Foreign Ministers
The official means used by most nations to communicate formally with each other is through their Foreign Service, or some similarly named agency. These consist for the most part of career diplomats, schooled in history, culture, and foreign affairs. Their role includes the protection of the rights of citizens of their nation when overseas, and the promotion of their national interests. This has evolved over the centuries from a time when most overseas emissaries were political appointees, selected because of their familial or business connections to the nations to which they were sent, and often little more than spies.
The first American delegation tasked with communication with a foreign nation was sent to France in 1775. They arrived in Paris intent with obtaining financial and military aid from a nation hesitant to openly twist the British lion’s tail, but covertly welcoming a British humiliation. The Americans followed the lead of Benjamin Franklin in their negotiations and though none of the delegation bore the title of ambassador, they filled the role successfully. Following the Revolutionary War John Adams, who had served as a minister in France, filled the difficult role of America’s first minister to Great Britain, presenting his credentials to the King he had done so much to depose in the United States.
In the ancient empires and even through the royal courts of Napoleonic times, emissaries dispatched to nations hostile to one another were at times in considerable personal danger. In 1815 the Congress of Vienna, which redrew the map of Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, established the concept of diplomatic immunity. Diplomatic immunity was reaffirmed by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations in 1961, which has been ratified by 191 nations. Among other things, the security of diplomatic communications with their home countries was affirmed, and the personal security of diplomatic couriers was established.
Although all signatory nations agreed in principle to the sanctity of both diplomatic communications and the security of embassies and consulates, nearly all have since used covert means to monitor the communications between embassies and their respective governments. Monitoring of telecommunications is an act practiced across the globe as nations spy on other’s diplomatic activities, and the presence of spies in allied nations allegedly friendly to each other is a prevalent part of international communications. One of the most damaging spies in American history was Jonathan Pollard, for example, an American who worked as a spy for the Israelis, an American ally.
Although often viewed as tedious and overly formal, diplomatic actions have in the past resulted in considerable international surprise, as they did in 1939 when the Soviet Union, widely believed to be on the verge of an alliance with Britain and France, instead announced the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement of non-aggression between Germany and the USSR. Negotiated in secret, the pact also agreed to the German-Soviet partitioning of Poland, and led to the German invasion of that nation in September. Neither the British nor the Americans were taken completely by surprise, thanks to their extensive monitoring of the German-Soviet communications.