On the one hand, experience in the workings of state-level foreign policy gives you an idea of how foreign policy works. On the other hand, it means that you come with an existing patronage network and conventional wisdom, which may or may not be A Good Thing, depending on how parochial your local foreign ministry apparatchiks are.

On the state level, I guess Tory Bliar represents someone with no foreign policy experience prior to having to deal with it. That does not seem to have done him any favours, but that may be because of the peculiarities of the British Foreign Office.

On the other hand, long foreign policy experience means - and this is a simple matter of mathematics that would apply to all experienced candidates equally - that much of the conventional wisdom they'd have in their baggage would predate the fall of the Berlin Wall (or, at the very least and depending on your definition of "experienced," predate Schengen, Vietraq and the €). Which does not seem to have ever done anybody any favours either.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.