Diplomat in 1648: The Peace of Westphalia

There has never been one required path into the job: some of history's most effective diplomats were career civil servants who rose through exams, others were merchants, priests, generals or aristocrats pressed into service for a single mission. What every era shares is the same basic function — a trusted go-between who can speak for a government abroad and report back honestly, because a government blind to what other capitals actually think eventually makes a catastrophic mistake.

This page follows the job from the Amarna letters and Venice's pioneering resident ambassadors to Talleyrand at the Congress of Vienna and the Vienna Convention of 1961. It covers how people actually enter foreign services today, what a single posting demands day to day, who reached the top of the profession and how, and how much of the work — from drafting cables to reading a counterpart's real intentions — machines can realistically take over.

Do diplomats need to speak multiple languages? Almost always, though requirements vary. Most foreign services require or strongly reward fluency in at least one language beyond the diplomat's own, and postings to non-English-speaking countries typically come with paid language training beforehand — the US Foreign Service Institute, for instance, runs immersive courses lasting from months to nearly two years for the hardest languages before an officer ever arrives at post.