Dominique Moisi is a clever and agreeable French intellectual. I met him once over lunch.

Here he is, bewailing what he sees as the professional limitations of diplomats who fail to see convulsions coming:

In the name of “realism,” diplomats and foreign-policy strategists are naturally conservative.

Indeed, it is no accident that Henry Kissinger’s masterpiece, A World Restored, was devoted to the study of the recreation of the world order by the Vienna Congress after the rupture of the French Revolution, followed by the Napoleonic adventures.

Is it more difficult to predict, and adjust to, the coming of a fundamental change, than to defend the present order, under the motto of “the devil you know is always preferable to the devil you don’t know!”

But, beyond these mental habits lie more structural reasons for the conservatism of foreign policymakers and diplomats. By emphasizing the relations between states and governments over contacts with the opposition or civil societies (when they exist in an identifiable form), traditional diplomacy has created for itself a handicap that is difficult to overcome.

Really?

Here is my Comment:

Maybe French diplomats have these problems. Not quite so sure that others do.

The argument is a bit thin. Take a stretch of dangerous road. It may well be obvious to any road engineer that a crash is likely for ‘objective’ reasons.

The crash is therefore predictable in general terms, but quite unpredictable in specific terms. Thousands of vehicles may go by safely before some or other fatal combination of small errors causes a crash, which in itself be nothing like what had been expected.

Thus with eg the Middle East.

It has been obvious enough to any sane person for a long time that these sundry national socialistic and other murky Arab autocracies were likely to have severe convulsions, sooner or later.

But precisely when they might occur is in principle unknowable and not easily guessable. Not least since some of the leaders concerned are tough and clever enough to ride out a serious problem through assorted concessions/cruelty.

At the British Embassy in Yugoslavia in 1984 I wrote a paper warning that Yugoslavia was not a ‘pillar of stability in the Balkans’. I still have it. Obvious enough now. But it took six more years for the thing to crash. The Yugoslavs themselves did not predict the scale of the ensuing mayhem. Should we have done much better?

In 1987 a colleague in the FCO Planning Staff wrote a short paper saying that German reunification could happen very suddenly. She was right, and how. But the fact that it happened suddenly and in the way it did all turned on impenetrable issues of private belief or uncertainty within Gorbachev and others.

Or look at the end of apartheid, which happened the way it did mainly for the banal reason that PW Botha had a heart attack and ‘Dopper’ FW De Klerk took over. Predictable? No way. See Chaos Theory passim

These elusive human factors tend to be ignored in favour of grand-sounding big picture ‘structuralist’ interpretations of events, as per this elegant article. But anyone who’s been close to the top of a government and seen what goes on knows just how significant the unobvious human factors are.

Finally, the issue is not that diplomats don’t see things coming. They often do, and say so.

It’s more that politicians don’t want to see them. Disruptive events are unwelcome and potentially unmanageable, and above all usually expensive.

Politicians over the years may have built up quite good relations with the Bad Leaders concerned and somehow assume that the wobbly stability they represent is better than the possible chaos which could replace them – myriad examples available, not least the reluctance of many key people in the West to say goodbye to Gorbachev and welcome in Yeltsin.

In short, the core issue isn’t the inflexibility or blinkeredness of diplomats.

It’s Life.

Or, as they say over the Manche, c’est la vie.