by Tom Fletcher
Keith Hamilton and Richard Langhorne, The Practice of Diplomacy (1995)
Nico Henderson, Inside the Private Office (1987)
Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia (1999)
Geoffrey Jackson, Concorde Diplomacy: The Ambassador’s Role in the World Today (1981)
Maurice Keens-Soper, Abraham de Wicquefort and Diplomatic Theory (1997)
Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994)
Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (2015 edition; first published in 1955)
Harold Nicolson, On Diplomacy (1961)
Carne Ross, Independent Diplomat (2007)
Andreas Sandre, Twitter for Diplomats (online)
Ernest Satow, Guide to Diplomatic Practice (2009 edition; first published in 1917)
True Brits (book of the BBC series)
John Ure, Diplomatic Bag (1994)
For more on power, and the future:
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997)
Niall Fergusson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (2011)
Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013)
Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (2010)
Moisés Naím, The End of Power (2013)
Joseph Nye, The Future of Power (2011)
Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008)
Stephen Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (2011)
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000)
Alec Ross, Industries of the Future (2016)
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age (2013)
For more on tech:
Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008)
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2011)
Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto (2009)
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (2010)
Philippe Legraine, Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis (2010)
Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (2010)
Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995)
Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992)
Adam Thierer, The Case for Internet Optimism Part 1: Saving the Net From Its Detractors (2008)
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (2011)
Tim Wu, The Master Switch:The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2011)
Notes
Introduction to the Paperback Edition
1. See Epilogue.
2. Early in Obama’s presidency, the UK press obsessed about the removal of the Churchill bust from his office. The story was completely overblown – the bust had been loaned by Blair to Bush for the duration of his term. But it is a nice early example of post-truth politics.
3. David Cameron’s first G8 summit was in Muskoka (Canada). To show his political virility, he and I went swimming in a freezing lake, and I briefed the other delegations. When we got to the main meeting, his fellow leaders were all suitably impressed. Except Berlusconi, who stormed off in a strop, and came back with eight photos of himself in very tight swimming trunks, which he then handed out to the baffled leaders. I have never seen them all so perturbed.
4. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, 1919.
5. World Economic Forum Global Risk Report, 11 January 2017.
6. Save the Children, Report on Global Refugee Crisis, 14 September 2016.
7. See Chapter 18.
Preface
1. The then Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first leader I observed bringing an iPad into a G20 meeting, to great effect. David Cameron was the first to do so at a G8. Erdogan subsequently lost his tech credentials when he tried to ban Twitter.
2. The Economist, September 2012.
Introduction
1. New York Times, 21 January 2013.
2. See R. P. Barston and Hans Morgenthau on the academic debates on representation.
3. See 2014 Policy Exchange report on digital governance.
4. See the University of Pennsylvania’s 2014 Global Go-To Think Tank Index for the full league table.
5. See Robert Phillips, Trust Me, PR Is Dead (2015) for a similar critique of public relations.
6. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (2015 edition).
Chapter 1
1. For more on caveman diplomacy, see Finnish diplomat and anthropologist Ragnar Numelin’s work on the early evolution of diplomacy (1950).
2. I recommend Yuval Noah Harari’s 2015 TED Talk on what sets humans apart.
3. For more on this magnum opus, see Roger Boesche, The First Great Political Realist: Kautilya and his Arthashastra (2002).
4. Joshua Mark, Ancient History Encyclopedia (2009).
5. See James Montgomery, History of Yaballaha III (1927).
Chapter 2
1. Edward Dreyer, Zheng He, China and the Oceans of the Early Ming (2007).
2. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1997).
3. For more on the competition between East and West, see Ian Morris’s brilliant Why the West Rules – For Now (2010).
4. See Pierre Chaplais, English Diplomatic Practice in the Middle Ages (2003) for more on the intrigues and espionage of the court.
5. Wellington Society of Madrid, Wellington Anecdotes (2008).
Chapter 3
1. Harold Nicolson, On Diplomacy (1961).
2. David Brown, Palmerston: A Biography (2010).
3. Letter to Lord Gower, 2 October 1807, quoted in Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (2006).
4. James Mill, quoted in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume 4 (1990).
5. Ernest Satow, Guide to Diplomatic Practice (2009 edition).
6. Uncle Matthew, in Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love (1945).
7. F. S. Pepper (ed), Twentieth-Century Anecdotes (1990).
8. Robert Tucker and David Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (1990).
9. Independence Day speech, House of Representatives, 4 July 1821.
10. Quoted in John Ure, Diplomatic Bag (1994).
Chapter 4
1. F. P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (1986).
2. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, ‘War: Its Nature, Cause and Cure’ (1923).
3. US commentator Reinhold Neibuhr, April 1943.
4. See Cita Stelzer, Dinner with Churchill (2011), for more on how Churchill used culinary diplomacy.
5. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (1934).
6. Peter Preston, Guardian, 15 June 2014.
7. For more on this extraordinary event, see Ed Conway’s The Summit: The Biggest Battle of the Second World War (2014).
8. Wilson P. Dizzard, ‘Digital Diplomacy’, Center for Strategic and International Studies (2001).
9. Quoted in Alex Barker, ‘Britain’s First Female Diplomats’, Financial Times, 6 November 2009.
10. Ibid.
11. For more on women in diplomacy, see Helen McCarthy, ‘The Rise of the Female Diplomat’, Prospect, 20 October 2014.
12. FCO, ‘Guidance on the Do’s and Don’t’s of Etiquette and Other Relevant Matters’ (1965).
13. For more on diplomatic spouses, see Katie Hickman, Daughters of Britannia (1999)
14. Guardian, 5 February 2011.
15. See Geoffrey Jackson, Concorde Diplomacy: The Ambassador’s Role in the World Today (1981). Jackson was kidnapped for eight months in 1971 by Uruguayan guerillas. Maybe the diplomatic experience had not changed so much after all.
16. John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (1985).
17. Memoirs of the Prince de Talleyrand (1891).
18. Quoted in John Ure, Diplomatic Bag (1994).
19. Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013).
20. Chris Patten, What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (2008).
Chapter 5
1. Burson-Marsteller, July 2013.
2. New York Times, 4 February 2014.
3. Anne Marie Slaughter, former State Department Director of Policy Planning.
4. Jimmy Leach, ‘In the Digital Diplomacy Battle, the Upstarts Will Start to Win Out’, Huffington Post, 6 October 2014.
5. Oliver Miles, ‘Stop the blogging ambassadors’, Guardian, 12 July 2010.
6. Sir Leslie Fielding, ‘Is Diplomacy Dead?’, VIII Adforton Lecture, Oxford University, June 2010.
Chapter 6
1. Sir Leslie Fielding, ‘Is Diplomacy Dead?’, VIII Adforton Lecture, Oxford University, June 2010.
2. Harold Nicolson, On Diplomacy (1961).
3. Ibid.
4. BBC Radio, Desert Island Discs, 13 November 1968.
5. Sir Christopher Meyer, ‘The Secrets of my Success’, Daily Mail, 6 February 2010. The title of the article suggests that modesty was less important to the skill set.
6. Oliver Miles, ‘The job of an ambassador’, Guardian, 14 July 2010.
7. Nicolson, op. cit.
8. Ernest Satow, Guide to Diplomatic Practice (2009 edition). Satow’s book is still a good read.
9. Ibid.
10. Bloomsbury Anthology of Quotations (2002).
11. Quoted in John Ure, Diplomatic Bag (1994).
12. Quoted in Stephen Lee, Aspects of European History, 1789–1980 (2008). For more on Cavour’s effective but often unscrupulous diplomacy, see Edgar Holt, Risorgimento: The Making of Italy, 1815–1870 (1970).
13. Charles Hill, Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft and World Order (2010).
14. Tony Blair, A Journey (2010).
15. Fielding, ‘Is Diplomacy Dead?’, op. cit.
16. Miles, ‘The job of an ambassador’, op. cit.
17. Quoted in Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye (eds), Commission on Smart Power, Center for Strategic and International Studies (2007).
18. Nicolson, op. cit.
19. Quoted in George Egerton, Political Memoir: Essays on the Politics of Memory (1994).
20. Richard Stengel, Mandela’s Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage (2010).
21. BBC News Magazine, 10 October 2006.
22. R. G. Feltham, Diplomatic Handbook (1970).
23. Rosemarie Jarski (ed), Words from the Wise (2013).
24. BBC News Magazine, 10 October 2006.
25. Nicolson, op. cit.
26. Foreign Affairs Committee report, January 2014.
27. Quoted in Raymond Jones, The British Diplomatic Service, 1815–1914 (1983).
Chapter 7
1. Harold Nicolson, On Diplomacy (1961).
2. See Malcolm Gladwell’s brilliant description of co-creation during the Industrial Revolution in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005).
3. Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013).
4. Independent, 17 August 2010.
5. Office for National Statistics, 2013.
6. See Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind (2014).
7. Quoted in Martin Ford, The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future (2015).
8. Minqing Hu and Bing Liu, Mining Opinion Features in Customer Reviews (2004).
9. Kalev Leetaru, Culturomics 2.0 (2011). The term ‘culturomics’ and the form of analysis it refers to were pioneered by Harvard academics Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden in 2010.
10. McKinsey, ‘Big Data – The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity’, May 2011.
Chapter 8
1. For more on the heavy drinking, ferociously deceptive master traitor, I highly recommend Ben Macintyre’s riveting A Spy Among Friends (2014), given to me by an impressed Lebanese warlord.
2. CNN, 30 November 2010.
3. Guardian, 5 February 2011.
4. Michael V. Hayden, ‘The Future of Surveillance in a Post-Snowden World’, Huffington Post, 18 March 2014.
5. Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (2008).
6. Financial Times, 13 February 2014.
7. Financial Times, 3 November 2014.
8. Hayden, ‘The Future of Surveillance in a Post-Snowden World’, op. cit.
9. Sir David Omand, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller, #Intelligence, Demos, April 2012.
10. Guardian, 28 February 2014.
Chapter 9
1. Quoted in Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (1994).
2. Durham Global Security Institute.
3. Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye (eds), Commission on Smart Power, Center for Strategic and International Studies (2007).
4. IfG-Monocle Soft Power Index, www.instrumentfor government.org.uk.
5. Many of the quotes in this chapter are from the excellent 2013 House of Lords report on smart power, ‘Persuasion and Power in the Modern World’ (online).
6. Quoted in ibid.
7. Quoted in ibid.
8. Armitage and Nye (eds), Commission on Smart Power, op. cit.
9. See James Barr’s brilliant A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East (2011) for more on this controversial period. The grandson of Sykes, Christopher Simon Sykes, is also writing a book on this period.
10. Quoted in Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame (1990).
Chapter 10
1. Quoted in José Calvet de Magalhães, The Pure Concept of Diplomacy (1988).
2. Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2013).
3. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (2015 edition).
4. See the scene in the movie Love Actually (2003) when the British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, lays into his American counterpart.
5. Quoted in Richard Wigg, Churchill and Spain (2011).
6. Massolution report, 2013.
7. TED talk, 2013.
Chapter 11
1. See Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon, Cameron at 10 (2015) for the full account.
2. See Jonathan Powell, Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (2008) for a more detailed discussion.
3. For more of Jonathan Powell’s vital thoughts on audacious peacemaking, see his book Talking to Terrorists (2014).
4. John Ure, Diplomatic Bag (1994).
5. Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees (2013).
6. Gareth Evans, blogpost ‘Sorry Is The Hardest Word’ for Project Syndicate, 28 January 2014.
7. President F. D. Roosevelt is reported to have said in 1939 of Uruguayan dictator Anastasio Somoza, ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’, although there is no official record of this.
8. Interview, ‘The Work of Diplomacy – Conversation with Philip Habib’ (1982).
Chapter 14
1. Bob Zoellick, ‘The Currency of Power’, Foreign Policy Magazine, October 2012.
2. For more on theories of power, see Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (2010).
3. TED talk, January 2011.
4. Philippe Legraine, Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis (2010).
5. West Point speech, May 2014.
6. Daily Telegraph, 20 November 2003.
7. See the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index.
8. International Institute for Strategic Studies.
9. Quoted in 2013 House of Lords report on smart power, ‘Persuasion and Power in the Modern World’ (online).
10. Again see James Barr’s A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East (2011), on British and French perfidy in the region.
11. Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013).
12. New York Times, 29 December 2013.
13. Carl Benedickt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, ‘The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?’, Oxford Martin School working paper, September 2013.
14. Office for National Statistics.
Chapter 16
1. Ipsos M
ORI.
2. Fermi’s Paradox asked why, if there is such a high probability of alien life somewhere in the universe, on planets billions of years older than ours, have they not yet come to find us? Fermi, a physicist, wondered ‘where is everybody?’ It is a fair question. Maybe these other forms of life do not exist. Maybe the conditions for life are unique on earth, or life elsewhere is periodically destroyed by natural disasters. Or maybe it is because civilisations end up destroying themselves before they can develop sophisticated space travel – they get to a point where they overheat, where they cannot control the pace of their own development. In this theory the fact that we haven’t heard from older and more developed planets is because they wipe themselves out. Or maybe because they are all online, having lost the will to innovate and explore.
3. Niall Ferguson, ‘A World Without Power’, Foreign Policy Magazine, October 2009.
4. New York Times, 15 September 2014.
5. Speech to Parliament, 18 June 1940.
6. Martin Rees, Our Final Century (2003).
7. See Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), or Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget (2010).
8. See, for example, Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011).
9. Simon Head, on ‘Amazonia’, in Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014).
10. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992).
11. See Jonathan Franzen, How to be Alone (2002).
12. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992).
13. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (2011).
14. Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013).
15. Thomas Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume 1 (1849).
16. 2009–10 Human Security Report.
17. Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013).
18. Lecture to the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 20 November 1936.
19. See Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (1995) for some uber-optimism.
20. See Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Non-Violence and the Will of the People (2003).
21. Ray Kurzweil’s ‘Singularity’ is the concept that by 2045, computers will be able to host all minds in the world, merging carbon and silicon intelligence into a single consciousness. See his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2006).