Economic diplomacy is the closest direct, acceptable, and regular contact in international economic relations. Economic policy is formation and direction; diplomacy is communication and implementation – the lubricant of foreign policy machinery. Traditionally, its form derives from the nature of the state system itself. In the absence of a common forum, such as an international parliament, states were obliged to regulate their contacts directly. As international economic relations became more complex, they were obliged to became knowledgeably about the state to which they had been sent, skilled not only in advancing their sovereign’s interests there but in interpreting what was going on in the other sovereign’s mind, the better for sovereign to gain or to forge understandings to their mutual advantage.