How modern diplomacy is – and how it is different – is shown in ‘The Diplomat’ – National
A senior British official traveling to Canada says the most important job of maintaining relationships and sharing information between key partners is not much different than what audiences can watch on a Netflix show.
Although Diplomat It’s a myth, David Prodger, the British deputy commissioner in Canada, says that the news coverage taken out of the headlines captures what it’s like to prevent problems from spilling over into the background – especially the “repressed atmosphere of panic” in many areas. characters.
“I think a lot of those little vignettes were very faithful to real life,” Prodger told Mercedes Stephenson in an interview that aired on Sunday. West Block.
“You are facing big problems, and you have to deal with them quickly.”
Keri Russell stars as an American diplomat who has just appointed the new US ambassador to the United Kingdom, where she works to alleviate disasters at home and abroad. The series was filmed inside foreign offices and official residences in Britain and has been praised for its accuracy.
As shown on the show, Prodger, who is based in Ottawa, said diplomacy mainly involves maintaining and developing small-scale relationships between officials of other countries to ensure that “big picture relationships” are maintained, with officials at all levels always talking to each other.
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But he said the show could overreach the kind of reach even high-ranking politicians like him would have with government officials.
“I am not sure that I can enter the office of (Minister of Foreign Affairs) Melanie Joly here,” he said.
“(But) whether it’s on the day-to-day policy side, whether it’s between our missions and our headquarters, we can expect to see our partners coming in and out of the foreign office all the time.”
“That relationship is really important, and we spend a lot of time trying to get it right,” he added.
Prodger said the Five Eyes intelligence sharing partnership – which includes Canada and Britain as well as the United States, Australia and New Zealand – is “very important” as democracies work to protect national security and economies from growing threats.
As governments struggle to ensure that people get the right information, he said it is important for like-minded countries to work together to fight disinformation and false information, as well as cyberattacks and other conflicts.
At the same time, he said part of the job involves “paying attention to where the public opinion is.”
“We are public servants,” he said. “We work for our government, so we have to think a lot about how we present what we do.”
Podger said that public transparency about what the government knows about current and emerging threats, or during emergencies such as terrorist attacks, is important.
Despite warnings from military and government officials that the current threat landscape is more dangerous than ever, Podger sees it differently.
“I think things are always on the cards,” he said.
“If you look back 10 years, we had Iraq, we had Afghanistan, we had 9/11. Before that, there was the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain. We had genocide in Europe. So … there were always those big geopolitical questions. It’s changing right now.
“I think what we’re seeing is … the geopolitics of the world is struggling to correct itself,” he said, “I think that’s something we’re working hard to do.”
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