Actually, this is for anybody who might be of help…
I am very knowledgeable in geography, history (my Major) and good with languages. Now this might seem like a given, but considering that one should play on one’s strengths and these are definitely my strengths .. does a career in either intelligence or diplomacy seem appropriate? I ask because I definitely lack the technological acumen aforementioned by Marquer.
Oh, and I also love travel and wish to live overseas for some amount of time.

Defense Language Institute. It is the premiere school of the U.S. Defense Department for languages, located in Monterey, California. They have a reputation for being among the best in the world at what they do.

With regard to the idea that parsing linguistic and cultural nuance is a critically important skill among diplomats, agreed. But it is possible to repose this skill in a third-party translator with success.

At one point, I was called on to brief an American businessman who was going in to a meeting with non-English-speaking Korean executives. I said to him, “Bill, my high regard for your abilities notwithstanding, I must note that an idiomatic American sports term comes out of your mouth with every second sentence, and these gentlemen will simply find that incomprehensible. You must speak neutrally and without slang. It may even be considered disrespectful if you do not do so.”

Of course, he was thirty seconds into his presentation when he first said, excitedly, “Right. It’s fourth and goal,” and I buried my head in my hands. He went on from there, salting the entire speech with such asides, some of them opaque even to me.

It turned out not to be a problem. The very professional young Korean woman who was translating handled Bill’s athletic expostulations smoothly. I asked her about it afterward, and she said, “It’s a common issue with American men in business. I took a class to learn what these things mean.”

What does DLI stand for?

I will admit I’m biased towards language study as, well, it’s what I’m doing right now. It depends what your job is. If your work consists mostly of being briefed by people who know their way around science, of course you should have enough of a grounding to understand their briefings. If you work in diplomacy, a lot of your time will be spent working out what people say and what they really mean. An understanding of the subtleties of a different language is obviously required in that case.

Winston Churchill was an aberration; there may never be another world leader of Churchill’s stature.

If you are manifestly competent in your field, especially technical fields, language difficulties will be overcome. Diplomacy, however, requires a mastery of both one’s own language, and the language of where one is serving, as differences of opinion often lie in nuances, rather than concrete terms.

A competent translator can amend the lack of a language skill. It is much less easy to ameliorate in real time an incomprehension of history or or of geography.

The third area in which rapid remedial coaching similarly fails is in trying to convey the subtleties of science and technology, which are at this point in human history of profound importance to geopolitics.

More cogently, there have been times in history when the tongues of a few dominant powers were the only ones which needed to be known in order to perform competent diplomacy. Jefferson was fluent in five languages and read in several more, but the circumstances of the day made only French an imperative possession.

Today we have a mad Babel. And the languages of importance are themselves often far more difficult to master. Russian. Arabic. Mandarin. It takes two years of immersion at DLI doing little else to get good at any single one of those, with a high washout rate.

It would be preferable to have polymathic statesmen schooled in every area, of course, but in a pinch, language should be deleted in favor of grounding in science and engineering.

Much of what Paasikivi says in the quote must stem from the frustration that small states are often left alone, on top of his nasty temperament. About the knowledge of foreign languages, he read newspapers in six languages, and negotiated with the Soviets in October and November 1939 without an interpreter.

The “choice” as you call it was not a) Soviets or b) Nazis, but a) total invasion and conquer by the Soviets or b) an alliance with the Nazis in which Helsinki kept its independence. Any leader that chose a) would today be considered one of the greatest failures of the 20th century. And the choice was so clear to Finland’s population that even Finland’s Jews fought with the Nazis.

Finnish President Paasikivi is of the generation that allied Finland with the Nazis. (I know his unhappy choice was between Hitler and the hated Stalin.) Does that make him more qualified to pontificate about the amateurish policies of other statesmen? Still, he looks impressive in profile with that stogie stuck in his pie hole.

Also, certainly part of the reason the North invaded was because the US suggested it would not defend the South if such an invasion occurred.

The US had strategic reasons for not arming the South after WWII. They deliberately did not arm them because they were worried that Syngman Ree would make a play for the North, as he had threatened to do. Unfortunately, they were ignorant of the threat of the North to the South. A grave mistake, so in some ways the Finnish President was right, but where was he when all this was happening?