Cultivating Calculated Risk at the State Department and Learning Control It

At the 2026 Aspen Security Forum, John C. Phelan, the seventy ninth Secretary of the Navy and a veteran of the investment world, brought a vital and refreshing perspective to the stage. He challenged the Navy to fundamentally rethink risk, framing it not as an unavoidable danger to be feared, but as an operational variable that we can actively control.

This insight is critical. In the private sector, risk is something you price, hedge, and exploit to achieve a strategic return. In contrast, our national security institutions treat risk as an unmitigated hazard to be avoided at all costs. To me, as a former diplomat and current academic, this defensive posture is a profound mistake. When foreign policy bureaucracies attempt to eliminate risk, they rarely make us safer. Instead, they produce infinite layers of clearance paperwork, shifting the institutional goal from achieving strategic outcomes to maximizing personal defensibility. True risk readiness is about taking control of our exposure.

To understand why the interagency is paralyzed, we must look at how risk is defined academically. Frank Knight famously established a vital distinction between risk and uncertainty. True uncertainty represents completely unknowable variables where probabilities cannot be calculated. Risk, however, is measurable and bound by probability, meaning it can be managed, mitigated, and ultimately controlled. As the risk theorist Peter Bernstein argued, the mastery of risk defines the boundary of modern times, proving that humanity is not passive before nature. When the Department of State avoids risk, it confuses risk with hazard. A hazard is an objective danger, like an adversarial threat. Risk is our exposure to that hazard. We cannot always control the hazard, but we can absolutely control our exposure through timing, positioning, and execution.

During seventeen years as a diplomat, the institutional gravity of the interagency frequently pulled toward passive compliance. The system silently rewards defensive drafting, teaching officers that the safest posture is to remain invisible. To let the principals do the talking. To have necessary but intense messaging discipline. But during my final two diplomatic assignments as Public Affairs Officer in Benin and Brunei. In those role and across my career, it meant I directed high-stakes media relations, a media advisor, executive speechwriting while orchestrating multi-million dollar exchange programs, federal grant portfolios, and public advocacy campaigns to advance U.S. foreign policy. It became clear that playing it safe was actually the highest risk posture of all. We chose to actively control our risk across four critical operational pillars: our programming, our cable reporting, our strategic partnerships, and the methods we used to diffuse Washington approved messaging.

Expanding on these mechanics reveals that unconventional tactics are actually the ultimate form of risk control. In our cable reporting, we rejected the sanitized language that dominates the department, choosing instead to write candid, rigorous dispatches. Cautious reporting creates a massive strategic risk because it leaves Washington policymakers operating on flawed, sugarcoated assumptions. Candid reporting controls the risk of policy failure by forcing reality into the decision loop.

Similarly, when it came to diffusing Washington approved messaging, we recognized that robotically reciting sterile talking points invites the risk of local irrelevance or public backlash. We took control of the narrative by translating top down directives into authentic, culturally resonant communication. This controlled how the message was received to ensure it achieved its intended impact. By taking creative risks in our programming and building unconventional partnerships, we actively shaped the environment. We calculated the potential fallout, established clear operational guardrails, and proved that proactivity is the primary mechanism of institutional control.

To shift the national security apparatus from a posture of defensive panic to calculated audacity, we need an immediate operational triage paired with a strict generational blueprint.

1. Redefine risk metrics in professional evaluations. We must fundamentally rewrite the Employee Evaluation Report architecture. Currently, core precepts reward the flawless execution of safe tasks. The Department should introduce a mandatory evaluation block titled Calculated Risk and Strategic Agility. Officers must explicitly document instances where they stepped outside conventional parameters, priced the trade offs, and acted. If calculated failure remains career fatal, risk readiness is dead on arrival.