"The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on October 21, 2025, sponsored by Hillsdale’s Center for Military History and Strategy."
In recent years, the U.S. State Department has taken on a dizzying array of goals detached from the national interest. These range from fighting climate change to advancing identity politics and advocating for an assortment of supposed global “rights” untethered from the U.S. Constitution.
"Diplomacy is an instrument of strategy that great powers use to survive and gain an advantage in competition with other powerful states. Excellence in diplomacy is a vital prerequisite to the success and endurance of great powers. Diplomatic skills atrophied in the United States after the end of the Cold War, as we came to rely on military technology and economic sanctions as the main tools of our foreign policy. But now we are entering a dangerous age in which great powers are competing for the things they have competed over from the beginning of time: territory, resources, influence, and prestige. In this setting, the United States will need to recover the lost art of diplomacy.
"First, let me clarify that by diplomacy, I don’t mean John Kerry landing in Davos, Switzerland to give a lecture to the world’s political and business leaders about climate change. I mean the use of negotiations to reconcile conflicting interests on matters of war and peace. Diplomacy is an art and is best defined by its outcomes rather than by its processes. The most consequential outcome by far is the constraint of the power of one’s adversaries—in other words, setting limits to the hostile accumulation of power. Powerful states are naturally constrained by all kinds of things, such as geography, fearful neighbors, and limitations of military technology. Diplomacy works to maximize these constraints in order to restrict an aggressive opponent’s options for conquest. Of all forms of diplomacy between great powers, the most important concerns itself with limiting, avoiding, or preparing for war.
"I should also define what I mean by strategy: it is the matching of national means, in the form of military and economic resources, to national ends, in the form of foreign threats and opportunities. Danger arises when gaps emerge between the means at a nation’s disposal and the ends to which those means must be applied. Diplomacy is critical when a state faces enemies too numerous or powerful to be deterred or defeated by military means alone. Diplomacy’s role in strategy is to increase the external means at the nation’s disposal by building coalitions and to reduce the threats arrayed against it through détente. Effective diplomacy permits states to avoid tests of strength that are beyond their ability to bear.
"There are two erroneous conceptions of diplomacy that have become entrenched in the modern mind" . . . More...
A. Wess Mitchell is a principal and co-founder at The Marathon Initiative, a grand strategy think tank. From 2017 to 2019, he served as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. He received a B.A. from Texas Tech University, an M.A. from Georgetown University, and a D.Phil. from the Otto Suhr Institut für Politikwissenschaft at Freie Universität in Berlin. A recipient of a Stanton Foundation prize for writing in applied history, he is the author or co-author of several books . . .
