At a time when the relative influence of the United States is decreasing, and the relative influence of states is decreasing, we need a retooling of the architecture of U.S. foreign policy. Just as “personnel is policy,” it is also true that “organization is policy.”

The structure of America’s foreign affairs bureaucracy predisposes some outputs and forestalls others, empowers certain viewpoints and creates blind spots, and determines the efficiency and effectiveness of America’s engagement with the world.

New 21^st-century threats, however, do not conform to the structure of our current institutions any more than they respect sovereign borders. While the State Department is preoccupied with government-to-government relations, many of these new threats are coming from non-state actors – and not just malevolent ones. The technological advances that make modern society possible also risk horrific dystopias, brought about through ignorance, accident, or evil design.

As I argued in a recent article for the Italian foreign policy magazine Limes, the incoming Trump Administration should reform and then re-empower the State Department to better adapt our foreign policy structure to a changing world.

Marginalized by the Obama White House, and without influence over some of the most powerful levers of U.S. influence (administered instead by the Departments of Defense or Treasury, for example), State is currently too reactive, too much an observer of foreign events, rather than the locus of U.S. statecraft.

While I have been critical of State’s internal organization, institutional preconceptions, and tactical myopia in the past, I also have a deep appreciation for the expertise, energy, and dedication of so many of its officials, gained during my own quarter century as a foreign service officer.

State is fixable, and an empowered department can help reinvent U.S. foreign policy for this new century. But it needs support, an updated mandate, and reform that streamlines its hierarchy and devolves authority down.

It is not yet clear how the Trump Administration will organize its foreign policy machinery. President-elect Trump would nevertheless do well to resist the continued marginalization of the State Department, which is neither in the country’s interest nor his.

The 21^st century may well usher in solutions to chronic human problems like scarcity, disease, pollution, and conflict. It could also bring new existential threats like nuclear terrorism, bio-weapons, antibiotic/viral-resistant pandemics, industrial accidents related to biotech/pharmaceuticals or geoengineering or nanotechnology, armed conflict in space, collapse of the global internet, or malevolent artificial intelligence.

The international community just managed to smother recent potential pandemics before they became global catastrophes, but only because of the bravery of local and international health workers. We struggle with tens of millions of forcibly displaced persons, but climate change alone could uproot hundreds of millions. On something as esoteric as the possibility of a large-scale nanotech industrial accident, the State Department’s current structure is of limited relevance to the potential danger.

What do the new threats have in common? They do not have to originate with government authorities. Deterring or punishing perpetrators – even ascribing responsibility – will be difficult. And catastrophes won’t stop at international borders.

Realists and liberal internationalists, hard and soft-power advocates, isolationists and humanitarian interventionists, nationalists and multilateralists – they all should hope for a State Department that is better prepared for the foreign policy challenges of the 21^st century.

Read the full article, “U.S. Foreign Policy Architecture for the 21^st Century,” on Limes here, or in English on the Wilson Center website here.