While reports from diplomats comprise an important basis for policy formulation, it is wise to consider who reads their documents, and what they do with this information.

Throughout their tenure, diplomats may be seeking to engage on very different tasks. Diplomatic posts can have very different priorities and emphases at different times.

However, in regard to strategic and political matters it’s not just the sending of reports from diplomatic posts that is important. The next question is who reads them, and what they do with this information. Of course every ambassador would like his reporting and advice to be read by the foreign minister, and even the prime minister. And sometimes it is. A good example can be seen in the volume Australia and the Formation of Malaysia, published by DFAT’s Historical Section, which shows the lively interaction between ministers and some very talented Australian heads of mission: Thomas Critchley in Kuala Lumpur; William Pritchett in Singapore and Keith Shann in Jakarta. Shann’s reporting on Indonesia’s “confrontation” with Malaysia, and the 1965 communist coup attempt, was much read and commented on at the highest governmental levels in Canberra.

Often, however, diplomatic reporting is not read at the highest levels. But it forms a very important part of the basis for assessment, policy formulation and recommendation. In Australia this work is largely done in the so-called “policy departments” of DFAT, Defence and Prime Minister and Cabinet, and often by people whom a year or two earlier had been providing input themselves from overseas posts.

But sometimes reporting isn’t heeded at all, or at least sufficiently, by policy-makers. A recent example is the failure to prevent ISIS’s lightning sweep from Syria into Iraq. President Obama criticised the US intelligence community for lack of warning. It defended itself, with the help of the media, which was able to play tapes of officials’ briefings to Congress, for example.

Failure to anticipate and to prevent Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait is another example, although in that case there was ample distraction for Western policy-makers in the collapse of the Soviet Union occurring at the time. They may also have felt that Iraq had got its fair share of attention during the just-concluded Iraq-Iran war. At any rate, according to intelligence community legend, repeated warnings from one quite senior CIA analyst went unheeded at higher levels.

And that leads me to a fact that officials just have to live with: making predictions isn’t easy. I had a friend from the CIA who worked on the Middle East. He used to say that he reckoned he could understand Saddam; he’d grown up in a tough neighbourhood in the Bronx, with lots of people like that. He felt he knew what made Saddam tick, unlike people from more genteel backgrounds and life experiences who cut him more slack. Think of Hitler and Neville Chamberlain.

I came across another striking reminder of how difficult it is to make predictions in the September/October editor of Foreign Affairs. The prime article on American dysfunction was written by Francis Fukuyama, a prominent American academic. He is still prominent but the prediction that made him famous hasn’t stood up too well. About 20 years ago he wrote The End of History in which he espoused that “history had ended” because the Western model of democracy and free market economics had attained universal acceptance. Tell that to Putin, Xi Jinping and the leaders of ISIS!

In these circumstances Australian diplomacy has some achievements to its credit, including the passage by the Security Council of the resolution on MH17, and Julie Bishop’s negotiations in the Ukraine with Putin and over access for the SAS to Iraq. But in terms of policy Australian diplomacy will have to be based on the most realistic assessments possible not only of adversaries but also of its prime ally.

Geoff Miller is a former Australian Ambassador to Japan (1986-89) and former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments (1989-95). He has served as National Vice President and NSW President of the AIIA.  

This is the second in a series of two articles publishing an edited version of the address by Geoff Miller at the AIIA National Conference Diplomacy Masterclass, October 2014. This article can be republished with attribution under a Creative Commons Licence.