The Foreign Service Journal, April 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2021 29 diplomacy officers moved almost exclusively online, sparking remarkable innovation but losing the irreplaceable power and impact of in-person exchange programs, classroom engage- ments and public events. Regional security officers identi- fied risks specific to posts under lockdown, established new protocols and found innovative ways to compensate for crisis management exercises with host-nation counterparts canceled due to the pandemic. But no matter what our cone, functional specialization or agency, COVID-19 and virtual work pose the same challenge to that most basic diplomatic task: maintaining and deepening relationships with trusted contacts. Our Foreign Service colleagues abroad are generally in the same boat as foreign diplomats in Washington, D.C. Those of us who were already in place when the pandemic hit have had an easier adjustment, transitioning from in-person coffees and lunches with established contacts to informal WhatsApp exchanges or phone calls. Depending on the country, we have been able to resume one-on-one coffee meetings, outdoors and with appropriate precautions. Even so, some colleagues find that communicating in a second language through a mask can be frustrating—reading the expressions of covered faces is next to impossible, it turns out—and prefer to meet with contacts over videoconference, despite the stilted feeling of such meetings and the onset of Zoom fatigue. At the same time, those colleagues who arrived overseas dur- ing the pandemic are at an immense disadvantage for building the critical relationships that inform all good diplomacy. For them, the already steep learning curve for newly arrived person- nel became even steeper. One new officer struggled for several weeks before she was finally able to engage with any external contacts. Not surprisingly, she found that actual, in-person meetings were the best way—and sometimes the only way—to get things started and ensure that she subsequently received replies from interlocutors to her email inquiries. Déjà Vu All Over Again? Many of the questions about virtual diplomacy today feel familiar because they are familiar. They’re a variation on the same theme that crops up each time a newfangled technology arises and threatens, or promises, to eliminate the need for real live diplomats to do the work of diplomacy. Whether it be due to WorldNet, the fax machine, email, social media or now Zoom and Microsoft Teams, diplomats always seem to be on the brink of being declared obsolete. Who needs ’emwhen you’ve got X, Y or Z capability? Well, not so fast. Technological advances are often useful and mostly good; they can play a valuable supporting role. But no technology platform or other mere mediating mechanism is a substitute for actual physical presence for in-person, face-to-face, human-to- human engagement. Critically, getting things, first, off the ground and, second, across the finish line are impossible in the absence of in-person engagement. To paraphrase Edward R. Murrow, only actual human beings can bridge those “final three feet.” Examples illustrating the benefits of in-person contact abound. The same D.C.-based foreign diplomat who said things were going fine for him virtually, for example, acknowledges that his government would never have been invited to participate in an important weekly phone call with other key countries had he not been there in person at a pre-pandemic meeting and hit it off with the American organizer. For a U.S. political or economic officer abroad, the humble démarche—at once the most routine and potentially consequen- tial of our activities—offers a case in point. In Spain, COVID- 19 restrictions were so severe that for months we delivered démarches exclusively by phone or email. The Spanish ministry of foreign affairs’ response was invariably a noncommittal: “Thank you, duly noted.” On the rare occasions when our instruc- tions mandated in-person delivery, our counterparts obliged. We relished the opportunity to meet in person, be masked and socially distanced, to catch up, exchange insights, and reconnect as fellow humans experiencing this odd new reality together. It was during those in-person conversations that we received information of real diplomatic value. Only in face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) situations would our contacts feel comfortable conveying their more nuanced assessments of, say, the barriers to signing onto our initiative, or explaining the ways in which they were quietly pushing forward our common agenda, or asking us to provide some additional context after a worrisome tweet. No Substitute for Being There One crucial element of person-to-person engagement simply cannot be replicated in the virtual environment. Though that sounds self-evident, it is difficult to articulate what this element is. Much of this goes back to the core of diplomacy being about cultivating relationships of trust; as former Secretary of State George Shultz suggested in the pages of the November FSJ , trust underlies and informs everything of value that we do. It is dif- ficult if not impossible to “tend the garden” and concoct such an intangible substance as trust from afar. It has something to do with what psychologists call collision : the spontaneous, unpredictable and often creative chemical combustion that occurs when people gather together for some