Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service

Former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger praised the first edition of Career Diplomacy (2007) as "the best description of life in the foreign service--its challenges, dangers, satisfactions, and fun--I have ever seen." In that book Kopp and Gillespie, both of whom had distinguished careers in the field, provided a candid account of the foreign service, exploring the five career tracks--consular, political, economic, management, and public diplomacy--through their own experience and through interviews with over 85 current and former foreign service officials. This second edition provides significant revisions, supplemented by 20 additional interviews and addressing three great changes that have occurred since 2007: 1) the increasingly important work of foreign service personnel alongside the U.S. military in fragile states threatened with or emerging from combat; 2) the rapid growth of the foreign service in the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the close integration of that agency's budget and mission with those of the U.S. Department of State; 3) the golden moment in 2008 when Congress and the Obama Administration found common cause to improve the foreign service by adding people, training them better, and giving them more money to work with--captured in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's slogan "Diplomacy 3.0," indicating that diplomacy, defense, and development were now equal pillars of American foreign policy. This edition also offers updated data for the 17 tables and figures covering organizational charts, salaries and pay scales, career trajectories, and much more.