A top Brit diplomat to Canada says the increasingly important task of maintaining relationships and sharing information between key allies isn’t much different from what audiences might see on a hit Netflix drama.
Although The diplomat According to David Prodger, the British Deputy High Commissioner to Canada, the story is fictional and uses the headlines to reflect what it’s like to prevent crises from spilling over behind the scenes – particularly the “suppressed panic” that surrounds many of the characters .
“I think a lot of those little vignettes were very, very realistic,” prodger Mercedes Stephenson said in an interview that aired Sunday The Western Block.
“You are dealing with big problems and you have to solve them quickly.”
In the thriller, Keri Russell plays a career American diplomat who is suddenly appointed the new US ambassador to the United Kingdom, where she works to contain disasters at home and abroad. The series was filmed in real foreign offices and diplomatic residences in Britain and was praised for its accuracy.
As portrayed on the show, Prodger, who lives in Ottawa, said diplomacy is largely about maintaining and developing smaller relationships between foreign diplomatic officials to ensure the “overall relationship” is maintained, with officials at all levels constantly talking to each other.
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Still, he said the show may overstate the kind of access even senior diplomats like himself have to government officials.
“I’m not sure I could walk into (Secretary of State) Melanie Joly’s office here,” he said.
“(But) whether on the day-to-day policy side, whether between our respective missions and our headquarters, we would expect to see our allies in and out of the State Department all the time.”
“These relationships are actually critically important and we spend a lot of time getting them in the right place,” he added.
Prodger said the Five Eyes information-sharing partnership – which includes the United States, Australia and New Zealand in addition to Canada and Britain – is becoming “increasingly important” as democracies work to protect national and economic security from growing threats.
As governments struggle to ensure people get the right information, he said it is critical for like-minded countries to work together to combat disinformation and misinformation, as well as cyberattacks and other hostilities.
At the same time, he said that part of the work was “paying attention to the public’s opinion.”
“We are civil servants,” he said. “We work for our government and so we have to think very carefully about how we present what we do.”
Podger said transparency with the public about what the government knows about current and emerging threats or in an emergency situation such as a terrorist attack is critical.
Despite warnings from military and government officials that the current threat situation is more dangerous than before, Podger sees it differently.
“I think things are always cutting edge,” he said.
“If you look back 10 years, we had Iraq, we had Afghanistan, we had 9/11. Before that, we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain. We had genocide in Europe. So… there have always been these big geopolitical questions. It’s changing right now.
“I think what we’re seeing is … that global geopolitics is struggling to realign itself,” he said. “I think it’s something we’re working really hard on.”
&Copy 2024 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
