5 March 2017
So Boris Johnson, Britain’s diplomatically inept, part-time foreign secretary (his other job is entertainment) is going to Moscow for talks with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Read more.
5 March 2017
UN-led prenegotiations for a settlement of the Syrian civil war tragically seem once more to be going nowhere. Read more.
10 February 2017
While studying documents on the ‘treaty of friendship’ signed between the State Department and the CIA in 1977, I came across a particularly interesting memo. Read more.
31 January 2017
Radical changes of government have in the past often led to tension between the new regime and at least some of the state’s diplomatic servants at foreign posts, Read more.
18 January 2017
CIA documents already released have now been made accessible online via CREST (CIA Records Search Tool). Read more.
12 January 2017
Published by BuzzFeed here, if this is fake news it was drafted by a master forger. Read more.
9 January 2017
‘Who would want to be a diplomat now? Civil servants are judged as though they are reality TV contestants, while reality TV stars have inherited the Earth.’ So writes one of the Guardian’s sharpest columnists, Read more.
(Beaufort Books: New York, 2016), p. 376, incl. index. ISBN 9780825308253
This book tells the story of the vital role played by the US Embassy in Monrovia in helping to mediate an end to the brutal, 14-year civil war in Liberia in 2003. Its successful diplomacy was assisted by a popular yearning for peace, the absence of significant anti-Americanism in the country, the reputation of the United States for vigorous military intervention in support of its foreign policy (soon assisted in this theatre by a naval task force loitering off the coast), the backing of influential friends (among them the Nigerians), and the leadership of an able and determined ambassador, John Blaney. Nevertheless, the circumstances in which the embassy had to act were extremely dangerous, and Washington more than once encouraged the ambassador to shut up shop and evacuate – which meant that he would have been charged with bad judgment should things have gone wrong. However, the story as told by the mission’s political officer at the time, Dante Paradiso, of how Blaney took this risk and pulled off his remarkable achievement, is an example of a genre much more common in film than in book form: the docudrama. The first question that has to be asked, therefore, is: Does he pull it off?
As a rule, the docudrama provides an account of historical events with little if any direct reference to documentary sources. In such treatments, dialogue presented as if it actually took place is given prominence; the eye is invited to linger on physical features of the backdrop such as storms, riots, striking landscapes, and corpse-littered streets; and ‘human interest’ is stimulated by digressions into the private lives of the individuals conspicuous in the action. Paradiso’s book has all of these features in abundance (in a note in the prelims he frankly admits that ‘in reconstructing the thoughts, dialogue, and experiences of the actors, spoken language and descriptions have been shaped for clarity and narrative cohesion’). And some of this works very well indeed: for example, the biographical detail on and individual actions of Jenkins Vangehn, the locally engaged political assistant; and the vivid descriptions of the detritus of war on the streets. As well as an acute political mind, the author has great sympathy for his subjects, an eye for detail and a fluent style.
On the other hand, I felt that the book was too long and – as a docudrama – lacked pace, sometimes because slipping into purple prose when a more terse delivery would have served better; for example, ‘The shelling of the American embassy made news back home. In Crawford, Texas, at the dry, dusty ranch where the hot winds carried the smells of sagebrush and cow dung and where the leader of the free world spent his vacations, and sometimes hosted distinguished guests, President Bush …’ (p. 205). As for what in reality were clearly the nerve-jangling highpoints of the story – the ambassador’s courageous forays into rebel territory to meet the truculent, unpredictable General Cobra – in the book these just do not stand out. It does not help that the 47 chapters are far too short, and that the prelims lack a contents list. The seven ‘parts’ – The First Attack, Pressure, The Second Attack, The Hast, The Third Attack, Frontline Diplomacy, History on the Bridge – should have been the chapters and the chapters their sections. In short, the packaging of the book leaves a lot to be desired. Furthermore, precisely because it remains essentially a docudrama, historians will be uneasy with it, as they were with H. C. Armstrong’s similarly constructed biography of Atatürk, Grey Wolf (1932); while students of diplomatic method will find that the baggage of this genre just gets in the way.
But the book has redeeming features other than those I mentioned earlier. To begin with, Dante Paradiso was himself one of the important players in this drama, even though he appears in the book not by name but, with unfashionable modesty, simply as ‘the political officer’; so the book is also part memoir – a more familiar genre and valuable primary source in writing about diplomacy. In addition, he shows that he has taken great trouble with his oral history, for at the end of the book he provides ‘notes’ for each chapter that list the interviews on which they chiefly draw. For these reasons, The Embassy provides authoritative insights into just how a diplomatic mission can support a mediation, and subsequently a peacekeeping operation, in the most adverse conditions. His clear account of the ambassador’s rationale for staying the course is particularly interesting (p. 55ff, and Chapter 15). Despite my reservations, therefore, I regard this as a serious book, and a suitable accolade for John Blaney’s embassy – predictably, the ambassador got little enough attention elsewhere when he returned home.
Post Script 1 May 2017: This book has just been named a national gold medalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards. See also this excellent talk by the author to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.
9 November 2016
There is sometimes a silver lining to the darkest of clouds, and a case in point in connection with Donald Trump’s election victory might well be the injection of a virus into that sometimes useful but now out-of-control mode of diplomacy, summitry. Read more.
(Hart: Oxford and Portland, Oregon, 2016), 493pp. incl. index. ISBN 9781849464369 (hb), ISBN 9781509902781 (Epub).
Q: ‘Why will there never be a coup d’état in Washington? A: Because there’s no American Embassy there.’ This old joke serves to highlight the belief – entrenched deeply in poor, weak states – that diplomatic missions too often meddle in the ‘internal’ or ‘domestic’ affairs of the countries in which they are located, sometimes with dramatic consequences. It is a view that was held in the years following the Second World War by the former Yugoslavia, then struggling to extricate itself from the Soviet orbit, and prompted it to press successfully for the codification of diplomatic law. Emerging in the shape of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) signed in 1961, this duly gave prominence to the duty of those enjoying diplomatic privileges and immunities not to interfere in the internal affairs of the state in which they were posted (Art.41.1). But later developments, particularly the strengthening of human rights law, has caused controversy over this subject to increase rather than diminish, and this is the first reason why the appearance of this book by Paul Behrens, a Lecturer in Law at the University of Edinburgh, is so valuable. The other reasons are that the law remains vague on the question, that this is the first attempt to give it serious and comprehensive attention, and that the book is very good indeed.
The author believes that international lawyers have hitherto been disposed to give too much weight to the rule of non-interference, which obviously favours receiving states, and either overlook or unduly minimise the legal arguments that in some circumstances entitle and even oblige those benefiting from diplomatic privileges and immunities to meddle in the ‘internal affairs’ of their hosts. By examining the evolution of customary law on the subject, which he maintains is indispensable since conventional law on it is more or less useless, it is his aim to provide a set of practical ‘guidelines’ for lawful diplomatic interference. The contents list of his work, which can be seen on the publisher’s website here, shows at a glance how he has gone about his difficult task.
Behrens takes a broad view of ‘internal affairs’ (on the definition of which the VCDR is silent); in other words, he adopts a view indulgent to receiving states because it includes the formulation by governments of their foreign as well as their domestic policies. Nevertheless, he also insists that international law entitles diplomats to interfere in the domestic processes by means of which these policies are arrived at, not least on the basis of the list of functions given to them by the VCDR itself. Most important among these, he maintains, are the protection of the sending state’s interests in general and of its nationals in particular, observation and reporting, and the promotion of friendly relations with all of the citizens of receiving states. As for the more controversial question of the entitlement to interference on the basis of human rights law, he points out that – quite apart from the erga omnes obligations by which states are bound – the VCDR’s list of diplomatic functions is admittedly not exhaustive and that, in any case, diplomatic interference to protect human rights is readily embraced by traditional functions, especially observation and political reporting, and protection of the sending state’s interests (large scale human rights abuses can have serious impacts on neighbouring states in particular, especially if fighting induced by such abuses spills outwards, they are inundated with refugees, and the regional economy suffers); it is useful to be reminded that a few states appoint ‘human rights attachés’ to some of their embassies. When the ‘restrictive’ (on diplomats) rule of non-interference meets ‘permissive’ (for diplomats) rules such as these, the author favours conciliatory rather than confrontational methods to resolve them; in crude summary, he argues that conflicts of this sort are best managed when diplomats interfere in the manner least likely to provoke their hosts – always provided it is as efficient as any other realistic method. This theme is elaborated at some length in Part II of the book: ‘Fields of Diplomatic Interference’ (better understood, I think, at least for the non-lawyer, as ‘forms’ of interference).
I have just a few reservations of substance about this generally splendid work, and one of a more technical character.
The latter, which I shall take first, concerns the ‘Timeline of Diplomatic Interference’ in Annex A, a sort of calendar (Oxford English Dictionary, sense 4e) of instances of diplomatic interference from April 1961, when the VCDR was signed, until April 2014, the half centenary of its entry into force. Stretching to a full 110 pages, this contains the bedrock of evidence on which the author bases his argument for the evolution of customary law. Its contents are thus of immense importance and set the book apart from the more superficial treatments of its subject that tend to be the norm. But was the inclusion in the publication of what is in effect a working paper of such length really necessary? Having compiled this calendar and had it always at his elbow, could not the author have referred readers to the key sources via footnotes at first mention of the cases? As it is, including this Annex must have put up the price of the book considerably (although it is still well below that of many law books), thereby helping to put it beyond the reach of those many diplomats from poorer countries who would benefit greatly from reading it. But never mind! Including the full list shows the author’s (unfashionable) honesty and makes his argument more readily testable. Furthermore, in any future paperback edition, which I hope very much will appear, the Annex can safely be deleted because reference can be made to the appropriate pages in the hardback. By way of a footnote to this point, however, it is a pity that – in view of the importance of the Annex – and despite the authority it provides by the very large number (300) of well documented cases it contains, the author fails to include a reminder in its short preamble of why an exhaustive list (which would in any case be an impossibility) is not necessary. For this, the reader needs to go back to pages 19-23 of the Introduction, where the (surmountable) problems involved in establishing the ‘generality’ of practice and legal opinion required of customary law are clearly and authoritatively discussed. Having said this, I was a little surprised to find no cases listed concerning South Africa until 1987, although after the Sharpeville shootings in March 1960 apartheid became for many years probably the cause célèbre of diplomatic interference.
As to reservations of substance, all of which are relatively minor, I note merely two. First, I think it seriously over-optimistic for the author, when introducing his ‘guidelines’ at the end of the book, to state baldly that the demands of the (sophisticated) legal framework he has advanced will not ‘pose insurmountable challenges to Foreign Ministries, who can rely on the knowledge of the resident experts in their legal departments’ (p. 267). Unfortunately, I think it probably true that most foreign ministries don’t even have legal departments, let alone ones with any great expertise; this is the conclusion at which I arrived in researching and revising the chapter on the foreign ministry in my textbook. Second, I think the argument that diplomatic interference is sometimes justified by lawful allowance for the promotion of ‘friendly relations’ between states as well as their governments would have benefited from discussion of the key concept here. True to character, the VCDR also fails to define ‘friendly relations’, and in this regard the author follows suit. However, in the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Diplomacy we took the view that its first sense is ‘normal’ or civilized relations and only its second sense the ‘warm’ relations signified by friendship among humans. In short, it’s easier to justify to a receiving state diplomatic contacts with its opposition groups if this is done in terms of friendly relations sense (1) rather than sense (2).
But these are very minor quibbles. In the round, this book displays great learning, immense research, clear-sighted judgment, and – more than once – an attractive turn of phrase. All students of diplomacy are greatly in the author’s debt, and the guidelines he provides for practitioners at the end are carefully worked and succinctly expressed. A paperback edition soon, please!
A 20 per cent discount on this book is available here by quoting ref: CV7.
29 June 2016
The best known short work on diplomacy is still probably Harold Nicolson’s, Diplomacy. Read more.
(Bloomsbury: London, 2015). 652 pp. incl. index. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4088-2792-5 TPB: 978-1-4088-2793-2 ePub: 978-1-4088-4944-6[ buy this book ]
I thought to review this book because I had enjoyed the spy novels of John le Carré and, having introduced a chapter on secret intelligence into the latest edition of my textbook and mentioned him in it (p. 155), was keen to see if Adam Sisman had turned up anything new about the novelist’s own short career as an intelligence officer in what was then West Germany. In the event, this was the only disappointment of The Biography because it was the one subject on which le Carré – whose real name is David Cornwell – refused to speak to the author. (It looks as if we shall have to wait a long time for this particular story, which will no doubt be mentioned in the still secret post-1945 official history of the Secret Intelligence Service said to have been written by Gordon Philo, aka ‘Charles Forsyte’ – see in the section headed ‘Novels by former Diplomats and Intelligence Officers’ on this page.) Having said that, what Sisman does tell us is that, having initially been thought disloyal by SIS for depicting his former colleagues as ‘unscrupulous or, worse, incompetent’ in the novel that made his name – The Spy who Came in from the Cold (1963) – by the 1990s, if not before, le Carré was once more persona grata at SIS headquarters in London. This was chiefly because of his portrayal of George Smiley, the central figure and successful mole-hunter in later novels. ‘Taken as a whole,’ writes Sisman, ‘David’s oeuvre had portrayed British intelligence as highly effective in the Cold War – arguably, as much more effective than it had been in reality.’ In short, SIS had come to like le Carré because he improved their reputation, both at home and abroad (pp.520-1).
Despite telling us nothing new about the subject’s own career as an intelligence officer, in every other regard this lucid, exhaustively researched, and admirably even-handed biography will be read with great enjoyment by all le Carré fans. There is much fascinating – even shocking – detail on the subject’s early life, particularly his relationship with his father Ronnie, an adept and outrageous swindler who even sought to blackmail his own son. The treatment of le Carré’s dealings with his various publishers as his novels began regularly to hit the number one spot on the US bestseller list is also instructive. For those who have occasionally struggled with the plot-line of some of the spy novels, have difficulty in placing the characters in his cast lists, or would be interested to know which features of persons in le Carré’s own life shaped these fictional individuals, Sisman’s detailed accounts of each novel and how they were written will prove absorbing. It is also most interesting – and a mark of the biographer’s detachment – to give space to criticism as well as praise for the novels, especially the later, polemical ones; for example, Hilary Mantel’s savaging of The Constant Gardener in the New York Review of Books. Other critics given a respectful hearing include John Updike and the always incisive and entertaining British-based Australian, Clive James.
I was also impressed by the attention that Sisman gives to le Carré’s method of writing and research. It might well be presumptuous of me to say so, but I think that any teacher of what it is now fashionable in higher education to call ‘creative writing’ could do far worse than put this book high on their reading list. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the lengthy Index – almost entirely just a proper name index – was not drawn up with The Biography’s value in this regard also in mind. There is no guide in it to pages (350-3, for example) dealing with ‘plot development’, ‘character collection’, and so on. I think that Sisman has missed a trick here.
As I have already indicated, although it bears repeating, Sisman’s book is by no stretch of the imagination a hagiography. Le Carré, he at least strongly hints, sometimes cannot tell the facts of his life from his own fiction, and occasionally writes so obscurely that even someone as close to his mind as his own biographer cannot understand him. Neither does he shrink from describing what seems to be the rather ruthless treatment meted out by his subject to publishers and agents who had served him loyally for many years but eventually been found wanting in energy or imagination; nor from recording le Carré’s inability, now and then, to resist the temptation to engage in venomous public exchanges with fellow writers such as Salman Rushdie – one of the last chapters is headed ‘Mr Angry’. In any case, who is perfect? These failings – if such they are – pale in comparison with Le Carré’s skills and industry as a novelist, his later acts of charity, and his willingness to court critical attack by using his more recent books as vehicles for attacking the corporatism of our age, not least – in this case with some success (p. 536) – in the shape of the not altogether benign influence of the global pharmaceutical industry. To these outstanding merits The Biography does full justice; it is a work worthy of its subject.
25 March 2016
The judgment of Mr Justice Hayden on 8 February 2016 in Estrada v. Jufalli would have established a dangerous precedent if upheld. Read more.
12 January 2016
On 2 January there were well-publicised attacks on Saudi missions in Iran by mobs angered by the execution of the important Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Read more.
(The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2014), 524pp. incl. index. ISBN 978-I-4696-1763-3 (cloth); ISBN 978-I-4696-1764-0 (ebook)
This book went to press after the much-publicised handshake between US president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro at the memorial service for Nelson Mandela in December 2013 – but before their historic, simultaneous announcements a year later, assisted by a prisoner exchange and the good offices of the Vatican, that they were resolved to end their 50 years of estrangement and normalise relations. In one way, it was cruel luck for the authors because this is what they had convincingly argued for, and – missing the denouement – their book ends on a note of disappointment with President Obama. But in another way it was a stroke of good fortune because the eye-catching announcements of December 2014 threw a sharp spotlight on Cuban-American relations and made their work essential reading. So authoritative and persuasive is it, moreover, that it is hard to rule out the possibility that in a small way it contributed to this development.
The authors have excellent credentials: William M. LeoGrande is a long-established academic authority on Cuba, while Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, where he is the director of its Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that their book is exhaustively researched and carefully documented. Its structure is remorselessly narrative, with each chapter – beginning with Eisenhower – turning on relations with Cuba during individual US presidencies, except that those of ‘Nixon and Ford’ and ‘Reagan and [George H. W.] Bush’ are grouped together. This plan, it is true, leads to a considerable amount of repetition on the subject of US gambits towards Cuba and the responses to them of the Castro brothers, most of which seem to have varied only by degrees from one administration to the next, but it is a small price to pay for the way the detail stiffens the argument. What is it?
US policy towards Communist Cuba was designed during the Cold War to bring to an end Havana’s alignment with the Soviet Union and support for revolution in Latin America, and thereafter – during the ‘War on Terror’ – simply to get rid of its ‘terrorist’-listed government. What LeoGrande and Kornbluh particularly take issue with, however, are the methods employed in pursuit of this policy: economic embargo, subversion (aka ‘democracy promotion’), an escalating propaganda assault, and diplomatic duplicity. Sustained only by ideologues in successive administrations and fear of the powerful Cuban-American community (with its control of key votes in Florida), these methods were always likely to founder on Cuban patriotic sentiment (which they merely stimulated), the wiliness of the Castros, and the valuable sources of support on which they were able to rely in the outside world – not least in Latin America. And despite being tried for half a century, fail they did; in the process, exposing the limits of Washington’s influence in its own backyard, creating significant difficulties for it within the OAS, and making seriously problematic the cultivation of the interests which both American and Cuban governments admitted they shared. The last of these points is given special emphasis in this book, for these interests were many and important, among them properly regulated emigration from Cuba to the United States, counter-narcotics liaison, hurricane prediction, environmental protection, and – irony of irony – counter-terrorist cooperation, which included tackling air piracy. And it was in large part these common interests that encouraged what LeoGrande and Kornbluh call the ‘back-channel’ diplomacy between Washington and Havana, and which Cuba at any rate hoped might provide a cover for discussion of more sensitive subjects and, step-by-step, lead eventually to a broader rapprochement of the kind achieved in the 1970s between the United States and the Peoples’ Republic of China.
Students of diplomacy will find the greatest interest in this book in its account of the various forms taken by this ‘back-channel’, although I must say at once that use of the term ‘back-channel’ in the context of Cuban-American relations is a little misleading. After all, a back-channel presupposes a ‘front channel’, as in the classic case of Soviet-American arms control negotiations in the Nixon-Kissinger era that popularized the term, and there was of course no front channel in Cuban-American relations. A back-channel also suggests intense secrecy and, while much Cuban-American diplomacy was well concealed, much was not. This said, we all know what the authors are getting at: it was a diplomacy featuring in great and surprising abundance all of the techniques employed by states not in diplomatic relations that nevertheless wish to have constructive discussions and even make agreements. Thus special envoys of every sort were employed at all levels: among those with official status, intelligence officers; and among unofficial envoys, businessmen and journalists. The ease of making discreet contact with the permanent high-ranking Cuban mission to the UN in New York was also regularly exploited by the Americans. The frequent offers of assistance by third parties – notably Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Switzerland and Canada – were sometimes taken up as well, although the need for them appears not to have been strongly felt and, when this occurred, their activities seem to have been limited chiefly to the provision of good offices as compared to the more interventionist role of mediator. Most significantly perhaps, beginning with the Carter administration in the late 1970s, large interests sections were established under protecting powers in Havana and Washington, although the behaviour of USINT in the Cuban capital during the George W. Bush presidency – especially in 2002-2005 under the cowboy Foreign Service Officer Jim Cason (now a Florida mayor, surprise, surprise) – was openly subversive and, therefore, in flagrant contravention of diplomatic law. (Cason boasts about this in his ADST oral history interview How his supine nominal chief, the Swiss ambassador, lived with all this I cannot imagine.) Not interested in diplomatic method as such, LeoGrande and Kornbluh offer no general thoughts as to which of these devices was most effective in contributing to the ‘back-channel’ to Cuba. With the notable exception just noted, they all seem to have prodded it forward in different ways.
As well as providing rich material on how enemies talk to each other, Back Channel to Cuba provides evidence on other important points of interest to students of diplomacy. I shall pick out just two. One of these is ‘diplomatic support’ by intelligence officers, about which I write in the new chapter on ‘Secret Intelligence’ in the soon-to-appear 5th edition of my textbook, Diplomacy: Theory and Practice and on which evidence is naturally difficult to obtain. Another is the employment during the Carter administration of the characteristic diplomatic method of Ancient Greece; namely, delegations composed of representatives of different political factions or what Harold Nicolson called with disgust ‘mixed embassies’. Fed up with the contrasting visions of Cuba policy of the National Security Council and the State Department, and more especially with the bitter rivalry of their chiefs for its control, President Carter ordered the representatives of both agencies to be stuffed into the US delegation for talks with Cuba (pp. 189-94). Nicolson would have been aghast at this and not at all surprised that it failed; but his judgement on the Greek method was one-sided. Progress with the Cubans by a State Department-only delegation would have been useless if scuppered by the NSC afterwards.
I’m not sure that presenting the conclusion to this book as a list of numbered ‘lessons’ was a good idea: it tends to suggest that all are of equal importance, and there also seems to be overlap between a few, notably those dealing with step-by-step diplomacy. But the work is richly detailed, important and absorbing, and I read every line of it. It really is salutary just to what extent even the presidents most hostile to Communist Cuba were forced to negotiate with its government. The book also has a very good bibliography and – thank goodness – a pretty good index.
17 April 2015, with 2020 post script
Is it a waste of time producing an index for a book when lengthy works are appearing more and more in searchable electronic format? Read more.
17 April 2015
The American Academy of Diplomacy has just released a major report called ‘American Diplomacy at Risk’, Read more.
25 February 2015
The announcement by British prime minister David (‘Sleepwalker’) Cameron that Britain is to send military advisers to Ukraine is the latest of a long series of Western blunders that has contributed to the catastrophic crisis in Ukraine. Read more.
23 September 2014
It is worth keeping in mind – and reassuring – that throughout this undeclared war each party has kept open its embassy in the other’s capital, Read more.
(Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 88 (incl. index). ISBN 10: 1137298545 / ISBN 13: 9781137298546
The trenchant contribution to this subject of the outstanding American scholar-diplomat Laurence Pope is published in Palgrave’s ‘Pivot’ series of short books designed to be brought out quickly. Its contents list and other details, including numerous well-deserved plaudits, can be seen here.
This book is an account of the marginalization of the State Department and the running down of its Foreign Service professionals to such a degree that retired ambassadors are constantly begged to return to work. It is also an indictment of the groups and institutions that have elbowed them aside, not least on policy on cyberspace. Prominent among these are the arrogant and ignorant neo-cons; the White House’s ‘off-the-books’ National Security Staff (NSS); and the various components of the ‘military-intelligence complex’ fattened to gargantuan proportions by the so-called ‘War on Terror’. And it is an alarm bell rung over the consequences of this lamentable state of affairs, namely failed nation-building wars, the continuation of ‘Washington’s propensity for making foreign policy without reference to foreigners’, and the resulting prospect of more bloody ‘engagements’ in the future – this time courtesy of Special Operations Command (which already has a presence in over 100 countries), since the more thoughtful conventional military have been sobered up in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In what are in effect long asides to Pope’s main theme, but telling all the same, are gently mocking accounts of the manner in which the State Department has sought to mask its irrelevance in Washington. Notable among these are ensuring the secretary of state spends as much time as possible in the limelight abroad; seeking the endorsement of its ‘globaloney’ by academics who, mesmerized by ‘networks’, wouldn’t grasp the nature of the state even if, while on sabbatical, their own university were to be wiped out by a drone strike (my example, not his); parading its enrapture with social media, the employment of which is doomed to confuse the public with the personal; fussing over house-keeping matters; and producing vacuous and turgid four-yearly reviews (the QDDR), the first of which no diplomats known to the author read and in the White House produced ‘nothing but yawns’.
What is to be done to demilitarize American diplomacy? Other than readily deducible prescriptions prompted by his criticisms of fortress embassies (‘foreign bases’) and the sale of ambassadorships to pay off campaign debts, Pope has no detailed proposals for the institutional reform and resurrection of the State Department and Foreign Service. Instead, he confesses, his main contribution – no mean one – is to highlight the need for this, which is the more urgent, he maintains, because those who think the sovereign state is finished are living in a parallel universe and the decline of American power relative to China and other rising states is inevitable. But he does add that there is something to build on, in particular the continuing high calibre of most Foreign Service Officers – so well advertised, ironically enough, by the quality of their cables released by Wikileaks – and the formal authority of the chief of mission as representative not of the State Department but of the president. With ‘mission and leadership,’ he urges, much could be achieved.
It is a pity that the title of this book is misleading. After all, it is about the militarization – not the demilitarization – of American diplomacy. More importantly, I think the author goes too far in suggesting that to all intents and purposes the United States no longer has a ‘foreign ministry’. Surely, it has lost one but gained another – the National Security Staff. This, as Laurence Pope points out himself, now has hundreds of officials; these include senior directors for every region of the world, each with their own staff, ‘replicating the State Department’s organization’; while able officials in State seek promotion in the NSS. Of course, on the face of it, it is absurd that the United States should have both a de jure and a de facto foreign ministry but the demise of the former’s functions should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, somewhere, they are still being executed. Pope knows this, of course, but I think it could be brought out more clearly.
Few people are better placed than this scholar-diplomat to provide a convincing account of the nexus between diplomacy and the military because, as well as having been a member of the US Foreign Service for 30 years and delved deeply into the history of his profession, Laurence Pope was for part of this time Political Adviser to Central Command (he is an Arabist) and in his retirement was a consultant to the military. This is a book that must be read. It is also a highly engaging read, replete with pungent observations and memorable aphorisms. A propos the various fashionable fantasies that states are on the way out, I particularly liked his line that ‘Palestinians aspire to a state with a territory, not to a website.’ For those unable to secure this book, more of its flavour can be obtained from this interview.
