Olvera discusses their experience of the Foreign Service, providing an inside-look into the organization.
Most is qualitative information that cannot be easily summarized, but three strands of thought permeate the article:
- The Foreign Service is much more insulated from political demands than generally assumed.
- Entry into the Foreign Service is determined mostly by competitive examinations, not CV. Hence, its employees often have a diverse set of past experiences.
- Most Foreign Service work consists of slow, methodical information gathering — i.e did Egypt's GDP really grow at the expected rate?
Thought it was an interesting look into a famous but little-discussed system. I hope r/neoliberal enjoys the read.
Posted by DudleyFluffles
1 Comment
>The output of my research took the form of diplomatic cables: two-to-five-page reports summarizing what people on the ground were saying about a given subject, written on the assumption that most readers would only get through the first paragraph summarizing the piece and the last paragraph, the diplomat’s comments.
[…]
>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.
As someone, who has worked as a local employee at a small European country’s embassy (think ~30 people everything included, driver, chef, deputy, etc., and 3-4 posted staff) this is insane to me. If I ever wrote more than 2 pages, it would have to be a in-depth dive into a subject, and I think I only did that once or twice, or answers to a list of questions from another ministry or agency (think, how does X country apply this regulation from the European Union). By far, most reports were ½ page. Maybe with a 1/3 being over around a page.
And if the ambassador had to sign-off on all my reports, they would never had time to do anything else. I had some very topical topics, and ended up writing ~100 reports in a year (unusually high) and my colleagues, both local and posted, wrote maybe 50-60 a year. Off the top of my head, maybe 20 required his sign-off, because he was the only lawyer there and those were on international law or they were simply high-profile enough to warrant his attention (think summits, topics the minister is interested in, high-level breaking news, or meetings the ambassador attended). Maybe half required the deputy’s sign-off. However, a posted diplomat always had to read it. It worked similarly for posted staff, but they didn’t need other posted staff to approve it.
Anyway, I largely agree on the piece. Working at an embassy is really about creating a granular real-time overview of what happens everywhere in the world and which is concise enough that political decision makers can read and understand it quickly, while also making sure that relevant ministries and agencies know what they need to know but don’t know yet.