DIPLOMACY MATTERS: The Diplomatic Dance is sometimes a really twitchy tango By J Brooks Spector parkhurst1
There is an old adage about diplomats that goes like this: A diplomat is a man who is sent abroad to lie for his country. Wags, of course, have rejigged that language and syntax to point to the possibilities of more intimate encounters by diplomats, but we’ll just leave that thought parked.
Sometimes, however, in less salubrious circumstances, it has been to deliver a message that effectively has said: “Our patience is exhausted and the next sound you hear will be that of our soldiers crossing the border .” But, given the technology of the times, Harris had no real channel of communication with the US, and so was forced to give the captains of any passing foreign ships his periodic reports and to ask them to pass those documents on to the American state department somehow. At one point he even confided to his diary that he had heard nothing from Washington in more than a year-and-a-half — neither agreement with what he had achieved in his negotiations, nor any new instructions from the capital.
Sometimes a diplomat’s task becomes an acutely uncomfortable one, either because of the folly of the task itself or because of the sheer difficulty of accomplishing it. Back in early 2003, one of my own tasks had been to explain the American government’s position in the run-up to the second Iraq war, and then, as the actual attack began, to explain that as well.
As long as I was a staff member of the American embassy, my task was to convey the American government’s position as clearly as possible to my audiences. My task was not to be a foreign policy freelancer, armed with my very own foreign policy. Instead, it was to be a clear, cogent explainer of the specifics of American governmental policies, as well as their larger background and implications.
Back in my own case, I knew I would retire in a few months, and that once that happened I would be free to speak — or write — my thoughts without restraint. But while I was still taking that “king’s shilling” I had an obligation to do my job.
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