by Tom Fletcher
Long studies were written in the past about the art of diplomacy, and the skills required of its practitioners. A kind of cult has emerged among diplomats, including between those of different nations. So the Congress of Vienna, that high point of conference diplomacy, is often depicted – rightly – as European elites making the compromises necessary to keep themselves and their class in office and power. As we have seen, the diplomats had more in common with each other than most of their compatriots. They very clearly saw their roles as to represent their monarch, not their citizens.
There have always been lots of diplomats who are not good at diplomacy. Harold Nicolson saw great danger in the professional detachment – ‘functional defects’ – developed by diplomats. He generously blamed this not on them but on exposure to the ‘human folly or egotism’ they tended to witness from politicians, and the ignorance of the general public they claimed to represent. He judged that as a result, diplomats ‘underestimate the profound emotion by which whole nations may be swayed’. A diplomat could become ‘denationalized, internationalized, and therefore dehydrated, an elegant, empty husk’.7 There are plenty of those empty husks working in international organisations today, and in some cases running them.
Ernest Satow, writing in the early twentieth century at the high point of the British empire, was less generous about politicians, describing most diplomats as ground down from being too often ‘compelled to contend for a bad cause’. Many diplomats had as a result concluded that the best they could manage through ‘prudence and love of peace is the postponement of the evil day’.8 A pretty sobering mission statement.
But in his massive guide to diplomacy, Satow also notes that although ‘telegraphic communication now enables a negotiator to remain in constant touch with his government’, the basic ingredients of statecraft – ‘national character and human nature’ – do not change. He identifies as the essential diplomatic attributes an open and serious spirit, small ego, sangfroid and equal humour, and the ability to remain calm under pressure. A diplomat must be ‘an honourable spy’, discreet and patient, neither too timid nor too ‘plein de feu’. He should know the customs and the history of his hosts inside out. He should be able to put himself in the place of his interlocutor. Satow deflates the egos of his contemporaries, and plenty of mine, by reminding us that ‘a diplomatist must be on his guard against the notion that his own post is the centre of international politics, and against an exaggerated estimate of the part assigned to him in the general scheme’.9
There is no doubt that detachment and tact matter. As Isaac Newton put it, ‘Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.’ It was always said that a diplomat should always think twice before saying nothing. But I’m increasingly sceptical about the idea of diplomats only as observers rather than picking the right arguments. As ever, Winston Churchill, whose negotiations with President Franklin Roosevelt to bring the US into the Second World War were a masterclass in the use of all the instruments of persuasion available, was tweetable: ‘Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.’10
So are the best diplomats actually also the best liars?
Machiavelli, who wrote the handbook on how to take, maintain and use power, would have said that they were. Metternich also saw deviousness as part of the diplomatic DNA, especially in his enemies. On hearing of the death of his diplomatic rival Talleyrand, he reportedly muttered, ‘Now I wonder what he meant by that.’ Palmerston seems to have agreed about diplomats being (in the Conservative minister and diarist Alan Clark’s infamous phrase) ‘economical with the actualité’, claiming that ‘I tell ambassadors the truth, because I know they won’t believe it.’11 Another nineteenth-century statesman, the Italian Count Cavour, also saw a lack of morality as essential to the process of statecraft, concluding that ‘if we did for ourselves what we do for our country, what rogues we should be’.12 In his case, it did no harm, allowing him to create Italy and become its first prime minister.
For US academic Charles Hill, who has looked at how literature influenced statesmanship, the most successful diplomats are indeed those prepared to break the rules, to dissemble in the service of their higher cause.13 Cavour, Cardinal Richelieu, Talleyrand and Oliver Cromwell were all amoral but effective. Legendary king of Ithaca Odysseus got his way by changing the messages he carried between Agamemnon (the king of Mycenae) and the warrior Achilles. Bohemian politician Albrecht von Wallenstein got the Treaty of Westphalia agreed by manipulating the facts against his own side. Maybe this is justified in pursuit of the greater good? As Tony Blair wrote of the Northern Ireland peace process, ‘it was sometimes necessary to bend the truth further than it should strictly have gone’.14 He may not have been popular for it, but he was right.
Sometimes I had to tell white lies for my country, as when one elderly Middle Eastern monarch asked what was written on the ‘nice placards’ being waved at him in London by the ‘friendly crowds’.
So was Sir Henry Wotton, a late-sixteenth-century English diplomat, right in his joking description of an ambassador as ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’? Only in part. Perhaps the best diplomats understand when to say nothing, or when not to say everything. No decent negotiator starts a negotiation by laying all his cards on the table. But honesty is in fact central to the work. Sir Leslie Fielding rightly says that ‘plain dealing is best. Deviousness always backfires. Charm not coercion; good manners, not ill; persuasion not deception.’15 Oliver Miles goes further in suggesting that ‘scrupulous regard for truth, not a quality always associated with diplomats’ is the key quality.16
The reality is that honesty has been and remains one of the most important qualities of a diplomat. In negotiations, you live or die on your reputation. The best negotiators recognise that trust is essential. Edward Murrow, the CBS journalist turned diplomat, counselled diplomats that ‘The really critical link in the international communications chain is the last three feet, best bridged by personal contact – one person talking to another.’17 Harold Nicolson agrees. ‘Good diplomacy is akin to sound banking, and depends on credit. Even if your opponent gains a trick or two by sharp practice, you should yourself abide by the rules of the game.’18
Greater transparency and oversight mean that you are now more likely than ever to be caught out if you are lying, or trying to have it both ways. In an ideal world a diplomat is actually an honest man or woman sent abroad to tell the truth about his or her country. As a former French ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, put it: ‘a diplomat is a person who can tell the truth to anyone in the government to which he is accredited without offending him, and to anyone in his own government at the risk of offending him’.19
Diplomats also need to lead. I represented the British prime minister at Senator Edward Kennedy’s funeral. I gave Sinn Fein leaders Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness a lift in my car. One of the speakers told us that John Kennedy had inspired America, Bobby Kennedy had challenged America, but it was Teddy Kennedy who had changed America. The best leaders must be able to do all three – set a compelling vision, engage people to deliver it, and then establish the structures and plans that help them to do so. Getting this right is not straightforward – most leaders with whom I have worked master two of the three. The best diplomats have to do better than that if they are to lead their teams effectively.
It is also striking the extent to which many modern autobiographies – most recently those by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and former US president George W. Bush – stress judgement, and the ability to take the big decisions, as the key to foreign policy. If we include leaders rather than purely diplomats, perhaps Nelson Mandela was therefore the greatest statesman of the twentieth century. He knew when to use strength and when to make concessions. His deployment of measured language was often supreme diplomacy. He knew when to lead from the front and when to lead from the back. He even knew when to put on his opponent’s jersey, l
iterally in the case of his personal backing for the South African rugby team, previously seen by many black South Africans as the epitome of white dominance. In his book on Mandela’s leadership, Richard Stengel also said that Mandela recognised the importance of looking the part, knowing your opponent and playing the long game.20 Good diplomats recognise that there is an element of theatre to what they do.
As well as needing to be accessible, flexible, culturally aware and able to improvise, diplomats also have to eat and drink for their countries. Diplomatic dinners and receptions remain an art form. At many official dinners, the placement determines who sits where, with feathers ruffled and snubs nurtured for years where necessary. Sir Christopher Meyer calls the effort to get this right ‘one of the most sublime arts of diplomacy’. Lord Carrington, when British High Commissioner in Australia, observed one diplomatic counterpart refuse to eat his food because of his irritation at his position at the table – ‘but only his first course, for he was extremely greedy’.21
Discussion at such dinners can be lively and meaningful, but it can at times also be more than usually stultifying. Diplomats are expected to soak this up, wearily. In R. G. Feltham’s guide to diplomacy given to my intake of Foreign Office diplomats, we were encouraged to ‘engage the lady on either side of you equally, regardless of their relative charm or vivacity’.22 I still think of this whenever there is an obvious gulf in vivacity between my dinner companions and the next course looms.
There is no doubt that food, and especially drink, makes it much easier to do business, as it does in the private sector. As the Marquis de Sade observed (though his objectives were rarely strictly diplomatic), ‘conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated’.23 The normally teetotal President Sarkozy gave a notoriously squiffy press conference after being repeatedly toasted with vodka by Putin. Stalin reportedly substituted his vodka for water in order to stay sober long enough to outwit his opponents. Churchill’s ability to work during and after imbibing enormous quantities of alcohol helped to forge the diplomatic alliances necessary to win the Second World War and create a new world order. No diplomatic handbook suggests that mild alcoholism is a prerequisite to effective statecraft, but perhaps a little of Churchill lives on in the Sun’s August 2014 claim that British diplomats spent a ‘scandalous’ £16,137 on cigars in the previous year – ‘Are you Havana laugh?’, the newspaper wondered.
Every diplomat has stories of eating weird and wonderful dishes at such dinners. According to Foreign Office folklore, the Queen gamely tucked into a bat in South America, and a variation of rat in the Pacific. Many of us in the Middle East have been given the dubious honour of eating the sheep’s eye when its head is served. I once confused a chef at a function in Africa by asking for a cappuccino. After great debate in the kitchen, and several anxious returns to the table, I was gingerly offered a much less satisfying cup of tuna, while the entire hotel staff gathered to watch. When governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten was at a banquet for the World Wildlife Fund mission to promote conservation at which he was perplexed to see bears’ paws served. I once persuaded Gordon Brown to try a Japanese meal, but the culinary experiment was aborted after he ate an entire bowl of wasabi in one go. Fondue with President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni was an adventure. Prime Minister Berlusconi would only serve dishes coloured in the red, white and green of the Italian flag. The ice cream and pasta were more palatable than the bread.
Once the placement is navigated, cutlery creates plenty of potential for awkwardness. Stalin used to think that Churchill had the place settings made especially complicated in order to gain a tactical advantage over him, a feeling probably shared by many guests at state banquets. We used to judge the Chinese reaction to our meetings not by the number of courses served at the subsequent dinner but by how easy or hard they made it for us to eat them all. After a particularly tough discussion on climate change, few of the British diplomats present succeeded in getting past the second course.
There is no reason to let all of that go. We all still need to eat. But this is a global race, and we can’t spend our time indulging in pointless triviality or seeing the dinner as more important than the dialogue it allows. As Chris Patten observes on diplomatic dinners, ‘I think there is a certain amount of tosh talked about this, principally by those who confuse foreign policy with being nice to foreigners.’24 Rightly, we do now need to show that every truffle has a tangible effect on national interests. Most do. But we also need to avoid getting trapped in functions that no longer generate influence or information.
Harold Nicolson in 1961 captured, deliciously, the traditional national day event – ‘these parties tend to degenerate into stagnant pools in which the same old carp circle round and round gazing at each other with lacklustre eyes’.25 I have been at plenty of those. Diplomatic receptions are of course not as glittering as the popular stereotype suggests. Some well-placed observers even characterise them as ‘cheap wine, plastic cups and sponsorship by easyJet’.26
Perhaps the best advice for diplomats in any era is in a letter written in 1813 by James Harris, the first Earl of Malmesbury – a former ambassador to Russia, Prussia and France – to Lord Camden, with advice for a nephew shortly to start a diplomatic career. The earl captures a long history of diplomatic apprenticeship in suggesting that ‘the best school will be the advantage he will derive from his own observations’. But he offers some sage words nonetheless:
The first and best advice I can give a young man on entering this career, is to listen, not to talk at least, not more than is necessary to induce others to talk. I have in the course of my life, by endeavouring to follow this method, drawn from my opponents much information, and concealed from them my own views, much more than by the employment of spies or money …
To be very cautious in any country, or at any court, of such as, on your first arrival, appear the most eager to make your acquaintance and communicate their ideas to you. I have ever found their professions insincere, and their intelligence false. They have been the first I have wished to shake off, whenever I have been so imprudent as to give them credit for sincerity. They are either persons who are not considered or respected in their own country, or are put about you to entrap and circumvent you as newly arrived …
Never to attempt to export English habits and manners, but to conform as far as possible to those of the country where you reside, to do this even in the most trivial things, to learn to speak their language, and never to sneer at what may strike you as singular and absurd. Nothing goes to conciliate so much, or to amalgamate you more cordially with its inhabitants, as this very easy sacrifice of your national prejudices to theirs …
Not to be carried away by any real or supposed distinctions from the sovereign at whose Court you reside, or to imagine, because he may say a few more commonplace sentences to you than to your colleagues, that he entertains a special personal predilection for you, or is more disposed to favour the views and interests of your Court than if he did not notice you at all. This is a species of royal stage-trick, often practised, and for which it is right to be prepared …
In ministerial conferences, to exert every effort of memory to carry away faithfully and correctly what you hear (what you say in them yourself you will not forget); and, in drawing your report, to be most careful it should be faithful and correct. I dwell the more on this (seemingly a useless hint) because it is a most seducing temptation, and one to which we often give way almost unconsciously, in order to give a better turn to a phrase, or to enhance our skill in negotiation; but we must remember we mislead and deceive our Government by it.27
These are points that should resonate with any modern diplomat too captivated by the sound of his or her voice, too beguiled by the flattery of diplomatic groupies, too condescending about the customs of their host country, too seduced by a few kind words from a leader, or too ready to sex up his or her reports.
From Malmesbury to Mandela, the most important diploma
tic skills can be distilled to tact, curiosity, courage and the ability to get on with anyone and eat anything. The rest is detail. Stripped of the diplomatic baggage, naked diplomacy must hold fast to those qualities. Yet it cannot be static, nor a rarefied and impenetrable cult. Instead it must constantly evolve, and draw from the best of the trades with which it increasingly finds itself in competition.
The history of diplomacy helps us understand what makes it such a vital profession, and the essentials of the craft. But this is not an academic exercise. Can diplomacy cope with the Digital Age, with disruption on an unprecedented scale, and with the opportunities and challenges that come with a hyper-connected world?
* The workload of a modern diplomat is often as heavy and as serious as this list suggests; but diplomacy doesn’t all need to be hard work. Part of my role in Downing Street included building in moments to watch the football, beat me at tennis or let off steam in other ways. President Sarkozy gave David Cameron a pair of excellent tennis racquets at their first meeting in Paris, which we put to good use after dinner, slipping and sliding barefoot in the dark on the embassy’s grass court.
PART TWO
Statecraft and Streetcraft: Power and Diplomacy in a Connected World
7
iDiplomacy: Devices, Disruption and Data
All cultural change is essentially technologically driven.
William Gibson
Writing in 1961, against a backdrop of social change and the spectre of nuclear war, Harold Nicolson saw that the fundamentals on which the international politics that he knew had been built were shaky. The rules of the game – an elite talking to fellow elites in Europe about how to carve up the rest of the world – were changing. ‘The old diplomacy was based on the creation of confidence, the acquisition of credit … the old currency has been withdrawn … we are now dealing in a new coinage.’1