The Foreign Service Journal, December 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2015 45 quick, resourceful, a good listener, courteous and agreeable. He should not seek to gain a reputation as a wit, nor should he be so disputatious as to divulge secret information in order to clinch an argument. Above all, the good negotiator must possess self-control to resist the longing to speak before he has thought out what he intends to say. ... The negotiator must possess the patience of a watchmaker and be devoid of personal prejudices. He must also possess courage and kidneys of iron—the first to face the anti-American terrorism that kills an average of two U. S. diplomats each year, the second to handle the incessant diplomatic receptions and partying that diplomats themselves detest but seem powerless to stop. (...) Diplomats go where they’re told. Those who go to outbacks like Ouagadougou face two years of dysentery and boredom. Others get the dream assignments of London or Paris. Most are somewhere in between. Diplomats can be amusing company in private, but most are aware that, when abroad, jokes translate poorly. Some of the best ambassadors of this century have been dry and self-effacing to the point of dullness. (...) There is another area where the professionals fault men like Andrew Young, and that is the necessity that an ambassador’s words clearly represent his government. When Young pops off, no one is quite sure whether he speaks for President Carter or is merely scratching one of his own itches. Carter and the State Department have had to spend considerable time making omelets out of Young’s dropped eggs. To such criticism Young responds that, even as an ambassador, he remains his own man. This misses the key point of diplomacy—an ambassador is never his own man but is the representative of his sovereign. Or, as the ancient Celts had it, a “servant.” An ambassador does not have the luxury of speaking his own mind. Rather, it is his lot to be forever speaking somebody else’s mind. (...) Another problem: ambassadors have to be hired guns on occasion, sometimes defending one policy one day and its opposite the next, depending on the whims and twists of his government. In an imperfect and hypocritical world this is a necessary task, and diplomats accomplish it with dignity by never identifying themselves personally with any one policy. (...) One question remains: In this era of summits and SSTs, of instant communication and satellites, of summits and Kissinger-style shuttle talks—in this era of personal diplo- macy, who needs diplomats? Britain’s Lord Chalfont has written that diplomats suffer from “the dottier forms of populism”—the distrust of any- one who speaks French, drinks champagne and wears tail- coats in the daytime. But Chalfont acknowledged the more serious challenge to traditional diplomacy posed by the modern, jet-age diplomacy of Henry Kissinger. To this, he replied: “The Lone Ranger style of diplomacy epitomized by the Blessed Henry may be very long on glamor, but it turns out to have been rather short on actual achievement (...).” The reason why such peripatetic diplomacy accomplishes little has been frequently analyzed. It is that successful negotiations can usually be best handled by diplomats who understand the needs and problems of the other side; who have the opportunity to prepare every clause and sub-clause; who are not harried into hasty agreement by the political pressure of publicity; and who can hang around after the ink is dry, to make sure the agreement is carried out. Diplomacy, like any profession, has its share of misfits, goldbrickers and incompetents who survive solely by bureaucratic apple-polishing. [British author-diplomat Sir Harold] Nicolson warned that even the best may “become internationalized and therefore dehydrated, an elegant empty husk.” But most diplomat-watchers are convinced that the elite corps of diplomats, operating on less than half of one per cent of the national budget, are patriotic professionals whose quiet wiles probably do more to keep the peace than the broadsides of an Andrew Young. n When diplomacy fails, it fails noisily. When it succeeds, it does so quietly and in private, and is likely to be ignored.