by Tom Phillips
On the flip side to being overly trusting, there’s the self-defeating Chinese foreign policy under the Ming Dynasty, which has become a case study in the perils of isolationism. In the first three decades of the 1400s, China had one of the greatest naval fleets in the history of the world, under the command of the legendary mariner Zheng He. Composed of up to 300 ships, including enormous nine-masted vessels larger than any boat that would sail for centuries in the future, the fleet carried as many as 30,000 men; it even included ships that acted like floating farms, growing vegetables and keeping herds of animals.
What’s more, during this period the Chinese were notable for not really using their fleet to do much in the way of, you know, invading places. Certainly they spent quite a lot of time fighting pirates, and the fleet was very handy for vaguely threatening displays against any country considering stepping out of line—but in all of Zheng He’s seven voyages to destinations across Asia, Arabia and Eastern Africa, it was only involved in one relatively minor war. Instead, it spent most of its time visiting ports as far-flung as Malacca, Muscat and Mogadishu, and...well, exchanging presents. The Chinese gave out precious metals and fine cloths, and would get a wide variety of gifts back, including an awful lot of animals. One time they brought a giraffe back from Kenya.
As displays of overwhelming force by imperial powers go, it all sounds rather nice compared to the alternatives. And so it’s particularly baffling that after Zheng He’s death in 1433, the Ming Dynasty just sort of...stopped. They abandoned their navy. In a pretty extreme overreaction to the continued operation of Japanese pirates, they resurrected the old policy of haijin—an almost complete ban on any maritime shipping. Distracted by ongoing battles with the Mongols in the north, foreign diplomatic missions were seen as an unnecessary expense, the money better spent on a different project: the construction of a very large border wall.
In the following years, China turned increasingly inward, shutting out the world. The fact that they did this just at the point when European navies were starting to explore the globe had a double effect: it meant that when the Europeans started to show up in Asian waters a few decades later, there wasn’t a major local power to stand in their way, and it meant that China kind of missed out on much of the scientific and technological acceleration that was kicking off. It would be a long, long time before the country regained its status as a world power.
That highlights just how much diplomatic choices are, to an extent, about trying to predict how power balances will shift in the future. Given that this is impossible to do with anything close to accuracy, it’s not entirely surprising that people get it wrong so often. In Switzerland during the late spring of 1917, right in the midst of World War I, a middle-aged man with a funny beard had a proposal for the German government. He was Russian, and he desperately wanted to get back home to his own country, which was in the grip of political upheaval, but the war made traveling across Europe all but impossible. The best route back to Russia was to head northward through Germany, but the man would need German permission to do that. And the German government were no fans of his politics.
The pitch was simple. For all their differences, he and the Germans currently had a shared enemy: the Russian government, who he didn’t like and was rather keen to overthrow. The German High Command were fighting a war on several fronts, and reasoned that any distraction that might divert Russian resources away from the front lines would be helpful. So they agreed. They put the man, his wife and 30 more of his compatriots on a train to a northern port, from where they’d travel onward via Sweden and Finland. It wasn’t much of a vanguard, but it was better than nothing. The German authorities even gave them some money, and would continue to help them out financially over the following months. They probably imagined that like most political obsessives with a niche cause, the man would stir up a bit of trouble, get the Russians off their backs for a while and then fade quietly into obscurity.
Anyway, yeah, that guy was Lenin.
Now in many ways, the German plan worked flawlessly. Better than expected, in fact! The Bolsheviks didn’t just irritate and distract the Russian authorities, they absolutely wiped the floor with them. In just over six months, Russia’s provisional government was gone, Lenin was in power and the Soviet state was established. The Germans got a ceasefire that they couldn’t even have dared to dream about back in April when they’d waved Lenin’s train off.
In the slightly longer term, however, the plan was not what you’d call a runaway success.
For starters, the ceasefire on the Eastern Front didn’t actually help win the Germans the war. And subsequently, the relationship between the expansionist new Soviet state and their helpful German pals rapidly turned sour. Fast-forward a couple of decades and another world war later, and half of a newly divided Germany would be under Soviet control.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin (1870–1924)
The Germans had fallen into the old trap of believing that their enemy’s enemy would be their friend. Which isn’t always wrong, exactly—it’s just that the friendship usually has a remarkably short shelf life. And that enemy’s enemy delusion lurks somewhere in the background of an astonishing number of history’s worst decisions, in addition to explaining several centuries’ worth of extremely confusing European history.
Another name for this phenomenon could be “postwar US foreign policy.” During the extended period of worldwide poor decision-making that was the Cold War, the US allied themselves with just about anybody who met the exacting criteria of “not being a communist.” Many of these allies were simply flat-out bastards (see: sundry dictators in Latin America, the succession of awful rulers in Vietnam). But on top of that core problem comes another one: these allies frequently had a habit of turning out to never have been huge fans of the US in the first place.
Consider that, in only the last few decades, the US has been involved in an armed conflict against al-Qaeda, which emerged from the mujahideen in Afghanistan, a group the US had previously supported on the grounds that they were fighting the Soviets. (I strongly recommend watching the 1987 James Bond film The Living Daylights if you’re a big fan of shouting, “OH WOW THAT DID NOT AGE WELL” at your screen. Bond teams up with the mujahideen, who are led by a charming, heroic character best described as “suave bin Laden with a posh English accent.” Good theme song, though.)
In that time, the US have also been involved in an armed conflict against Iraq, a country they had previously supported because they were fighting Iran, a country that opposed the US on the grounds that the US had supported Iran’s previous dictatorship, because they, too, opposed the Soviets.
And they’ve been in an armed conflict against ISIS, who grew out of the activities of al-Qaeda in postwar Iraq and are now fighting in Syria in what is at minimum a three-sided war, in which the US opposes a regime it previously supported and then tried to support the enemies of, but it turned out that some of the enemy regime’s enemies were also friends with ISIS, who are the enemies of both the US and the US’s enemies, although some other friends are enemies of both—oh, and Russia’s fighting there, too, just for old times’ sake.
And that’s just in one part of the world.
Look, international politics is really hard. There’s not much room for lofty ideals, and the cold hand of pragmatism means you often have to make do with the allies you can get, rather than the allies you really want. But a lot of the problems we run into time and time again might be avoidable if we remembered that, most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is just as much of a bastard as the original enemy.
But in the long history of really bad diplomatic mistakes, there’s one that stands out above all others.
How to Lose an Empire (Without Really Trying)
In 1217, Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, the shah of the vast and powerful Khwarezmian Empire, received a neighborly message from the leader of a new power that had been
growing in the east. “I am master of the lands of the rising sun,” it said, “while you rule those of the setting sun. Let us conclude a firm treaty of friendship and peace.” It proposed a trade deal between the two powers, to their great mutual benefit.
At which point Shah Muhammad II made the absolute worst decision in the long history of international diplomacy.
The Khwarezmian Empire was one of the most important in the world at the time, stretching almost from the Black Sea in the west to the mountains of the Hindu Kush in the east, from the Persian Gulf in the south to the Kazakh Steppe in the north. It covered a huge area that today includes either all or a large part of the territories of Iran, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and more. At a time when Europe was still a century or two away from getting its Renaissance on, Khwarezm was right at the epicenter of the developed world. It was through Khwarezm that the Silk Road ran, the great route that connected east and west, along which both goods and ideas flowed. The shah’s domain was one of the beating hearts of the Islamic world, by far the richest and most advanced culture in existence. Cities like Samarkand, Bukhara and Merv, the jewels of the Khwarezmian Empire, were among the great cities of Central Asia, renowned as places of scholarship, innovation and culture.
If you’re thinking: that’s odd, I’ve never even heard of the Khwarezmian Empire—yeah, there’s a reason for that.
You see, the message the shah had received was from a guy called Genghis Khan. And just a couple of years after he made his terrible decision...well, there wasn’t a Khwarezmian Empire anymore.
Genghis Khan depicted in battle, from a fourteenth-century book by Rashid-al-Din
It’s worth noting that as far as history can judge, Genghis’s message of friendship to the shah was completely sincere. By this point, the great warrior had effectively achieved all his goals: he had conquered and united the nomadic peoples of northern China and the surrounding territories into his Mongol Empire, a series of conquests that ranged from the relatively easy to the profoundly brutal. He still had a few battles to win in the east, but no plans at all to push any farther west. This was as far as his ambition and desires stretched; and furthermore, he was nearing his sixties. Job done, time to start planning for a quiet retirement.
It was his recent conquest of the Qara Khitai—an empire of displaced Chinese nomads centered roughly on modern Kyrgyzstan, and one of the last holdouts against his reign—that had brought Genghis to Khwarezm’s doorstep and created a new border between the Mongol and Islamic worlds. As tends to happen at borders, especially ill-defined ones, there had already been one abortive military skirmish between the Mongol troops and the Khwarezmians. This took place when Muhammad II and his army turned up to have a battle with some of his enemies, only to find that the Mongols had annoyingly got there first and routed them already.
This wasn’t even the first time this had happened. Genghis seemed to have a habit of turning up first and winning wars that Muhammad had been planning on having himself—which might possibly help explain the shah’s ill-advised reaction to the olive branch that Genghis extended after that initial skirmish. He was, possibly, a little pissed off and humiliated that the Mongols kept on stealing his glory. (It should also have probably tipped him off that they were pretty good military tacticians, but eh, apparently not.)
Additionally, Khwarezm–Mongol relations seem to have suffered the kind of problems you always get when things are lost in translation. “I am master of the lands of the rising sun while you rule those of the setting sun” was probably just Genghis laying out some basic east–west geography and acknowledging their status as (roughly) equals. But here’s an alternative translation of the message: “I am the sovereign of the sunrise and you are the sovereign of the sunset.” Put it like that, and all of a sudden it sounds like Genghis is throwing a hefty amount of shade. To a ruler who was already feeling a little touchy about somebody else winning his battles for him, did it come across as effectively saying, “I’m a rising power and you’re a fading power, LOL”?
Conducted via a series of emissaries sent back and forth, the subsequent dialogue between Muhammad and Genghis plays out like a passive-aggressive comedy of manners. Genghis felt patronized by the gifts of fine silks the shah sent him (“Does this man imagine we have never seen stuff like this?”). He responded by sending back a gift of an enormous gold nugget, presumably in an effort to demonstrate that they had nice things, too, even if they lived in tents. At which point Genghis’s earnest repetition of his wish for peace—“I have the greatest desire to live in peace with you. I shall look on you as my son”—hit entirely the wrong note with Muhammad, who really was not a fan of being called “my son.” (This is much funnier if you say “my son” in a gruff cockney gangster voice, by the way.)
And yet, with formalities and protocol still being observed (despite the undercurrent of pettiness), Genghis clearly believed that his request for a peaceful trading relationship had been agreed to. For starters, it was so obviously a win-win for everyone. “You know that my country is an ant heap of warriors, a mine of silver, and that I have no need to covet other dominions,” as he told Muhammad in one message. “We have an equal interest in fostering trade between our subjects.”
And so it was that Genghis sent out his first trade mission to Khwarezm, backed with his own funds and led by his personal envoy: 450 merchants, 100 troops and 500 camels, with wagons loaded with silver and silk and jade. Their aim was, in the first place, to ensure that Khwarezm’s recent embargo on trade across the border with the Mongol Empire was at an end. Everybody was extremely keen for this to happen, especially beyond Khwarezm’s borders: Genghis’s unification of northern China had made passage along the Silk Road theoretically much easier, and merchants across the Islamic world were superkeen on a chance to crack the Chinese market. But the shah’s territorial pissiness had closed the route off. As such, when the caravan of merchants and goods entered the northern Khwarezmian city of Otrar in 1218, it must have seemed like good times were here again.
This is where it all went very, very wrong, for a very large part of the world.
Instead of welcoming the trade mission, letting them park their camels and offering them a nice cup of tea, Inalchuq Qayir-Khan, the governor of Otrar, took a different approach. He had them all killed and stole everything they had brought with them. It was a vicious surprise attack, in which only one person out of the 550 in the party survived, because he was having a bath at the time of the massacre and managed to hide behind the tub.
The incident shocked the world, as an outrage against decency and hospitality and also basic common sense. The explanation given by Inalchuq—that he suspected the entire party of being spies—was completely ludicrous. The merchants themselves weren’t even Mongols, instead being largely Muslims from the Uighur region. The prospect that Islamic merchants in an Islamic city on a major trade route were now at risk of being massacred by the local government on a flimsy pretext was, to put it mildly, rather upsetting and definitely not good for business.
And absolutely nobody believed that Inalchuq would do something so potentially destructive—for an empire whose wealth and prestige depended on trade—without either the permission of, or a direct order from, the shah himself.
If there were any lingering doubts that Muhammad was hell-bent on starting some shit with the Mongols, they soon melted away. Incredibly, despite the outrage in Otrar, Genghis was willing to give him a second chance. The trade deal was still a priority for the Mongols (for starters, their campaign of conquest had not been great for the agriculture of their homelands, so they needed to buy stuff). And so Genghis sent three envoys—one Muslim, two Mongol—to set things straight with Muhammad, demanding punishment for Inalchuq, compensation for their goods and a return to peace.
Instead of apologizing, the shah beheaded the Muslim envoy and burned the beards off the faces of the Mongols, sending them back
to Genghis mutilated and humiliated.
Why? I mean, literally, why would you do that? Did Muhammad really start a war with Genghis Khan because he thought that a description of where the sun sets was a diss?
It’s certainly possible, and not significantly dumber than any other explanation. But at the same time, it’s worth noting that Muhammad’s paranoia extended further than a bit of extremely fragile masculinity. Of Turkic origin and descended from a slave, he was often looked down upon by neighboring Persian and Arabic nobles in the Muslim world. His empire was almost as young as Genghis’s, and internally divided. He had a difficult relationship with his mother, which never really helps. He also had a long-running beef with al-Nasir, the Arab caliph of Baghdad, who he now suspected of secretly plotting with the Mongols to bring him down. (In fairness, it’s not impossible that al-Nasir actually was plotting with the Mongols, although it would have been a pretty counterproductive move for all concerned.) And a failed attempt to capture Baghdad in 1217, when Muhammad’s troops got lost in the snow as they tried to cross some mountains, had probably left him feeling even more raw about his military prowess.
In addition, he may have simply underestimated the threat Genghis posed. In a good example of why you should wait until you’ve got as much information as possible before doing anything rash, as the now-beardless Mongol envoys were heading home with news of Muhammad’s provocation, one of the shah’s emissaries was headed the other way carrying news of exactly how strong the Mongol forces were. Upon finding out what he’d just put himself up against, the shah’s reaction seems to have been, to paraphrase roughly, “Oh.”
And so Genghis climbed to the top of Burkhan Khaldun, the mountain near his birthplace that he always went to when contemplating war, and prayed for three days and nights. Then he sent one final message to Muhammad—and this time, at least, it was straightforward enough that it couldn’t really be misinterpreted. “Prepare for war,” he told the shah. “I am coming against you with a host you cannot withstand.”