What Is Your Country? - The State Department Vs The United States Of America

See: Reagan Readied U.S. Warship for '82 Falklands War

The article details how President Reagan was ready to lend England one of our warships in the event that they lost a carrier in their fight with Argentina over the Falklands.

The article has a curious tidbit:

Lehman and then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger agreed to support U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with the loan of the amphibious warship USS Iwo Jima , he said.

“We agreed that [Weinberger] would tell the President that we planned to handle all these requests routinely without going outside existing Navy channels,” Lehman said in a speech provided to the U.S. Naval Institute he made in Portsmouth, U.K. “We would ‘leave the State Department, except for [Secretary of State Al] Haig, out of it.’” 

It was as if they were deliberately treating the State Department as if it had trouble understanding where it's loyalties should be.

I was reminded of something that I had heard about Secretary Of State, George P. Shultz.

LAMB: Is there anything that didn't make it into these 1,188 pages that disappointed you -- you ran out of time, space?

SHULTZ: Oh, no, I think that the important things are all there. There's one incident that somehow or other is not in there, and I don't know why it got left out. But it's an interesting thing that happened. When I was -- in the first period when I was secretary of state, there was in my office a big globe. And when ambassadors, who were newly going to their posts or in their posts and coming back to visit me, would get ready to leave, I would say to them, "Ambassador, you have one more test before you can go to your post. You have to go over to the globe and prove to me that you can identify your country." So unerringly, they would go over and they'd spin the globe around and they'd put their finger on the country they were going to, pass the test. 

So Mike Mansfield, great elder statesman in America, former Senate majority leader and who had been ambassador to Japan for a while before I was there, and he was a close friend of mine from back when I was in the Nixon administration -- so he was visiting and he got ready to leave. I said, "Mike, I got to give you the same test I give everybody else. Before you can go back to Japan, you got to show me that you can go over to the globe and put your finger on your country." So he went over and he spun this globe around and he put his hand on the United States, said, "That's my country." 

So I've told that, subsequently, to all the ambassadors going out, "Never forget, you're over there in that country, but your country is the United States. You're there to represent us. Take care of our interests and never forget it, and you're representing the best country in the world."

It is an important caution.

It would be far to easy to work in the section for a particular country or region and forget that you are working to promote what is best for the United States of America, not necessarily what is best for that particular country or region that you are assigned to.

Another issue that comes into play is how a person's world-view fits or conflicts with role of State Department. Those that look at themselves as more of a "citizen of the world" than a "citizen of the United States of America" would be in conflict with the State Department role of protecting and promoting the interests of the USA over and above the interests of other countries or of "the world."

For the Constrained, the question of "What is your country?" is not confusing or difficult to answer. For the Unconstrained, the "citizen of the world" concept confuses and makes difficult a question that if answered wrongly, puts their country at risk.