Abi Olvera’s How Diplomats See the World is interesting in depicting diplomats as rationalists, a frame I’ve never considered before:
Like journalists and advocacy groups, diplomats deal in information. But each one has a different relationship to what that information needs to do.
Journalism is often optimized for public interest. Selection pressure is toward the dramatic over the incremental, and the negative over the positive. Advocacy groups are optimized for creating change. The information advocates and journalists provide is often excellent. They often have ground-level detail that’s hard to get anywhere else. However, it’s rarely the full picture.
Diplomats optimize for small, measured, and accurate updates. The diplomat’s goal is to build a correct, if boring, model of the world, continuously update it, and prepare decision-makers to hold to that model with the right level of confidence.
She goes into more detail on the why:
The accurate version of a story is usually the complicated one. The rules of the job force diplomats to capture complexity. A diplomatic cable has to get sign-off from different embassy offices — including the political or economic sections who see the same host-country issues from a different angle — as well as the ambassador, who might see people in the sector you wrote about at a reception later that week. Back in DC, many more offices will read it: labor and population desks, the economic growth teams, human rights offices. If your account is one-sided, you look out of touch. You must write the version that holds up from every angle. …
A diplomat abroad has a truth-seeking edge that is impossible to manufacture from home: distance. American journalists and advocates usually lean left or right, because American politics runs on two parties and most issues get sorted into one bin or the other. A diplomat posted overseas typically has much less of that reflex. The local politics are not yours. You also are often tasked with reading and understanding every newspaper in the country, and you always know that you may need to change regions soon.
The promotion system for U.S. diplomats requires that you serve in at least two different regions. Every officer has to be “worldwide available,” ready to serve what are known as the “needs of the service.” Early in your career, you go where the Department sends you. Your first two assignments are directed: If officers are needed in China, Gambia, or Sri Lanka, you might be the one to go. Officers who want to stay on a single issue or a single country usually leave the service.
Instead of becoming attached to one region or cause, you develop the skills required to quickly get up to speed on complex issues and efficiently determine which experts, practitioners, and data sources to trust.
Abi Olvera’s How Diplomats See the World is interesting in depicting diplomats as rationalists, a frame I’ve never considered before:
She goes into more detail on the why: