The Agency Washington Forgets
A conversation with Robert Bowker on five decades of western misreadings in the Arab world.
Foreign Affairs Newsletter
Written by Luca Salvemini
No. 174 - August 6, 2026
“In essence, western policy makers were taken by surprise when changes unfolded, because they did not think they needed to look.”
Introduction
Robert Bowker spent the better part of five decades inside western diplomacy, most of it trained on a single region: the Arab world.
He served as an Australian ambassador across several Arab countries, knows Egypt from years in Cairo, and now writes and teaches at the Australian National University’s Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies.
His memoir, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, distills a career spent reading the region on its own terms.
Bowker has spent a career attentive to the factor western capitals most often discount: the agency of regional actors themselves.
We talked about the Cold War assumptions that still shape western policy, why the Palestinian question keeps forcing its way back onto the agenda, whether Egypt’s stability is real or merely deferred, and the quiet transformation that leaves him more hopeful than the headlines would suggest.
What follows is that conversation, in full and in his own words.
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