Playing ball with swine
Having served as American ambassador for eight years, to the Central African Republic, Somalia and Zaire, which became the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the recent experience of Sir Kim Darroch, the outgoing British Ambassador to the United States, caused me some pain.
He had some of his embassy’s messages to London leaked to the British media, provoking U. S. President Donald J. Trump to attack him with tweets, thus leading to his resignation. This sequence of events had some resonance for me. Because some of the profession of diplomacy remains to a degree arcane, even secret, I saw some reason to write about what occurred, to try to make it clearer.
The fact of the matter is that the revealing of Mr. Darroch’s messages to London constituted a serious loss to all concerned, including the American and British publics. One of the primary tasks of any ambassador is to provide a candid view of the government and country to which he is accredited back to his own country’s leaders. This view is designed to provide them, based on the ambassador’s and his or her staff’s informed assessment
of events and people, as clear a view as possible upon which they can base their own decisions regarding relations between their nations.
A leak, such as what occurred with Mr. Darroch, will blow this capacity out of the water, particularly if the head of the government to which the ambassador is accredited is as thin- skinned as Mr. Trump ( although it is fair to say that most senior politicians are very sensitive to any criticism, particularly words like “inept” and “clumsy”).
It is also worth noting that a tendency to sympathize too heartily with the host government — what diplomats call “clientitis” — is an equally pernicious and unhelpful phenomenon. At worst, it becomes representing country “X” to Washington, rather than the reverse. At the very worst, the American ambassador, after retirement, enters into business arrangements with elements in the country he was accredited to and perhaps even moves there.
For what it is worth, as ambassador, I was consistently brutally candid in assessments I provided Washington and probably wouldn’t have survived in- country if its leaders had known how I described them to my government. In a few cases, exposure might have cost me my life. ( I knew that.)
It is also important in looking at the case of the British ambassador that in the U. S. Department of State, all messages from the embassy to the department are, in principle, signed by the ambassador, whether he or she wrote them or not. So Mr. Darroch thus may have been hanged for a goat, rather than a sheep,
All in all, the loss of the role of Mr. Darroch in America’s relationship with the United Kingdom was a major loss to both countries. He had been here since 2016 and was well connected within the American political menagerie.
The public hasn’t learned yet what genius spilled the beans to the British media. But it is a mark of the overall viciousness of politics in the United States and the United Kingdom that someone leaked the messages to the equally vicious British media. With a change in British prime ministers coming up, it could have been someone who wanted the ambassador’s job in Washington.
But the overall losers in this ghastly transaction are the American and British peoples. Until the perpetrator is identified, drawn and quartered, candor will be in short supply in the information about the United States and its prickly leaders available in London. This is unfortunate given the importance of the relationship between the two countries.
The American and British people pay for and provide the institutions, in the form of our Department of State and their Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to get first- class, confidential analysis of the two countries into the hands of their leaders. Anyone who messes with this vital function is a swine in my view. The media have to play ball, even with the swine, to perform their own function in the conduct of public affairs.