I spoke yesterday at a University of Maryland workshop on science and diplomacy. Here is what I prepared for the purpose. Due to time constraints, I said less. The organizers asked whether science and diplomacy were converging:
For me, convergence is not the right word. Intersection, which happens sporadically, is more like it.
Broadly I think of two different intersections between science and diplomacy.
The first is how technology affects diplomats’ work, even if they are not dealing with scientific issues.
The second is that diplomats do often find themselves dealing with technologies—less often sciences—that affect their country’s national interests.
When diplomats deal with technology they often find themselves tangled up in the question of norms. So I’ll turn to that at the end.
How technology affects diplomatic work
On the first issue, let me illustrate from my own career.
When I started as a science counselor at Embassy Rome in 1977, we were still using typewriters.
To send a cable, we typed it out and handed it to a communicator, who typed it again into a machine that could send it.
A diplomat today can send an encrypted cable from the personal computer or telephone she carries with her.
But that cable may not be nearly as important as it would have been 50 years ago because of the flood of other communications inundating the diplomat’s capital.
Emails, television, social media, and phone calls are far more important today than most diplomatic cables. They are becoming as archaic as the diplomatic pouch.
And those Secret cables a diplomat sends may soon no longer be so secret, as quantum computing is getting a lot better at de-crypting them.
In short, a diplomat today, to be convincing, needs to know what is going on not only in her narrow diplomatic world but also in all those other means of communication.
If your President didn’t like a tweet from the Foreign Minister of the country where you are posted and called the host country president to complain, you had better know about it.
It isn’t easy to gain that kind of 360-degree awareness.
An example
Even in an earlier era, multiple communication technologies caused problems
I remember one sad day at Embassy Rome when the Defense Minister called me to complain that the American forces in Mogadishu wouldn’t give his planeload of Carabinieri permission to land.
The US military had decided that they wouldn’t accept any troops from the former colonial power.
But there was a wrinkle: President George H.W. Bush had called the Prime Minister and asked for deployment of the Carabinieri.
Dealing with technology
Then there are the technological issues a diplomat may be called on to deal with.
When I first entered the State Department, it had imported almost all the “science counselors” from the Atomic Energy Commission.
They were mostly concerned with nuclear issues, in particular nonproliferation.
But then during my two decades at State, I dealt not only with nuclear questions, but also with outer space, missile technology, personal computers, energy, cancer therapy, the environment, drugs, and a host of other issues.
Today I imagine a science counselor would need to deal with communications technology, deep fakes, social media, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, quantum computing and still more issues with technological dimensions.
No one person can be expert in all these areas. But one person can be literate in all or most of them.
That is really what is required of a diplomat: technological literacy, the ability to read or listen and understand, whether acquired at university or by experience visiting scientists and talking with them about their work. I had the benefit of both.
Technological literacy is what was missing when Mr. Witkoff imagined that a small nuclear reactor could somehow enrich uranium.
His illiteracy helped push an equally illiterate President into initiating a war he cannot now get out of.
Norms
Let me turn in concluding to a particular issue that plagues international cooperation on advanced technology: norms.
Norms are vital to almost any technology.
I have studied their generation for radiation protection, where the norms for the entire world have been set for almost 100 years by an “international commission” with no legal authority.
These norms have survived scandals and court challenges, major technological change, two World Wars, deployment of atomic weapons and nuclear power generation, the Cold War public controversy over radioactive fallout, the environmental movement of the late 20th century, the unipolar decade of the 1990s, and the shifting multilateral geopolitics of the past 20 years.
The key to their survival international relation scholars call an “epistemic community.”
An epistemic community is “a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge with that domain or issue area.”
Where such communities exist, there is a clear record of success in developing international norms.
I would cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a particularly large epistemic community that has generated the widely accepted “net zero” 1.5/2 degree norm for global warming.
With the exception of the Trump administration, most of the world accepts this norm.
We are not going to meet it. But norms are not only important when you meet them, but also when you don’t: they tell you about failure.
Norm failure
I would contrast this with the situation for toxic chemicals, only a few of which are subject to international norms.
There are legal mandates for groups that discuss toxic chemicals, but the discussion of them is more adversarial than cooperative.
Academic scientists attack the industry representatives, who hide behind “trade secrets.”
This is not a good way to set norms. We have prohibited a few toxic chemicals internationally, but most are entirely unregulated.
The better way
It is far better to use a cooperative process in which people concerned about risks reach agreement with people concerned about preserving benefits.
That is what an epistemic community is ideally suited to do.
I’ll leave for discussion why such communities are not as common as they should be and what can be done to fix that.