23 Jun From Diplomat to Content Creator: How Ambassadors’ Roles have Changed Since 2017

When I briefed my first U.S. Ambassador to the UK – Ambassador Woody Johnson, a Trump appointee – in 2017, the role of ambassador still resembled its traditional form: a representative of the President, engaging behind closed doors and projecting diplomacy through statecraft and protocol. Today, that model has changed sharply. In my view, three major shifts have transformed what it means to be an ambassador in a post-Covid, digitally accelerated, more dangerous world.

Ambassadors as content creators

President Trump’s 2016 Presidential election campaign’s digital-first approach redefined not only American domestic politics, but also the expectations placed on his representatives abroad. What began as individualised engagement – retweets, Facebook posts, and media op-eds – has now formalised into an unexpected, quasi-secondary role for ambassadors: content creators. Covid-19 and successive lockdowns only accelerated this as in-person engagement collapsed, and public diplomacy moved online almost overnight.

Compare the public profiles of former US Ambassadors to the UK Matthew Barzun (Obama), Woody Johnson (Trump), and Jane Hartley (Biden): each iteration became more digitally accessible, media-literate, and public-facing than the last. In London, the US Embassy’s social media presence has evolved from formality to flair. Over just the past five years, diplomats filmed Instagram reels playing football with each other around the office during the Euros in 2020 and the World Cup in 2022, hosted live Superbowl watch parties, and leaned into trending memes to humanise themselves and strengthen bilateral sentiment, even when most legacy media headlines were anything but positive. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the US Embassy London’s Instagram account and Chancellor Rachel Reeves MP’s Instagram account have a similar number of followers.

Convincing senior diplomats to film football tricks inside the embassy would have been unthinkable pre-pandemic. But it built on Barzun, Johnson, and Hartley’s willingness to open doors – literally and figuratively – with behind-the-scenes documentaries like Inside the US Embassy (Barzun and Johnson) and the Netflix series The Diplomat (Johnson and Hartley). Now, short-form, informal content isn’t just permissible – it’s expected. A case in point is the Japanese ambassador to the UK, who almost weekly trends on Instagram for relatable social content that also serves as a useful weapon in the soft power arsenal.

Fixers, not figureheads, are in demand

The caricature of the ambassador as ceremonial ribbon-cutter is also dangerously outdated. A by-product of President Trump’s notoriously unpredictable court, where contacts with access to the President are incredibly useful but oftentimes volatile or short-lived, has meant that ambassadors’ previous political experience and access can gave their officials an edge in the form of a trusted intermediary. Today’s most effective ambassadors are often fixers as a result – strategic operators who can unlock high-level access, defuse crises, and navigate political complexity in real time. A case in point: UK Ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, has reportedly played a key role in brokering initial access between the incoming US ambassador to the UK, Ambassador Warren Stephens, and UK ministers – well before formal credentialing, but crucial at a time of war in Europe and the Middle East and slowing economic growth in the UK. It’s also not far-fetched to assume that his interventions played a part in the UK’s recent preferential trade deal with the US – including reduced tariffs and widened market access.

In the era of bilateral micro-deals and impulsive leader diplomacy, having the right ambassador – or fixer – matters more than ever.

Frustration with internal expertise and knowledge has led to parallel envoys to bypass the system

The rise of special envoys and informal intermediaries has at times been a pragmatic workaround,especially when traditional diplomatic channels are gridlocked. But bypassing institutional processes, a perennial ambition of President Trump, who is vocally opposed to the “deep state” as he pursues a foreign policy at odds with much of what came before it, comes with risk.

Consider the instance of President Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. A political appointee lacking Senate approval and US government institutional backing, Witkoff met with President Putin and used a Kremlin-supplied translator to discuss a possible ceasefire in Ukraine without any USG notetakers present—eschewing both the US embassy and the State Department apparatus entirely. The public outcry afterwards, mistakenly directed at the Foreign Service and embassy, is justified, albeit misdirected.

Most foreign services exist to ensure policy coherence and to speak uncomfortable truths – what diplomats call “speaking truth to power.” The institutional process can be slow and frustrating, but it is designed to balance short-term political priorities against long-term strategic interests, while drawing on the vast knowledge of the service’s diplomats and local staff. Circumventing it may speed things up but it also increases the risk of missteps, mistranslations, and costly diplomatic errors. Ambassadors, on the other hand, have the full weight of their foreign services and embassy communities behind them in their decisionmaking and engagement, insuring against even the most costly of mistakes, albeit at a slightly slower pace.

Ambassadorial rules have changed but the game remains the same

Ambassadors today must blend credibility with charisma and be equally fluent in TikTok trends and trade negotiations. But the deeper challenge has become preserving the integrity of diplomacy in an age of speed and spectacle, war and economic stagnation. The best adapt without discarding the principles that underpin effective foreign policy: institutional memory, strategic patience, and informed counsel, all viewed through the prism of home country interests. Those things, contrary to the constantly evolving role of Ambassadors, are unlikely to change.

The views expressed in this article are the authour’s own and do not necessarily represent those of BFPG. This blog is part of a series by Michael Martins for BFPG on the future of UK-US relations. The first blog in the series can be read here.