The piece below by Sir Ivor Roberts, is from the current issue of The Tablet.
A great read.
Sir Ivor Roberts is a past President of Trinity College, Oxford. He was previously British Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Ireland, and Italy.
While observing the zigzag political manoeuvrings towards, away, and now back again (at least at the time of writing) towards a Donald Trump–Kim Jong-un summit in Singapore on Tuesday, it is worth recalling the words of Dean Acheson, the former United States Secretary of State, who pointed out: “When a chief of state … makes a fumble, the goal line is open behind him.” He might have been talking about goalkeepers in Kiev. But his real point is that the dangers of summitry are not always appreciated by its practitioners.
Summits are high-profile events; expectations are often raised and the risk of failure is all the greater. Hence the need for pre-prepared, well-negotiated outcomes. And this is a job for professionals. It is work that cannot be conducted in full public view, as this would make the inevitable compromises impossible to achieve, nor by public statements, which would foreclose negotiating options or lead to unhelpfully harsh exchanges.
Megaphone diplomacy – often the product of domestic imperatives which impel politicians to talk toughly and roughly, even when they dimly suspect it will damage their longer term aims – is the very antithesis of what diplomacy should be. But it appears to be the only sort of diplomacy at which President Trump excels, in his case with his Twitter account replacing the megaphone. It is often the diplomat on the ground who is left to repair the damage.
The diplomat is also the one best able to prepare the ground for a successful summit. (I am using the word “diplomat” loosely here: the person deputed to carry out a diplomatic function might be from the foreign or another ministry or a special envoy, an unofficial and often informally appointed non-governmental actor.) With very few exceptions, the successful summits – where the outcomes are far reaching and positive – are those that have been most meticulously prepared.
Professional expertise and knowledge of the country and culture of the other side is invaluable. In most cases, the summiteers’ respective embassies play a pivotal role. Scaling a summit necessitates a base camp. And the base camp more often than not is the embassy.
Personal chemistry may help to make the occasion a success; if the chemistry works to repel rather than attract, the results will be meagre at best. But no matter how well-prepared, or how charming the protagonists, a summit is always a high-wire act.
Yet it is no secret that experts are currently very much out of fashion in both Washington and London. In Washington, the widespread view is that the swamp has to be drained of such people; here, as the Tory Minister Michael Gove succinctly put it during the referendum campaign:“People have had enough of experts.”
Of course, if what he meant to say was that expertise should not equate to an arrogant presumption of authority, he might have a point. But to dismiss statisticians at the Treasury and the Bank of England as insidious or disloyal was infantile.
Similarly, it was outrageous that Ivan Rogers should have been hounded from his position as British ambassador to the European Union because he had the temerity to point out that not everyone in continental Europe greeted the referendum result with enthusiasm, and that not everyone was planning to make our lives easier in order to accommodate a move most saw as hugely damaging to both the EU and the United Kingdom.
Had Rogers failed to accurately report the unvarnished views of the other 27 countries, however uncomfortably they would be received, he would have been falling down on the job. This fundamental misunderstanding of a diplomat’s task fits into the hardline Brexiteers’ narrative that those who fail to express enthusiasm for Brexit and instead point out the pitfalls are bordering on treachery in defying “the will of the people”.
While the Brexiteers reprise this mantra ad nauseam, they remain ignorant and wilfully self-deceiving about the reality of what can be negotiated with the EU 27. Their bluff, buccaneering blather – “Britain will be open to the world” – would carry more weight if it did not come, as Ivan Rogers recently pointed out, from people who have never negotiated a trade deal.
It is abundantly clear that speaking truth to power does not work in Washington either. Trump’s National Security Advisor, Herbert McMaster, and Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, both seen as figures of relative moderation and restraint, were dismissed within a couple of weeks of each other, each to be replaced by a man whose views on Iran and North Korea were more compatible with Trump’s.
It is as though Trump felt after a year or so in office that he was now unbound, and had no need to be restrained by advisors and diplomats of more moderate views.
The abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal, the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty and the tearing up of multilateral trade deals: in each case, we have seen Trump ignoring expert advice. He will discover his errors painfully through experience.
This is already starting to happen. Nobody in the Arab world any longer regards the US as capable of being an honest broker in the search for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, after Trump showed his disdain for the decades-long consensus that the question of the status of Jerusalem be reserved for the final stage of the negotiations between the two sides.
Trump has blamed the deaths that resulted on Hamas, as if no Middle East expert in the US or elsewhere had predicted a violent and bloody reaction to his decision to relocate the embassy. And to open it in Jerusalem on the seventieth anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel, the day the Palestinians refer to as the nakba, the “catastrophe”, only added fuel to the flames. The experts predicted that violence would follow, and it did.
President Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the nuclear deal with Iran marks another serious threat to international peace, as exasperated experts in the politics of region have repeatedly pointed out.
Within Iran, the moderates around President Hassan Rouhani have been bruised, humiliated and diminished; the hardliners close to the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Revolutionary Guards, who always opposed the deal because it included a moratorium on Iran’s ambition to become a nuclear power, have been emboldened.
Inevitably, the Guards’ second-in-command has called for the resumption of an “unlimited” nuclear programme. Given the existential threat that would pose to Israel, we are heading towards a scenario in which it would be well within the bounds of possibility for Israel and/or the US to launch major strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites.
This in turn could provoke retaliation by Iran not only against Israel but against Sunni states such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates, viewed as allied to the US and tolerant of Israel.
And not only experts must have held their heads in their hands, wondering how Trump imagines that the shameless breaking of an international treaty could encourage Kim Jong-un to renounce his nuclear programme in return for a US promise not to try to overthrow him.
Perhaps a world without embassies and diplomats and foreign affairs experts would be a better place – but it would be a world with no wars to end, no conflicts to soothe, no nuclear proliferation threats to defuse, no terrorism to prevent, and no tourists who leave their passports on trains – a world of perfectly free and frictionless trade, with no country in need of development aid or emergency relief in the case of a natural disaster.
In the world as it actually is, a diplomat not only has to possess the traditional range of peace-building and deal-making skills but is also expected to negotiate trade agreements, nurture counter-terrorism alliances, advance nuclear non-proliferation and combat international organised crime, including trafficking and modern slavery.
There is no danger of diplomats becoming redundant. It is a long way from the diplomacy of the nineteenth century but the essence of the challenge and satisfaction of its twenty-first-century version is that, almost uniquely, it brings together judgement, knowledge, experience and, yes, unashamedly, expertise.
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