Celebrating 90 Years - Foreign Policy Association

92 | FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION
Good Diplomacy
versus Bad Diplomacy
Sir John Sawers
President, United Nations Security
Council, and Permanent Representative,
Mission of the United Kingdom to the
United Nations
Foreign policy happens in real
life, in clashes of hard
interests and ambitions, not
in measured policy documents
or angry op-eds.
It is a great honor to celebrate the Foreign
Policy Association’s 90th birthday with this
audience of corporate leaders, diplomats,
and politicians. Some corporate leaders have
difficulty distinguishing diplomats from politicians,
and there is a story from my country
about this difficulty: A man went for a country
walk in the south of England on a rather murky
day, and out of the sky descended a hot-air
balloon. The man in the basket shouted down,
“I’m sorry. I’m lost. Where am I?” The man on
the ground said, “You’re suspended about 50
feet above the English countryside in a basket
below a hot-air balloon.” The man in the balloon
said, “Are you a diplomat?” He answered,
“Oh, yes. How did you know?” The man in the
balloon responded, “Well, your answer was
perfectly polite, factually correct, and completely
useless. And I’m still lost.” The man
on the ground asked, “Are you a politician by
any chance?” And the man in the basket said,
“How did you know? Yes, I am, as a matter
of fact.” The man on the ground said, “You’ve
got your head in the clouds, you have no idea
where you are going, and now you’re trying to
blame it on me.”
There are two types of diplomats in
the world: those who sit in pleasant
ministries and write the rules
and those who are sent out on the
streets to apply the rules. I have
been lucky enough to do both.