by Tom Fletcher
Internationalists in the US – Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson – had long argued that the US had to become, in Roosevelt’s words, ‘the balance of power of the whole globe’. In the aftermath of the First World War, President Wilson warned Americans that the world would be ‘absolutely in despair if America deserts it’. In 1919 he helped to create the League of Nations, an idealistic stab at a new liberal order, underpinned by US power. Wilson aimed to replace the nineteenth-century European balance of power diplomacy with a global consensus against misuse of arbitrary power, backed up by collective mechanisms for preventing nations from stepping out of line. For the first time, international players defined and established a response to ‘unethical’ behaviour by world powers. The league was the first international mission whose main objective was to preserve peace rather than simply to carve up power. It was the beginning of a more idealistic statecraft. The Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928 even tried to make war illegal.
This was noble ambition indeed, but – like much declaratory diplomacy – easier to agree than to enforce. Italian dictator Mussolini was later to dismiss the league as ‘very well when sparrows shout, but no good at all when eagles fall out’.1 But the principles that lay behind it have underpinned much American and international foreign policy philosophy since. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a contemporary British political scientist, saw in it the potential of growing democratisation – ‘the impossibility of war would be increased in proportion as the issues of foreign policy should be known and controlled by public opinion’.2 He was wrong in his century, but I will argue later that he may be right in ours.
Despite this progress, the two decades that followed, under both Democrat and Republican presidents, were a period of American retreat from world affairs. It was Hitler’s rise that panicked President Franklin Roosevelt to make the case afresh for US re-engagement in Europe on more idealistic grounds, in defence of the endangered ‘institutions of democracy’. He concluded that the US was no longer best secured through detachment, and that the US economy was now more dependent on the global economy. ‘The world problem cannot be solved if America does not accept its full share of responsibility in solving it.’3 The language of the US debates of the 1930s is strikingly similar to the US debates of the 2010s.
The Second World War was further evidence of the need for a new world order, and the failure of the League of Nations to deliver collective security. Europe’s nineteenth-century diplomatic structures had proved insufficient for the twentieth century. But the period that ended the conflict was also a high point in big-ship diplomacy. Churchill would spend months overseas, determined to establish a new world order through personal relationships with the leaders of the great powers, fuelled by epic dinners.4 The Yalta Summit of 1945 was the ultimate in the great-power projection of authority, washed down with gallons of vodka, wine and rich food. World leaders had never been able to get to know each other as intimately.
Yet this was the swansong for this kind of ‘maps and chaps’ statecraft. Its energy sapped by conflict and overstretch, Britain accelerated the painful process of shutting down an empire it could no longer defend – militarily or ideologically. Meanwhile, Asia was back as a serious player in international relations – before 1919, fifteen of the sixteen most active diplomatic states on the world stage were European. After 1919, that number was twenty-two out of forty-seven.5 The United States needed a new and more effective global architecture, which recognised this recalibration of global power away from Europe.
So, under heavy US pressure, the United Nations was formed. Fifty nations met in San Francisco in 1945. The victorious powers – US, Russia, Britain, France and China – were able to lock in their diplomatic clout by establishing themselves as permanent members of the Security Council with veto powers, a neat formula (for them at least) that continues to this day. For the first time, the world had a permanent forum for diplomatic horse-trading that was indisputably uncontested. Behind the protocol and preening, the tedium and tantrums, the hot air and hot rooms, that forum still matters. The United Nations had fifty-one members in 1945, eighty-one in 1959, and 191 by 2004. It is far from perfect, but no one has yet come up with a better idea for the pursuit of global coexistence.
So much for managing the politics. The US also needed a system for managing the global economy. In July 1944 the ‘Bretton Woods’ institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, were hammered out, the first effort to pool key decisions on global economic sovereignty on such a scale. Terminally ill British economist John Maynard Keynes and the American Harry Dexter White grappled over their foundations in ‘the summit to top the lot, a raucous, rollicking, exhausting, even death-dealing experience … a rancid stew’.6 Over 700 delegates and 500 journalists consumed huge amounts of alcohol while the structures of the modern global economy were put in place.7
Meanwhile, the US turned more firmly towards what we now call soft power, starting with a programme of global radio (and later TV) broadcasts to take on the propaganda coming out of the Soviet Union. Of course, the Soviets might have described it in opposite terms. The hard power still of course underpinned this. America was now able to operate militarily as both a European and Asian force, giving it a unique global advantage.
As in previous eras, diplomats decided that one consequence of the changes in the way that power was arbitrated was that their positions should be enhanced. Protection for diplomats, such a concern for that unexpected hero of diplomacy Genghis Khan, was further codified in the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. As a result, diplomats cannot be tried for crimes in the countries in which they are serving, though they can be declared persona non grata (or PNG’d, in the shorthand). Hence the massive number of parking tickets incurred by embassies in London, with the US the serial offender. Under the Vienna Convention, ambassadors can also be ‘recalled for consultations’, usually a sign of a frost in relations rather than any ambassadorial misdemeanour. Expulsion of diplomats, often tit for tat, remains another straightforward way to let off a bit of diplomatic steam.
When Samuel Morse sent the first telegram on 24 May 1844, from Washington to Baltimore, the daughter of a friend chose the biblical message – ‘What hath God wrought?’ Not everyone in diplomacy was impressed by this more immediate form of communication. On receiving his first telegram in the 1860s, Palmerston is reported to have spluttered, ‘My God, this is the end of diplomacy.’8
Maybe not the end of diplomacy. But he was right that it was indeed the beginning of the end of nineteenth-century diplomacy. Statecraft in the second half of the twentieth century was transformed by the spread of the telephone. For the first time, it was possible for leaders to speak to each other directly and immediately, without the services of intermediaries and envoys. The Cuban missile crisis showed the power of this direct communication to stop wars. And to start them – in 2003, the Iraq War was the first to be planned by secure videoconference.
Many diplomats must have wondered if this infernal new instrument meant the end of their privileged role as carrier and keeper of the message, with the skills associated with delivering it in the most effective way – normally smooth delivery, a vat of soft soap and a head for alcohol. Why have a foreign ministry or diplomats in the field when leaders can talk to each other directly?
But diplomats need not have worried. Every time a new form of communication develops, espionage accelerates in order to monitor and disrupt it. The sophistication of electronic eavesdropping quickly made telephone calls extremely vulnerable. At a New Year party in the British embassy in 1960s Moscow, diplomats wondered aloud how the KGB was celebrating. A phone rang in the corner of the room. The diplomat who picked it up listened in bemused incredulity to the sound of a champagne cork popping and two glasses clinking before the line went dead. The KGB wanted to let the Brits know that they were celebrating too. Even eavesdroppers can let their guard down occasionally.
One of my jobs in Downing Street
was to listen to all of the prime minister’s telephone calls with his foreign counterparts, in order to produce an official record – the average such call has up to five declared people listening in on their mobile telephones via the Downing Street switchboard. I’ve listened to thousands of them, including at times in playgrounds, pubs, while cooking and on mountains. This mass participation, even muted, tends to act as a brake on candour.
Telephone diplomacy, like all diplomacy, inevitably gets mired in protocol. When calls between heads of state are set up by their advisers, it is harder to establish who called whom. I’ve been on numerous calls where one leader has slammed the phone down because he believes he is being kept waiting by his counterpart. Leaders rarely if ever ‘cold call’ their opposite numbers. In my four years in No. 10, we did it only once, during the financial crisis when Gordon Brown wanted to bounce Nicolas Sarkozy into a deal on ‘naked short-selling’. With no warning of the call, we could not arrange a decent translator, ensuring huge confusion when ‘naked short-selling’ was rendered into hesitant French as ‘short, nude sales’. Sarkozy was understandably perplexed.
Few leaders are good at establishing rapport on the telephone, making really effective communication ever harder. To get round this, some leaders have turned to videoconferences. In No. 10 we established secure video communications with US, French and German leaders, sometimes simultaneously. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown used to have long videoconferences with George W. Bush, with Vice President Dick Cheney ever present (normally looming large in the frame, and drinking Coke through a straw), but always silent. Like traditional diplomatic meetings, videoconferences tend to be heavily choreographed. US advisers gave us a very hard time when Gordon Brown chose to neglect the carefully constructed agenda and talk about what was actually on his mind (normally the world economy).
After the Second World War, women made a long-overdue appearance on the diplomatic stage. Lucile Atcherson was the first to join the US State Department, in 1922. But it was not until 1953 that Frances Willis became the first female US ambassador, in her case to Switzerland.
In the 1930s, one British ambassador in Berne had written that it was ‘unthinkable that diplomats should produce babies’, as inane an idea as it is biologically unsound.9 The ambassador in Bucharest, turning a blind eye to the prodigious quantities of alcohol consumed by male diplomats, wrote of the danger of women diplomats who would ‘breakfast on an ether cocktail and will abandon the chancery for the playing field’.10 But the many roles undertaken by British women during the Second World War broke down the traditional prejudices that had caused diplomats to question whether women could manage the role, and a small band of pioneering women started to break through in London too. In 1946, women were at last allowed to join the Diplomatic Service, with Cicely Mayhew the first. Having helped crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during the war, she was surprised to be patronised as ‘our new lamb’ by her colleagues. In 1972, the infamous Diplomatic Service Regulation Number 5, which made it necessary for women diplomats to resign if they married, was finally abolished.11 Anne Warburton became Britain’s first woman ambassador, to Denmark in 1976. Yet even in 1965, the Foreign Office could still give its diplomats guidelines on when women should leave the dinner table once the food was finished: ‘after an interval of not more than 20 minutes, as it is horrible if the interval goes on too long’.12
Outside the monarchy and swinging, there are few vocations where a spouse is still expected to be part of the package. Yet traditionally, the diplomatic partner has been exploited. In popular eyes, he – or still more often she – is a trailing spouse, offering tea parties and living a comfortable life. In reality, she – although increasingly he – is someone who has sacrificed their almost certainly more lucrative career to follow their partner. They tolerate their family home being a hotel, entertaining space and public place. They accept the professional obligation on the diplomat – EU employment law notwithstanding – to be on duty 24/7.
Until 1992, British foreign ministry spouses were even appraised for their ability to support their husband’s role. As well as offering advice on how to talk to ladies at dinner, R. G. Feltham’s Diplomatic Handbook, first published in 1970, suggested to new (naturally assumed to be male) diplomats that ‘Your wife should develop a pursuit, such as tennis, to give her a wider conversational reach beyond servants and the weather.’ Oh dear.13
More than the arrival of television itself, the advent of 24/7 news coverage disrupted the diplomat’s ability to shape the reporting of events for his or her capital. As former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband puts it, ‘Global, real-time news-gathering, distribution and analysis has rendered useless a lot of traditional diplomatic reporting. Foreign ministers can read the latest resignations, opinion polls and GDP figures in the media before diplomats can tell them.’14 Game-changing events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall could be watched in real time by leaders, rather than relying on the despatches from their representatives. Diplomats were no longer in the business of reportage.
Keeping the public vaguely informed about what they were doing has only really been an issue for diplomats over the last century. Not until after the First World War did the Colonial Office feel it necessary to establish an information service, with Winston Churchill – a man who knew something about connecting with the public – the first Secretary of State to take a keen interest. The Second World War dramatically accelerated this process, as the totalitarian states demonstrated the power of what we used to call propaganda, but now call public diplomacy. But in 1964 the parliamentary Ploden Report still fiercely criticised the UK Foreign Office’s information work for not being linked to the national interest.
After the Second World War, diplomacy was further reshaped by the increased ability of leaders and diplomats to meet in person. Roads were the arteries by which power and influence spread in the twentieth century, just as railways had been in the nineteenth century. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was the first great practitioner of a more direct, personal interaction between statesmen, heralding the age of ‘Concorde Diplomacy’.15 Planes were to accelerate diplomacy just as trains and automobiles had.
In advance of the 2009 G20 summit, I was part of the team that covered an exhausting three continents in three days with Gordon Brown, and was unfortunately pictured by the Financial Times asleep behind him at one meeting. Hillary Clinton visited 112 countries and ramped up almost a million miles of air travel in her term as Secretary of State. Barack Obama and David Cameron bonded during a flight on the president’s Marine Force One helicopter in July 2010 – we noticed that the Americans did not wear seat belts. The ability to cope with weeks in the air every year is highly prized. When I applied to be Private Secretary to Valerie Amos, then the minister for Africa, her first question was, ‘Do you dribble on flights?’
There is also a danger that diplomacy is reduced to a test of stamina. The fact that European leaders can meet relatively easily once a month should not be a reason for them to meet once a month. There is now a serious imbalance in European international engagement as a result, with too little time spent on the other four continents, and too much time squabbling over issues that should be settled at lower levels. In my experience, the more a European country needs baling out, the more likely it is that its diplomats travel in business class. During the aftermath of the 2008–9 financial crisis, I once took a flight with EU colleagues where only my German colleague and I were in economy.
Bleary-eyed leaders now often swap stories of how far they have travelled, normally over weekends and at night. Some have an advantage, having developed more sophisticated private planes in order to deliver some form of normality and to stay in touch. Others compete to ensure they have the biggest plane on the runway at international summits – the Italian former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the Russian president Vladimir Putin usually won that contest. We once had a race with President Sarkozy from Sharm el-Sheikh to Tel Aviv by plane in the
knowledge that there was only time for one leader to have a bilateral with Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister. We Brits got there first – despite (or maybe because of) the fact that we had a French aircrew.
In the game of competitive planes, though, the UK tended to lose. Fear of a media backlash prevented Tony Blair from purchasing a prime-ministerial plane – dubbed ‘Blair Force One’ by the press. As a result, until an aircraft was finally bought in 2015, we still spent significant time and money getting our leaders to summits in less comfort and style than any other country. The nadir for me was arriving at one summit with the prime minister on a plane that had been used by Led Zeppelin and the Dallas Cowboys. The plane had an orange on its side. We had wipe-down seats. The media had their story.
As a result of the ease with which leaders can travel, the pace of international diplomacy has quickened. Many diplomats assume that the answer to most global challenges is a conference. At a ‘three-shirter’ European Union budget discussion or climate change summit, I would often long for the days when Winston Churchill’s Private Secretary, Jock Colville, could write in his diary: ‘war declared, rode on Hampstead Heath for three hours’.16
All of this travel and immediacy did not, however, sound the death knell for diplomats. The modern periods of US/Soviet Union rivalry and US unipolarity relied as heavily on diplomacy as other eras. The weapons were more destructive, but the underlying rivalries and power plays would have been familiar to the early diplomats of the Italian city states. In many ways, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis resembled the stand-off between James I and the Spanish ambassador that I described earlier – great-power brinkmanship and muscle-flexing as power ebbed and flowed. Superpower summits such as Geneva in 1955 were the successors of the great-power conferences that established Europe’s Westphalian system, carefully balancing the powers of the new states in the seventeenth century.