When the Senate unanimously confirmed Nate Fick as U.S. cyber ambassador in September 2022, the headaches of tech diplomacy were impossible to ignore, and Fick quickly tasked his team with creating a modern training program and integrating it into the regular FSI curriculum.
“He understood that we needed to do more and better in terms of preparing our people in the field,” Hop says.
The training program fit perfectly into Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s vision of a U.S. diplomatic corps fully versed in modern challenges and agile enough to meet them. “Elevating our technology diplomacy” is one of Blinken’s “core priorities,” Fick says.
While developing a curriculum, Fick and his assistants had several important goals for the new training program.
The first priority was making sure diplomats understood what was at stake as the United States and its rivals vie for global preeminence on technological issues. “Authoritarian states and other actors have used cyber and digital tools to threaten national security, international peace and security, economic prosperity (and) the exercise of human rights,” says Kathryn Fitrell, a senior cyber policy adviser at the State Department who helps teach the course.
Equally crucial was preparing diplomats to promote the U.S. technology agenda from their embassies and provide detailed reports to Washington on how their host governments were addressing these issues.
“It’s important to us that the department’s technology experts don’t just stay at headquarters,” Fick says, “but that we have people everywhere — in all of our locations around the world, where the real work gets done — who are equipped with the tools they need to make decisions with a significant degree of autonomy.”
Foreign Service officers are America’s eyes and ears on the ground, surveying the landscape and alerting their bosses back home to risks and opportunities. They are also the U.S. government’s most direct and frequent interlocutors with representatives of other nations, forming personal bonds with local officials that can sometimes make the difference between unity and discord.
When these diplomats need to discuss America’s technology agenda, they can’t just monotonously read a paper. They have to really understand the positions they are presenting and be prepared to answer questions about them.
“You can’t just call someone in Washington every time a cyber problem comes up,” Sherman says.
But some issues will still require help from experts at headquarters, so Fick and his team also wanted to use the course to deepen their ties with diplomats and offer them friendly points of contact in the cyber office. “We want to be able to support officers in the field when they face these issues,” says Melanie Kaplan, a member of Fick’s team who took the course and now helps run it.
Inside the classroom
After months of research, planning and programming, Fick’s team launched the Cyberspace and digital politics course at the Foreign Service Institute with a pilot in November 2022. Since then, FSI has taught the class six more times (once in London for European diplomats, once in Morocco for diplomats in the Middle East and Africa, and four times in Arlington) and has trained 180 diplomats.
The program begins with four hours of “pre-work” to prepare students for the lessons ahead. Students must document that they have completed the pre-work, which includes experimentation with generative AI, before taking the class. “That has really put us light years ahead in ensuring that no one misses the first day,” Hop says.
