Irregular: You'll never, never know
If you never, ever go
Hello from Paris,
One of the most extraordinary privileges of being a diplomat – and there are many – is deeply embedding yourself in a foreign nation and dedicating yourself to understanding the commonalities and differences of people, cultures, and political systems. There are very few jobs in the world where your principal purpose is to really understand the place in which you live and to visit not just the capital, but far-flung regions and, in many instances, countries of accreditation.
When I had the privilege of serving as an Australian diplomat in Russia, not only were we trying to understand the (in)famously inscrutable Russian political system – including through both specialised “Kremlinology” and more general political, social and cultural analysis – but we also had seven additional countries to which our embassy was accredited, from the former Soviet states in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. While many of these nations shared some similarities, principally a common language of official business, there were also profound differences among countries as diverse as Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Whole lives and careers are spent trying to understand just one of these nations or political systems, let alone all of them.
Mysteries wrapped in riddles
And yet, even for a wealthy nation like Australia, the embassy was resource-constrained, with only a small team responsible for understanding all these places, centrally from Moscow, but with regular travel to these other nations. Narrowly conceived, this travel was undertaken to explore areas of government, business and cultural cooperation in promotion of the national interest. More broadly, it was done to ensure we had an active network of useful contacts we could draw on if and when we needed them. We also travelled to gain a deeper understanding of the countries and to report accurately on local political developments. One role of a diplomat is to be your nation’s mouthpiece in a foreign land; another is to be its Rolodex; yet another is simply to be its “eyes and ears” on the ground.
Naturally, some countries received more attention than others, depending on the depth of existing ties, the economic and political importance of each nation in global affairs (or at least those touching on our interests), and historical and diasporic links to our own country. Travelling, as I was lucky enough to do, to Belarus, Moldova, and Armenia in particular, where I carried those files in addition to working on Russian foreign policy, domestic politics, and economic and defence matters, was something I will never forget.
There are certain things that you can only ever understand about a country, its worldview, its cultural values, and its approach to life and the international system by being there in person and meeting local people, whether government officials, opposition figures, leaders of cultural institutions, or civil society organisations. It is almost impossible to pick up the “vibe” from abroad, behind a computer, reading newspapers or consulting reports, and having conversations over the phone.
An old tourism advertising campaign for regional Australia used to say, “You’ll never, never know if you never, ever go.” That is not only the case for discovering natural beauty and physical places, but perhaps even more so when thinking about and understanding a people, their political systems, and their approach to the world and to the many matters on the international agenda. Simply being there, even for a relatively short period of time — a few days or a week, if constructed well — can drastically increase not only one’s theoretical knowledge of a place, but also generate a much deeper and more refined “feel” for it that persists much longer than any information gleaned from a book.
Personally, I find it challenging to develop a gut instinct for how a country might respond to a given issue, how it might conceptualise, prioritise, or conduct its foreign policy, or how its people might react to certain political developments, without having spoken to a wide range of people who live there. These need not necessarily just be the elites of a country, although as a diplomat, you, of course, meet senior politicians, officials, and leaders of business and civil society as a matter of course. It can equally come, and sometimes prove even more instructive, from conversations you strike up with a taxi driver, a barber, a friend of a friend, a waiter, or someone you meet at a bar.
Speaking of travel, if you would like more information about our upcoming bespoke tours to Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba, designed for business leaders and investors, register your interest using the button below, and we will send you more information.
Location, location, location
Oftentimes, I developed my best understanding of Russian attitudes toward politics, its leaders, and the world at large not through official discussions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — where you are ordinarily read fairly standard talking points — but from local staff members working in the embassy. This included not just those in the political section, but cleaners, drivers, and administrative staff who are not professional political analysts, but often what political theory would call the “median voter”. “Main Street, not Wall Street”, as they say across the Bering Strait.
Some experiences of travels across the country – a group of young drunk men threatening to beat me and a colleague up after hearing us speak English, based on the curious logic “you speak English, therefore you’re American, therefore you’re gay”, or FSB agents following us around and recording our conversations with interlocutors – were not always pleasant, but they were often instructive. Other more pleasant “pinch me” experiences, like a long evening conversation with Mikhail Gorbachev on the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, were more pleasant and at least equally illuminating and memorable. Neither type of experience could, however, have been had without being there, “on the ground”. (That is one reason why, incidentally, embassies remain as critical as ever, even in a world of instant communication. Other reasons embassies will always be necessities, not luxuries, include the fact that warm personal relationships conducive to sensitive conversations can only ever be developed in person.)
Travel for non-diplomats is (almost) always a rewarding experience. Pico Iyer, the great travel writer, once said that the value of travel is “initially, to lose ourselves” and “next, to find ourselves”. This undoubtedly holds true for professional diplomats, ambassadors, trade commissioners, and anyone sent abroad on an official mission. But perhaps the equivalent of Iyer’s rule for those in such professional roles is that travel to a foreign country, first, helps you shake off your own prejudices and assumptions about the world, second, allows you to find areas of commonality and difference, and, finally, nudges you to develop a more comprehensive worldview and personal understanding of how the world works.
As diplomats, sometimes we would travel by ourselves, sometimes with delegations on trade missions, and sometimes with analysts, in full recognition of the fact that you can understand far more about a country by visiting it for even a short period of time than by sitting in a capital, no matter how how expert you are and how many good intelligence sources you read. We would often arrange visits, meetings, and cultural experiences to help them form their own understanding as quickly as possible, free of media bias and their own personal assumptions about the countries in which they needed to rapidly develop a working expertise.
It is in line with that overall philosophy — that, in the words of that tourism campaign, “you’ll never, never know if you never, ever go” — that we are excited to be organising several study tours for business leaders and investors over the course of this year.
Just as we once did while working as diplomats, we will arrange week-long trips to various geopolitical hotspots for you, dear readers, to deepen your understanding of foreign nations and, for the businesspeople and investors among you, identify commercial opportunities while better understanding the realistic risks and political trajectories of different countries. And we’d love for you to come with us on those journeys.
Our upcoming bespoke tours to Venezuela, Colombia and Cuba are designed for business leaders and investors wanting to rapidly understand the region’s political dynamics and commercial risks and opportunities
Dunroad less travelled
We will be running our first visit to three countries in the Andean region: Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba.
Why these countries? Quite clearly, all three have been in the news – and Geopolitical Dispatch – of late. They are high on the new American foreign policy and strategic priority list, nations in the so-called “Western Hemisphere” when viewed from Washington, and countries that are, to use a hackneyed phrase, truly “at a crossroads”.
Each country is, of course, incredibly different. It would be wrong to say that they share much in common beyond language, a (somewhat) similar colonial history, and a certain geographical proximity — and that is precisely the point. Each is unique, with its own culture, political system, anxieties, hopes and fears, and economic and business prospects. And each is best understood, like all countries, by going there and seeing for oneself.
Venezuela, most obviously, has gone through significant change in recent months after the abduction of its longtime leader, Nicolás Maduro, who now faces criminal charges in the United States. The Chavista regime still holds power but appears to have significantly changed its relationship with the United States, which seems single-minded on opening up Venezuela’s oil industry, has effectively reopened its largely dormant diplomatic mission, and is now encouraging foreign, or at least American, investment.
And yet Venezuela still faces an enormous array of challenges, from migration and the exodus of its population to the repatriation of Venezuelans who have made their way to the United States in recent years. It retains a rigid political system, and the vast majority of the people live in dire economic circumstances. It is a country rich in natural wealth that may well prosper again, but there remain many uncertainties over its direction of travel, not just in relation to the United States, but in how it adapts its political system and undertakes economic reform.
Colombia, for its part, enters a Congressional and Presidential election year caught between a past it would like to forget and a future filled with hard choices it would like to defer. Unlike Venezuela, it has resilient democratic institutions, enviable human capital, and the region’s strongest economy outside Brazil and Mexico. But it is wrestling with entrenched insecurity and organised crime at home, and a sudden sense of isolation abroad that threatens the progress of recent decades. President Petro has had a very testy relationship with President Trump, although the two appeared to have a relatively convivial meeting recently in the White House. And Colombia has come into the crosshairs of the United States for its role in producing and exporting drugs, and its left-leaning government has come into ideological clash with Washington – which may or may not persist, depending on how its voters decide over the next few months.
Cuba, too, is firmly on the radar of the United States. Its economy is facing enormous challenges after Venezuelan oil supplies were cut off, and parts of the US administration evidently want to create a stranglehold and effect regime change. For more than six decades, Havana has survived by externalising its economic weaknesses and internalising political discipline – first the Soviet Union, then Venezuela, and then a shifting mix of tourism, remittances, and sanctions management. The Cuban system has always been less an economy than a precarious mix of grift, graft and payday loans.
But that “strategy” is now breaking down. Maduro’s departure removed Cuba’s most important remaining patron. Subsidised oil shipments — the fuel of transport, electricity generation and industry — have fallen sharply. What replaced them has been thin and politically exposed: tourism vulnerable to shocks, remittances vulnerable to US policy, and limited trade with China and Russia that is strategic rather than transformative. Cubans now live in permanent shortage: electricity blackouts are routine, food and medicine scarcity are endemic, and inflation has eroded what little purchasing power remains. And the population is shrinking not through catastrophe, but exhaustion.
All three countries, like many others in Latin America, are now under increased pressure from the United States to resist influence from its chief great-power adversaries, China and Russia.
We have therefore decided to run a week-long tour across all three countries that closely mimics how diplomats organise visits for senior officials to bring them up to speed as quickly as possible on a country’s politics, economics, risks, and opportunities.
The tour will involve meetings with local government officials, opposition figures, business leaders, chambers of commerce, heads of cultural institutions, diplomats from foreign missions, and civil society organisations. And it will be run by former diplomats with extensive experience in the region, Spanish-language skills, and deep connections with local government, businesses, and civil society.
All of this is designed to develop a rounded perspective on these countries’ current political and economic circumstances, their long-term trajectory, and a realistic assessment of both the potential and the perils of doing business and investing in these nations.
All aboard
If you are interested in learning more about this first tour to Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba, please register your interest or reply to this email.
And stay tuned: if you are interested in visiting other countries, we plan to bring delegations to places such as Taiwan, Korea, and Syria, and we can arrange similar visits to many other nations. Please let us know which of these may be of interest to you.
In the meantime, there remains an extraordinary amount one can learn from behind a computer or mobile phone, and for that reason, I would encourage you to continue reading Geopolitical Dispatch.
Best wishes,
Damien
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