The Naked Diplomat

by Tom Fletcher

  You need to know your followers. Of mine, 25% want to know more about the life of an ambassador (what’s it like to have bodyguards? Do we really eat nothing but Ferrero Rocher?), 25% are UK political junkies, 25% are Lebanon political junkies, and the rest are a mixture of the informed, interested, eccentric, curious and hostile.

  But you can’t be defined by your followers. We need to reach out, without falling into the trap of courting popularity. We’re not comedians, journalists or politicians, and we should not pretend to be. A high number of followers is a good sign you’re getting through, but is not an end in itself.

  If someone else is writing your tweets, you’re not on Twitter. People need to see the human behind the handle. The best diplomacy is action not reportage, purpose not platitudes. So tweets should be about changing the world, not just describing how it looks.

  Quality still matters. Just because there is huge amounts of rubbish out there, this does not mean we should compromise. Just as diplomats fail when their report matters more to them than the action they’re reporting, we should guard against caring more about the pithiness of the tweet than the subject we’re tweeting.

  It is a jungle out there, and we have to get our brogues dirty. Every time I tweet about Palestine or Israel, I get vicious abuse from supporters of both sides, in pretty equal measure. We should listen, try to understand, but we won’t convince everyone.

  Lebanon’s going through a major struggle at the moment. Success here is not going backwards too fast. Success here is that Lebanon is still standing at the end of the Syria crisis, and I’d be delighted if that’s the case.

  What people love here is conspiracy. Over many years they’ve had this sense there’s a conspiracy against Lebanon: the international powers, the Brits and the French, the Saudis, the Iranians, we’re all arm-wrestling in Lebanon, dividing and ruling and so on, and the last two years that narrative has flipped, and they’ve now understood that actually there’s an international conspiracy for Lebanon, there’s a feeling that there’s some kind of international decision that Lebanon won’t collapse.

  Lebanon now has 1.2 million refugees, one in four people here is a refugee, it’s the equivalent of every Pole and every Romanian moving to Britain. With that comes an enormous humanitarian burden and the development guys have responded very fast to help Lebanon cope, working to get education to people, working to get shelter, food, medicine to people. We’re now providing all the textbooks in all the schools and we’re scaling up to get 200,000 kids into school next year. And imagine them in ten years’ time, you either imagine an army of teachers and doctors, journalists; or imagine what they’ll be like if they don’t get education. So we have a real national interest in getting those kids into school and it is a daily struggle.

  Lebanon has, for a very small country, an amazing number of TV stations and newspapers, so it’s actually an easier place to do media. It’s a relatively free media, and very vibrant, but it means that everywhere you go you have a lot of cameras and a lot of microphones. There’s a danger, if you have a slightly narcissistic personality already, that it gets to you, so you have to have a number of people around you to stop that. I have two sons who, whenever I get home, chant ‘boring ambassador’, because they see me on TV being dull, so that tends to moderate the ego a fair bit. I think everyone should have someone like that following them around saying ‘you’re rubbish’.

  I’ve learned a huge amount from this job. If I’m honest, I’m completely knackered. It’s been a demanding posting. If Lebanon falls then you have a huge humanitarian crisis, even closer to our doorstep than the one in Syria. It’s also a question of heart. If we can’t find a way to coexist here in Lebanon, based on tolerance and diversity, then we will actually lose that battle closer to home, so I see it very much as a front line for what is going to be the massive battle of the twenty-first century.

  That for me is the real reason why we have to engage here, why we have to get the books into the hands of the kids, get the right kit and training into the hands of the army, so they can win that battle. It’s also why we have to be on the side of the positive people here, those who are looking to coexist, against those who are looking to divide the country, that for me is a battle worth being in. Those are enemy lines I want to get behind. And we’re doing that.

  I’m very proud to wear the shirt, to represent my country here, and to lead a team doing the work we’re doing. I will leave with my head up, knowing that we were on the right side. When the rest of the region was in flames, when the barbarians were at the gates here, Lebanon held its corner, held the line. And we played a small part in that.

  * The State of Greater Lebanon had been declared in 1920, as part of the division of the Ottoman empire after the First World War.

  13

  Envoy 2025

  Let’s imagine the British ambassador in Stockholm in 2025.

  She is woken refreshed from a night in which her smartphone has measured her sleeping pattern to ensure maximum rest and assessed what nutrients she needs in her morning smoothie. As she has breakfast, her tablet projects onto the mirror, the wall, or her glasses a distilled stream of analysis and news, curated by experts to ensure that it focuses on her priorities. In the car on her way to work she has a video conference with her capital and neighbouring posts on the breaking news.

  She enters her embassy through a series of non-intrusive but effective security checks. The embassy building is at the cutting edge of sustainable, innovative design. The ground floor is an engagement zone, a pavilion full of space and light, designed by Britain’s best creative minds, not by civil servants. All services are online, with customers who want to access them in the building also able to explore virtual reality tours of the UK. Students are accessing language materials, online and in the library, and a class is meeting for its monthly discussion group.

  Other customers are learning about cultural events or watching British films in the cinema space. People are making connections to British friends and strangers through hundreds of iPads with bespoke apps. Some are making business deals through a portal that uses online dating technology to link them to UK networks. Students are taking virtual tours of UK campuses, and sitting in on sample lectures.

  A café serves organic British products, and some non-organic fish and chips. Interior walls feature a constantly changing virtual gallery of contemporary UK artwork. Kids are having photos taken with interactive models of British heroes, with Prince George the most popular.

  This is not a space that people come to as a chore, but a place to which they choose to come. It projects the UK as fresh, innovative and creative. It channels the same spirit that lifted the London 2012 Olympics. This is an energising environment – there is a sense of possibility in the air.

  Our envoy chairs a meeting with her key staff, most joining via their smartphones. All have tablets on which they can add to the meeting record, displayed on a virtual whiteboard.

  She spends an hour online, engaging members of the public and helping visiting Brits understand where to get help. She joins a digital démarche on human rights, quickly backed by a million people, and picks a lively but respectful online argument with her Russian colleague, with thousands joining the debate on both sides of the argument.

  She hosts a virtual coffee on climate change with civil-society activists from all over the globe, live-streamed. She uploads to the embassy website a digital clip of her response to the new Swedish energy policy, which is simultaneously translated. Having received intelligence on a possible terrorist attack, she checks the number of Brits in country, all registered through the embassy’s visitor app, and where they are, just in case she needs to mobilise a rapid crisis response. She sends those in the capital a message reminding them to be vigilant.

  At a public event on the UK’s plans for reform of the UN, live-streamed and with a social media wall for interaction with what was once called an audience, she is pleased to see that most in the room are pla
ying with their phones, a good sign that they are engaging and interacting. Struck by a comment from a participant in Texas, she downloads a paper written ten years earlier by a colleague in Finland and shares key elements with other participants as she speaks.

  She hosts a video call between a local private sector group, a UK investor and one of her predecessors with particularly good business sense – in a networked world she needs to leverage every influence possible, and is not protective of her control of the UK brand.

  She looks forward to a more traditional encounter, lunch with the Swedish foreign minister. As is now standard etiquette, there will be no smartphones on the table – not just because half the world could listen in, but because it is just rude.

  It used to be said that the best diplomats are either boffin, boy scout or assassin. No longer. The 2020 envoy is a lobbyist, leader, communicator, pioneer, entrepreneur, activist, campaigner, advocate. She has learnt from the best in those fields, and has worked in several of them. She does crossover. She competes for space, attention, relevance and influence. She builds game-changing coalitions and alliances across business, civil society, borders.

  She uses information rather than managing it. She understands that diplomacy is not some kind of secret art form, concealed by jargon and titles. She does not hide behind diplomatic platitudes. She bases herself less on structures and institutions than on networks. She unleashes the younger (and older) members of her team to reach the parts she cannot. She spends little time in international conferences. Instead, she finds out where people are, and goes there.

  She doesn’t see the embassy as a building, but as an idea. Hers is the hub for the national brand and UK companies she promotes unashamedly. Her appraisals include an assessment of her digital clout. She gives her Foreign Secretary added value through influence and analysis, not just reportage. She prioritises outcomes over relationships. She takes risks. She does not believe that diplomacy is a job for life.

  I think she sounds authentic, flexible, connected, influential and above all purposeful.

  And we need her to be, if we are going to survive what the Digital Century is about to throw at us.

  PART THREE

  What Next?

  14

  Who Runs the Digital Century?

  International systems live precariously. Every ‘world order’ expresses an aspiration to permanence; the very term has a ring of eternity to it. Yet the elements which comprise it are in constant flux: indeed, with each century, the duration of international systems has been shrinking.

  Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994)

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  No thing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ozymandias’ (1818)

  During my time in Lebanon, I sometimes needed to escape the tempo of Beirut, the intensity of the Syria crisis, the security bubble, and the constant connectivity of social life and social media. My hideaway was the magnificent fort of Byblos, one of the oldest continually inhabited towns in the world. Legend has it that the Phoenician Princess Europa was abducted by Zeus (disguised as a bull) from here – reminding us that Europeans were kidnapping and people-trafficking as well as the people of the Middle East.

  From Byblos, people have watched the fleets come and go for centuries. You can stand among the debris of nineteen civilisations. Each of those empires thought themselves invincible or permanent. Each believed that they had something different, special, unique.

  The castle was consistently reduced to rubble, like the civilisations.

  Byblos is no place for hubris. I stood there whenever I thought I had the world worked out.

  We know from history that the desire to gain and use power is hardwired into humanity. Empires, civilisations, families and individuals have risen up not just to run their own regions, but to conquer and rule those of others. We also know from history that they fall, normally when they become overstretched, lazy or corroded from within, when demagogues run amok, when they start to see the world as a source of anxiety not opportunity, or when hungrier power rivals emerge. A world where one country dominates cannot last long. Challengers always rise up to snap at the heels of the top dog of the age. Power ebbs and flows. Empires often collapse rapidly – look at the Mings in the seventeenth century, the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, or the British and Russian empires in the twentieth century.

  The tectonics of global power are still in flux. ‘Power’, says former World Bank president Bob Zoellick, ‘is easier to get, harder to use, and easier to lose.’1 From Beirut to Bangalore, and from Birmingham UK to Birmingham, Alabama, we are feeling not only the tremors of changes in the geopolitical power balance, but also more fundamental power shifts, away from traditional authorities and hierarchies and towards greater empowerment of individuals.

  Traditionally, power is measured by historians and diplomats in terms of territory, war and statecraft. This is usually a zero-sum game: power is a pie to be sliced up. China’s rise, Europe’s decline. Power can be won or lost by good or bad decisions or political systems, by military might or weakness. It is raw power by Machiavelli, Stalin’s tanks, a never-ending struggle in which great states and great men – almost always men – compete constantly with blood and treasure for influence, land and markets.

  It is naturally easier for diplomats to understand the world in terms of this great power narrative. We are used to it. The big questions in international affairs since the birth of modern diplomacy in the fifteenth century have been about how states relate to each other. Diplomats found and expanded a natural niche in that system. It also reinforces our roles – we send ambassadors to Paris and Beijing, not to Google and Apple (though a high number of former ambassadors seem to find their way onto the boards of defence companies). Perhaps most important, it is a comforting way of understanding the world – because for diplomats to accept a decline in states also means accepting a decline in statecraft.

  Yet foreign ministries have long ceased to be able to monopolise their government’s interface with the world, let alone their country’s.

  An alternative idea, often promoted by geographers and anthropologists, is that power is about maps not chaps.2 As early as the fifth century BC, Greek historian Herodotus could show that ‘soft countries breed soft men’. In this narrative, civilisations rise and fall not because of mighty battles and inspirational leaders, but because of the advantages and disadvantages of geography, and their proximity to the energy source of the era. So, for example, with the thaw at the end of the Ice Age, European soil became better suited to the domestication of plants and animals. And the Brits had the advantage from the seventeenth century, because they unlocked fossil-fuel energy. Great men might slow down or speed up these changes, but they are at the mercy of longer-term trends that they cannot comprehend at the time.

  In either matrix for analysing power, we cannot be in any doubt that it is changing, fast.

  We are living through four major trends: the erosion of US hegemony and a shift to a period without a lead nation; the collapse, perhaps rapid, of the twentieth-century world order; the increased influence of non-state actors and new elites; and the technological empowerment of individuals. I’ll look in more detail at each of these.

  Who is winning wha
t David Cameron has characterised as ‘the global race’, the competition between states for economic and therefore military ascendancy? As the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reportedly responded to Henry Kissinger when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, it is too soon to say.

  The current American – and by extension Western – dominance is unlikely to be the exception to the ebb and flow of empires, but that is not to say that it will disappear as fast as many claim. US academic Francis Fukuyama famously asked in an essay in 1989 if we had reached ‘The End of History?’ He saw the great ideological battles between East and West as settled – Western liberal democracy had triumphed, and could not be bettered. Game over. It was not that events would stop happening, nor that there would be areas that held out against Pax Americana. But mankind would reach the end of our ideological evolution.

  This seductive claim now looks harder to stack up. Many economists anticipate that the East will have the upper hand by the second half of this century. British academic Martin Jacques predicts with beguiling precision that the East will overtake the West in 2103.3

  China and other dynamo emerging economies certainly have the wind in their sails. In the decade from 2003–13, China has gone from zero billionaires to over 300. It exports every eight hours what it used to in a single year (1978).4 The Chinese economy was one-third the size of the US economy a decade ago, but will overtake the US by 2020. It has twice the number of Internet users as the US. The average American is earning ten times as much as the average Chinese, but China is lending the West money to buy its goods.

  So what of the superpower? In 2013, the US had faster economic growth than the global average for the first time since the financial crisis. But it is becoming increasingly dependent on foreign capital; has had its military strength challenged and drained in Afghanistan and Iraq; and internally is increasingly politically polarised. Little wonder then that President Obama has sought to present a less expansionist military creed than his predecessor – ‘just because we have the biggest hammer doesn’t mean that every problem is a nail’.5