Diplomacy still matters a lot – even in the age of disruption
In the wake of the WikiLeaks disclosure of 250,000 US embassy cables in 2010, many warned that this was “the end of diplomacy”. In an article for the Huffington Post, Carne Ross, a former British envoy to the United Nations, warned that “the presumption that governments can conduct their business in secret with one another, out of sight of the populations they represent, died this week”. After Donald Trump’s phone calls to the leaders of Mexico and Australia recently – in which he suggested invading America’s southern neighbour and reportedly put the phone down on prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – it is not surprising that some are once again calling time on diplomatic norms.
Nor are these the only instances. A few years ago, new assertiveness on the part of China’s leadership led to speculation about the end of “smile diplomacy”, while more recently the Malaysian prime minister Najib Tun Razak’s speaking out for the Rohingya was criticised by Myanmar’s government as being undiplomatic.
Some welcome straightforward talk – even Mr Trump’s bluntness – as representing an end to spin, arguing that greater transparency is what people around the world have been voting for.
Unexpected public candour on certain issues can sometimes be right. But any suggestions that we should rejoice in an end to diplomacy, or seek to hasten its demise in the name of openness and honesty, are severely mistaken.
To begin with, diplomacy is ingrained and remarkably durable. It has suffered disruptions before, such as the Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev banging his shoe on his desk at the UN General Assembly plenary in 1960, or Colonel Qaddafi’s declaring himself “the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims”, before storming out of a summit in 2009. But we remember such incidents precisely because they are exceptions to diplomatic norms that continued to persist; and indeed, were necessary to restore order after these outbursts.
They survive because they are essential. It is not just that courtesy, secrecy and deception are frequently necessary for governments to deal with each other in a way that should be obvious to all but those who wish to indulge in manufactured outrage. ( Just as happened when a former British minister, William Waldegrave, once said that it was occasionally necessary to lie to parliament and everyone pretended to be shocked.) Diplomacy keeps the world safer. It allows countries to save face, it allows for compromises that would not be politically acceptable if made public but which, kept private, may prevent war – or in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, the obliteration of mankind. That standoff was defused not because John Kennedy stared down Khrushchev, who eventually halted the delivery of Soviet nuclear missiles to the island and removed those already there. That may have been the popular perception. But the truth was that the dispute was only resolved after the US offered a deal that gave the Soviet Union something too – the withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. The move, however, could not be made public at the time as it would have been seen as an unacceptable act of appeasement. As Kennedy’s biographer, Chris Matthews, has written: “He did what was necessary, proffering a deal he knew he couldn’t sell to his fellow countrymen.” No one should doubt that Khrushchev was ready to press the button. So this “deceit”, if one wants to term it thus, saved humanity from nuclear war. And it could only have been perpetrated under diplomatic cover.
The “transparency” that socalled whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange say is their goal leaves no room for that vital gap between what governments, diplomats and intelligence agencies can disclose and what they in fact do or say. These warriors for the truth, as they like to see themselves, take it upon themselves to decide what is in the public interest. Their presumption is awesome; the danger and destruction they unleash is clearly beyond their comprehension. Going back to Mr Trump, the lack of a diplomatic filter in his dealings with foreign leaders may well endear him to his followers who are impressed that he is telling it straight, not hesitating before enunciating whatever thought pops into his head.
But even he is likely to learn the value of diplomacy before long – if he hasn’t already. His team, for instance, warmly welcomed Boris Johnson to Washington last month, despite the British foreign secretary having previously characterised Mr Trump as being of “quite stupefying ignorance” and “unfit for office”. Such convenient amnesia, at one end of the scale, to fullscale concealment from the public at the other, are the essence of diplomacy. Its continued health is of the utmost importance.
As Wolfgang Ischinger, a former German ambassador to Washington, wrote after the WikiLeaks revelations: “This is not just about the hurt egos of some political leaders negatively described in embassy cables. This is about war and peace, and it can be about life or death.”