that they could do.

Unfortunately, those dissents are often prescient, laying out in plain language the dangers of a foreign policy driven by inertia, domestic politics, short-term thinking, and overly narrow interpretations of the national interest. Often, these are lessons weve learned before. Dissents dont typically identify problems no one saw coming. They usually identify problems we willfully chose to ignore.

What follows is one story of a problem we ignored, repeatedly and over a long period of time, which the decisions and actions of the US government not only failed to stop, but helped precipitate. It is a story of impunity, of unchecked violence against civilians, of abuses that occurred on our watch by a government we continued to legitimize. It illuminates a long-standing American trend of failing to look at long-term consequences in our foreign policy. I learned firsthand about the consequences of our failure to take a stand for the values of human rights and justice, when doing so could make a difference. This is the story of how America failed the people of a small country and how it did so by failing itself.

This book reflects the authors best recollections and understanding of the events portrayed. While the author has had the benefit of extensive contemporaneous notes, journals, and correspondence to fact-check and enhance these recollections, others will inevitably have different memories of some of these events. Some names have been changed, some events compressed, and some dialogue re-created, but the author has endeavored at every stage to capture all events as truthfully and accurately as possible.