The gap between the theory and the practice is where the real work happens

We were back from the ersatz Red Italian restaurant, where the pasta was limited to spaghetti with some ketchup-light version of a marinara sauce. There had only been red wine on offer. The vibe was straight out of Twin Peaks—we had been greeted by the hostess, who only spoke Mandarin and had an overdose of lipstick with a deep purple hue. On the bus, they had told us to dress formally, because the “big boss” was going to be there, ostensibly to welcome our delegation. One of us, a Chinese American from Chicago, had thrown an epithet back in response—there was no way she was getting out of her jeans. In any case, we all made it through the meal, and now everyone had gathered around my hotel room because I had the Wi-Fi cell phone hotspot that gave us internet access to the real world. We were behind the virtual bars of the Communist Party compound, just outside the Fifth Ring Road in Beijing. It was 2012, and we were there to discuss cognition and robots.

This is what science diplomacy actually looks like, from the inside. Not the glossy brochures. Not the joint press releases. Not the carefully worded communiqués about “mutual benefit” and “shared scientific values.” The real version involves bad Italian food in Beijing, a wifi hotspot passed around like contraband, and a delegation of American scientists trying to figure out whether the whole enterprise meant anything at all.

It usually does. But it’s complicated. And the complications are the story.

Two Concepts That Sound Like One

The field has a useful, if slightly academic, distinction that I’ve come to think is genuinely important: science for diplomacy versus diplomacy for science. They sound like the same thing. They aren’t.

Science for diplomacy is the older idea, the notion, dating at least to the Eisenhower era and Atoms for Peace, that scientific exchange can serve as a back-channel when official channels are frozen. Scientists can talk when diplomats can’t. The lab bench is theoretically neutral ground. When the State Department needs a reason to keep a dialogue going with a government it officially distrusts, a bilateral scientific commission provides cover, continuity, and occasionally genuine insight. This was the logic behind the U.S.-Soviet science exchanges during the Cold War. It was the logic behind our trip to Beijing.

Diplomacy for science is the inverse problem, and it’s the one that tends to get less attention, though it matters enormously to working scientists. This is about using diplomatic relationships, treaties, and agreements to enable science that couldn’t happen otherwise. Think of the agreements that allow American researchers to access field sites in restricted countries, or the treaties that govern data-sharing across international telescope arrays, or the painstaking negotiations that made CERN possible. In these cases, science is the goal and diplomacy is the instrument. The scientists are the clients, not the currency.

In practice, every international scientific engagement involves both in unstable and often unacknowledged tension with each other.

The Beijing Trip

The trip was the brainchild of Mihail “Mike” Roco, a program officer in NSF’s Engineering Directorate and one of the most consequential science administrators of the past thirty years. Roco had been the key architect of the National Nanotechnology Initiative under Clinton—the person who walked into the White House in March 1999 and proposed, on behalf of an interagency working group, what would become a multi-billion-dollar federal program adopted by five successive administrations. He understood, better than almost anyone in Washington, that you could design a scientific priority: that convergence across disciplines didn’t happen spontaneously but could be catalyzed by the right combination of funding, convening, and political timing. Cognition had been part of his vision from the beginning; his 2002 NNI report explicitly linked nanotechnology to biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. He brought that same architectural instinct to Beijing. The agenda was cognition and robots. The subtext was: What might a bilateral initiative look like, and is the ground ready?

The delegation, including myself, had been assembled under the auspices of a U.S.-China bilateral working group. The Chinese side wanted to understand how American neuroscience was thinking about cognition at scale—about the intersection of brain science and intelligent machines. Obama’s BRAIN Initiative was still a year away from announcement, still an idea circulating among a small number of people in Washington and in the research community. But the intellectual currents that would eventually produce it were already running. Some of the people in that Beijing room could feel them.

The meeting also had a political architecture that was never quite visible but always present.

The “big boss” who appeared at dinner turned out to be a mid-level Party functionary whose role in the actual science was ceremonial. His presence was a signal—to the Chinese scientists in the room, not to us—about the political valence of the meeting. International scientific exchange in China is not, and has never been, politically neutral. The researchers we met were sophisticated people, many of them trained in the United States, who had chosen to return. They understood the game. Some of them were playing it skillfully in multiple directions at once.

We were, by comparison, relatively naive about the political dimensions of what we were doing.

The Structural Problem

Here is the tension that I’ve never seen cleanly resolved, after years of watching and occasionally participating in science diplomacy efforts: the things that make a scientist good at science are not the things that make a diplomat effective, and vice versa.

Scientists, at their best, are trained to say what they actually think—to put their claims in front of peers who will attack them, to update their views under pressure, to regard certainty as a liability. The ethos of the good scientist is adversarial in a particular productive way: your best collaborator is the person who will find the flaw in your argument before your enemy does.

Diplomacy runs on a different operating system. It requires strategic ambiguity, the management of face, and the careful calibration of what is said against what is meant. A diplomat who always says exactly what they think is a diplomat who doesn’t last long. The useful diplomatic skill is knowing which truths to foreground, which to bracket, and which to leave permanently unstated.

Put scientists in a diplomatic role, and you often get one of two failure modes: the ones who over-adapt become surprisingly effective political operators—but often at the cost of their scientific credibility back home. The ones who refuse to adapt say something at a plenary session that blows up three months of careful preparation.

The woman in jeans was right, by the way. She didn’t mean it as a diplomatic statement, but it landed as one.

What Actually Works

I don’t want to be entirely cynical about this, because I’ve also seen science diplomacy work—genuinely, consequentially, in ways that mattered for both the science and the relationship.

What seems to distinguish the successes from the failures is a clarity about which mode you’re actually in. When everyone at the table understands that the scientific content is real but that there is also a parallel political conversation happening—and that both conversations deserve to be taken seriously—the enterprise can be productive. When either side pretends that only one conversation is happening, things tend to go sideways.

The Beijing meeting produced something. Not immediately, and not in a form anyone would have predicted. The collaborations that emerged weren’t with the Chinese researchers—that part of the equation didn’t pan out, at least not directly. What happened instead was that the American delegation, thrown together in a Communist Party compound with bad Italian food and a single wifi hotspot, started talking to each other. Neuroscientists, engineers, and cognitive scientists who would never have found themselves in the same room under ordinary circumstances discovered, over the genuinely good tea that appeared at every break, that they had overlapping problems. Ideas moved. Some of those hallway conversations became genuine collaborations in the years that followed. The convening worked—just not in the direction anyone had intended.

This is, I’ve come to think, more common than the official narratives of science diplomacy acknowledge. The bilateral wrapper creates a convening that the normal grant-and-conference ecosystem wouldn’t produce. The value lands somewhere unexpected. You go to Beijing to build a bridge to China, and you come home having built a bridge to the person from a completely different field who was sitting next to you on the bus.

The Harder Question

All of this was in 2012. The bilateral environment between the United States and China has changed dramatically since then, in ways that have made the science diplomacy question considerably sharper and more fraught. The initiatives that followed the BRAIN model—on both sides—have matured into programs that now sit at the center of a technology competition with serious national security dimensions. Cognitive science and robotics are no longer topics where the political valence is merely ceremonial.

I find myself thinking about those researchers in that Beijing compound, the ones who understood the game and were playing it skillfully in multiple directions. I wonder which direction their bets came down. I wonder what they make of where things stand now.

Science has always been embedded in politics. The useful illusion—and it is an illusion—is that the lab bench provides some insulation. What the science diplomacy world has learned, over decades of bilateral working groups and joint research programs and carefully staged restaurant dinners, is that the insulation is real but thin. It doesn’t protect you from the weather. It just gives you a little more time to figure out what the weather actually is.

That’s not nothing. Sometimes it’s exactly enough.