By Can Öztaş
“In an age when artificial intelligence does data analysis,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan asked assembled ambassadors at the 2025 Ambassadors Conference in December, “is there still such a need for the classical diplomat and for classical diplomacy?”
He answered his own question at some length. A diplomat must understand not simply what is being said in a capital but what is meant within its political and cultural codes. The contemporary diplomat is a multidimensional strategist. And then, to the ambassadors in front of him, he said: “Do not hesitate to share your strategic foresight and creative ideas with us.”
Every word of that is correct. The last sentence is also, unintentionally, the diagnosis. One does not tell confident professionals not to hesitate.
The request arrives at an awkward moment for diplomacy. Artificial intelligence can already translate, summarise, compare vast quantities of information and retrieve in seconds what once took diplomats days to assemble. Leaders communicate directly. Wars can be watched almost in real time. Yet the world has hardly become easier to understand. From Ukraine and Gaza to Syria, Iran, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, Turkey sits amid conflicts in which information is abundant but certainty decidedly less so.
There is a scene in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival in which humanity, confronted by a civilization whose technology it cannot begin to match, is offered something that can be translated as a “weapon”. Or perhaps it means a “tool”. The difference is consequential. Louise Banks, the linguist sent to find out, succeeds because she is willing to listen, doubt the obvious translation, and accept that another civilization may organize meaning differently from her own.
For all its spacecraft, Arrival is a film about diplomacy in the oldest sense, the one task neither artificial intelligence nor binary processing can perform.
MAKING OF A DIPLOMAT
Speaking the language of a country is an enormous advantage. Yet it is not enough. Knowing vocabulary is not the same as knowing a society.
Diplomacy requires the slow accumulation of judgement and memory. It requires diplomats who keep reading after the examination is over, who understand history beyond briefing papers, who engage with societies rather than merely official circles and who retain enough curiosity to discover when their assumptions are wrong.
Experience is institutional capital. A serious foreign ministry has to know how to recognize it, preserve it and place it where it matters. Merit belongs at the core of training, postings, promotion, specialisation and senior appointments. Where it is applied, diplomats go on developing their capacity for decision and initiative. Where it is not, a ministry accumulates a great deal of seniority and remarkably little experience.
There lies the central question of modern diplomacy. What use is professional judgement if the professional is given too little room to exercise it?
Foreign policy must, of course, remain under political authority. Governments determine objectives and ministers set priorities. But between a political instruction and the changing circumstances of Baghdad, Moscow, Athens or Washington lies a space that no headquarters can entirely control. That space is diplomacy.
Strong headquarters need strong missions, not obedient extensions of themselves. Ambassadors must be able to interpret, recommend, warn and occasionally tell the center something it would rather not hear. An institution that asks its diplomats for judgement must also be prepared to receive judgement.
The question, then, is not how much the Turkish Foreign Ministry will be able to know. It is what kind of diplomats it will trust to decide what any of it means.
WHAT THE MACHINE CANNOT KNOW
The old ministry transmitted knowledge through the usta-çırak (master and apprentice) relationship: the senior diplomat explaining, over countless conversations, why a formula had failed, why an interlocutor mattered, why an apparently attractive proposal had been tried before. Much of that can now be written down, indexed and retrieved in seconds. None of it can be inherited that way. An archive can tell a young diplomat what was decided in 1987. It cannot tell her why the man across the table still remembers it.
Machines will increasingly outperform diplomats at processing information. The diplomat’s advantage lies elsewhere: in knowing when silence matters, when a concession is possible but cannot yet be spoken, when an apparently technical disagreement conceals a political fear and when the instruction from headquarters no longer quite fits the country outside the embassy window.
It also lies in responsibility. An algorithm can identify possibilities. Someone still has to recommend one and be answerable for it afterwards.
Technology will make information faster, translation easier and the archive bottomless. But a foreign ministry capable of using those advantages will still depend on something stubbornly human: merit, experience and the freedom to exercise judgement. The aliens in Arrival bring a gift whose name admits two translations. Someone in the room will still have to be trusted to say which one it is.
