Thread by @PeterHarling

France's foreign policy has never been this shallow, reflexive and incoherent, detached from any national interest, slave to the news cycle.

I've witnessed this evolution over 25 years, during my own career. It carries lessons about diplomacy more broadly 🧵

The most obvious shift is: presidentialization. Policy used to take shape within the ministry (the Quai d'Orsay), home to solid intellectual traditions, a robust corps of civil servants, and strong leadership figures.

Gradually, it moved to the presidential palace (the Elysee).

Within the Elysee, policy was formed at first by a small team of technical advisors who hailed from the Quai d'Orsay, and coordinated closely with it.

Even that changed, as the president's political staff and the president himself took over.

That also opened the door to all sorts of "late-night" whisperers, and the impulses, intuitions, and influences coming from the president's personal networks.

This leads to abrupt, mystifying decisions that foreign policy professionals sometimes learn about through the news.

In this increasingly ad hoc process, what was lost was exactly what makes foreign policy: intellectual frameworks, institutional memory, long-term strategies, hard-earned technical experience.

They subsist, but all too often in catch-up mode.

Formal diplomatic circles haven't just been left behind.

Budgets have been shrinking almost yearly. Extraneous appointees have multiplied. Much young talent abandoned their career, discouraged. Much old talent has been humiliated, cowed, or shunned aside.

This means that what used to structure foreign policy has degraded. What's left is the paraphernalia of diplomacy: statements, envoys, and conferences with little substance and less consistency still.

Diplomats grumble at this state of affairs, which is part of the problem.

Diplomacy, while long being in crisis, hasn't done much to reinvent itself.

Embassies haven't evolved, with the exception of one unfortunate innovation: vacuous social media posts to boast about "constructive meetings" or flaunt the beauties of the countries they sit in.

Meanwhile, diplomatic cables follow the same patterns of old. No new depth of expertise has emerged on the world's contemporary problems: climate, inequalities, mobility, digitization, and so forth. In a crisis, embassies hunker down, overtaken by a stifling security mindset.

These trends in turn reinforce presidentialization, which rests on the premise that professionals have little on offer, locked as they are into lavish lifestyles and stale paradigms inherited from the past.

So we have costly, short-sighted decisions and petty politics instead.

For much the same reasons as France, the US, the UK, Germany, and others display foreign policies shaped by ordinary prejudice.

Because politicians are free from professionalized structures, their personal whims and biases, and that of their coterie of advisors, win the day.

This may help explain the ongoing collapse of Western-inspired international norms, in the context of Gaza.

It also sheds light on what these standards are being replaced by: base instincts, through which resurface so much of our unresolved past.

(If this sounds judgemental, I'll simply note that all the sectors I know are in crisis, mine included. The first act of reinvention is disclosure. In intellectual occupations, self-criticism is in the job description. It's not as if we could hope to hide our failings anyway.)