How Diplomats See the World—Asterisk

Inside the boring-by-design U.S. fact-checking machine.

A few years into my Foreign Service career, a colleague leaked a falsehood to the press. I couldn’t figure out why they’d done it.<br>A more experienced colleague explained the situation to me: The leaker was trying to break into partisan Washington. Their false claim supported a narrative favored by certain political leaders — and saying what powerful people want to hear opens doors. That colleague was competing to enter offices on the Hill, a world with entirely different rules.<br>I’d never operated in that world. I was deep inside what some call the “deep state,” the bureaucracy composed of long-tenured career civil servants who outlast individual administrations. Since leaving the government, I’ve tried to explain that culture. The clearest framing I’ve found is this: At its best, the national security apparatus is a distributed fact-checking machine.<br>Like journalists and advocacy groups, diplomats deal in information. But each one has a different relationship to what that information needs to do.<br>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.<br>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. Here’s how diplomats see the world.

Most of the analysis is boring

When I was posted to Egypt as an economic officer, I didn’t typically work on  crises or breakthroughs. My goal was to build a granular, quarter-by-quarter picture of the Egyptian economy.<br>One of my portfolio items was tracking poverty. Egypt is primarily a cash economy, which makes estimates difficult. Government poverty statistics are the best available data, but they’re released infrequently, sometimes only every two years. Governments, especially non-democracies, also have incentives to make conditions look better than they are.<br>To get around this, I tried to find proxies, such as the sales of commodities like electric kettles or soccer balls. Most families only need one, and it’s something you buy when you have a little money above subsistence; therefore, if imports are up, conditions are probably improving.<br>I spent much of my time finding small bits of useful data, sometimes tracking the economy or interviewing professionals operating in specific sectors. My assignment was usually open-ended. “Go talk to investment bankers and see what their assessment is.” “What are the charities helping poor families seeing?” “What is the head of that multilateral organization expecting and why did they decide that?” Sometimes, I wouldn’t find out much more than the organizations’ official stance. Sometimes, I’d find out a lot.<br>I’d form as many contacts as possible via conferences, mixers, introductions, and business dinners. This way, I could ask for clarity quickly when news broke. For my sources, I’d aim to have a mix of practitioners, local economists or analysts, non-profit and advocacy group leaders, government employees or officials, and businesspeople. Investment bankers, who often tracked the economy with a similar level of minutiae, often had the deepest insights, perhaps because there was money on the line behind their decisions.<br>All of these sources had high context and had no incentive to go on the record. Practitioners don’t want their assessments publicly attached to their names because this could bring unwanted media attention or reveal data meant to be private. Similarly, government officials usually prefer to stay private so that people don’t inundate them with cold outreach. This means that people with the most accurate information are also the least likely to share it publicly, but are sometimes willing to share it for a report that will stay very private. The people sharing information for articles or reports with wide public reach are sometimes interested in something other than accuracy, such as building reputation, advancing a policy agenda, or exposing wrongdoing.<br>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. Seen only by government agencies, diplomatic cables are similar to academic journal articles, except they are “small” updates with not-particularly-exciting headlines.<br>A typical finding in a diplomatic cable might be: Poverty in Egypt appears to be...