Diplomacy in a divided world

This article is part of the series — Raisina Files 2021.

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No one doubts that our world is divided.

It is divided by access to resources — between the one in 10 people living in extreme poverty and the richest 1 percent who own 44 percent of the world’s wealth. It is divided by the degree of individual freedom and liberty enjoyed by those located in countries that are free, partly free or not free. It is divided in health outcomes, now very noticeably between those who have access to vaccines to counter the COVID-19 pandemic and those that do not. Even climate change — something that will affect us all — often divides the world more than it brings us together.

As the key institution of international society, diplomacy should offer techniques for building understanding across divides and taking cooperative action. But we live in a time where diplomacy seems to be out of favour. In many countries, diplomacy is not viewed as the key tool for dealing with international problems.

Even climate change — something that will affect us all — often divides the world more than it brings us together.

This paper investigates why diplomacy sometimes has few supporters, and some factors that can undermine it. As a provocation, it asks us to consider whether diplomacy can indeed offer solutions for the problems of our divided world.

A venerable institution

Diplomacy is a centuries-old social practice with its own ceremonial and procedural culture passed down through generations. It is particularly tied to the birth of the nation-state and is described by Hans Morgenthau as of “paramount importance” as an element of national power. Hedley Bull viewed it as a key institution of international society, while Martin Wight described it as the “master-institution” of world politics.

But the golden days of diplomacy are long past. Diplomacy has had to evolve quickly in response to fundamental changes, especially in transport and communications technology, meaning that diplomats no longer have the exclusive gatekeeper role they once held in international affairs.

The golden days of diplomacy are long past.

This has led to a significant evolution in the practice of diplomacy. One memorable description is of a transition from “club” to “network” diplomacy — from secretive interactions between a few elite officials to a more multilateral and polylateral character. Twenty-first-century diplomacy has been described as “multifaceted, pluri-directional, volatile and intensive, due to the increased complexity in terms of actors, dialogues subjects, modes of communication, and plurality of objectives.” This has required diplomats to become adept at adaptation. Today's interconnected and technology-driven world requires the modern diplomat to engage with a plethora of new international actors and be happier mixing with the population than inside embassy walls.

The changing operating environment means that concerns about the decline of diplomacy are not new. Morgenthau wrote about the decline of diplomacy in 1948 when: “two superpowers, the centers of two gigantic power blocs, have faced each other in inflexible opposition. They could not retreat without giving up what they considered vital to them. They could not advance without risking combat. Persuasion, then, was tantamount to trickery, compromise meant treason.”

Today’s interconnected and technology-driven world requires the modern diplomat to engage with a plethora of new international actors and be happier mixing with the population than inside embassy walls.

In response, he offered nine precepts for reviving diplomacy that provide a useful agenda for times when these fundamentals are out of favour. He suggested four fundamental rules — to define foreign policy objectives in terms of the national interest; avoid a crusading spirit; look from the point of view of other nations; and be willing to compromise on non-vital issues — along with five prerequisites for compromise: do not be legalistic; do not put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat; do not allow a weak ally to make decisions for you; and do not allow either the armed forces or public opinion to control foreign policy.

This is pertinent advice as we live through another period where diplomacy is particularly challenged.

Various factors have led diplomatic approaches to be sidelined in recent years in the US, China and Australia. But in each case, diplomacy can be revived by recalling one of its fundamental precepts.

Diplomacy vs. populism: Trump’s America

The Trump administration’s attitude has been described as a “war on peace and the end of diplomacy,” with the damage done to the State Department well-documented. Ronan Farrow lays out the vicious cycle: “American leadership no longer valued diplomats, which led to the kind of cuts that made diplomats less valuable. Rinse, repeat.”

Populist leaders are often associated with centralising foreign policy decision-making in the leader and the leader’s family.

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is often particularly blamed for the budget cuts and restructuring that led to what has been described as a “near-dismantling of America’s diplomatic corps, chasing out hundreds of State Department employees and scaling back the country’s engagement with the world.” Even after Tillerson’s departure, the diplomatic apparatus never reached full strength; for example, the Trump administration never managed to appoint an ambassador to Singapore.

According to Gordon Flake, head of the Perth USAsia Centre, “President Trump viewed diplomats as the enemy, as the deep state.” Diplomats are an easy target for scorn as a “self-serving establishment” and “unaccountable elite.” As the Lowy Institute’s Director of Research Alex Oliver argues, “Diplomacy has always been viewed as a preserve of the elite, hence the stereotype of champagne-sipping diplomats. This is a legacy that is hard to shed. Populism is toxic for the regard that diplomacy is held in. Diplomacy is all too much about compromise and collaboration.” She argues that “Under the Trump administration, we saw the sidelining of diplomacy, bureaucracy and other informed decision-makers, which has generated repercussions from partners. It exacerbated a mode of state-to-state relations, which featured centralising of decision-making within leaders' offices with decisions on diplomatic engagement managed by a small cohort of staffers.”

Despite Trump’s showy initiatives — such as his summitry and border visit to North Korea — he finished his term with little to show by way of results for US national interests, and with long-term damage to institutions of diplomacy.

Populist leaders are often associated with centralising foreign policy decision-making in the leader and the leader’s family. Leaders tend to express suspicion of professional diplomats who are, definitionally, elites. They prefer to conduct leader-on-leader diplomacy.

With Trump, this meant diplomacy via Twitter and via leaders’ summits, which he thought showed off his deal-making abilities, plus significant roles for family members. It also meant a reliance on populist solutions — offering deceptively simple answers to complex problems. According to Peter Varghese, former head of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, “Populism tends to displace knowledge-based policy. Populists have little time for expert explanations about why countries may be taking particular positions. But populism eventually runs out of puff because it can't actually deliver the simple solutions it promises.”

Despite Trump’s showy initiatives — such as his summitry and border visit to North Korea — he finished his term with little to show by way of results for US national interests, and with long-term damage to institutions of diplomacy.

The US needs to return to Morgenthau’s precepts that “the objectives of foreign policy must be defined in terms of the national interest” and “the government is the leader of public opinion, not its slave.”

Diplomacy vs. ideology: China’s wolf warriors

Another major challenge for diplomacy is domestic politics: specifically, domestic nationalism and the desire to be seen as “tough” on foreigners. An example of this has been China’s “wolf warriors” — named after a patriotic movie franchise — who have conducted foreign policy with an eye to domestic audiences wanting to see an assertive China pursuing its national greatness.

Demanding that one’s diplomats be demonstratively patriotic means it is difficult for them to do their job in terms of connecting with their host society.

These diplomats are known for using social media tools to defend their home country aggressively online. Their behaviour has often been decidedly undiplomatic, with governments in Sweden, Kazakhstan and France summoning China’s ambassadors to address concerns about tactless behaviour and, in Sri Lanka, China’s embassy being suspended from Twitter due to an offensive tweet.

This new approach by the Chinese foreign ministry is considered a direct response to President Xi Jinping issuing diplomats a memo in 2019 to show more “fighting spirit.”

Demanding that one’s diplomats be demonstratively patriotic means it is difficult for them to do their job in terms of connecting with their host society. As Griffith Asia Institute Director Caitlin Byrne puts it, diplomats operate in a curious liminal space between domestic constituencies and foreign audiences where an air of duplicity and slipperiness is hard to shake. Her colleague Ian Hall notes that diplomats have to constantly maintain their legitimacy, managing “the suspicion of their host state and that of their own state, demonstrating to both their honesty, reliability and capacity.” This is harder when there is pressure to show fighting spirit.

China’s assertive diplomacy has been spectacularly unsuccessful as a way of winning hearts and minds.

The turn away from diplomacy has been counterproductive to China’s international interests. It has led to tweaks by social media platforms to try to rein in state-linked accounts. More broadly, polling by Pew Research shows China’s international reputation in advanced economies has plummeted over the past decade. Worse, it makes life more complicated for counterparts who are otherwise-minded to cooperate with Beijing. China’s assertive diplomacy has been spectacularly unsuccessful as a way of winning hearts and minds.

China needs to return to Morgenthau’s rules that “diplomacy must be divested of the crusading spirit” and “diplomacy must look at the political scene from the point of view of other nations.”

Diplomacy vs. security: Australia’s wolverines

Diplomacy can also be supplanted by a security mindset where the national security apparatus predominates over other tools. This can be seen in Australia where the percentage of spending on diplomacy and development is now at its lowest ever, having dropped from almost 9 percent of the federal budget in 1949 to only 1.3 percent in 2019. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade particularly suffered during the 9/11 decade compared to the ballooning budgets of security and intelligence agencies.

In the Australian context, the issue has become about who runs the relationship with China.

The predominance of military thinking (dubbed ’mil-think‘ by some) has consequences for foreign policy. Security thinking tends to paint in black and white, as enemies and friends. The focus is on denying the enemy its interests and every concession can be painted as a loss of sovereignty rather than a trade-off. This is appropriate when in conflict. The problem is in peacetime, if it subordinates a less adversarial civilian perspective.

In the Australian context, the issue has become about who runs the relationship with China. Former Ambassador to China Geoff Raby wrote that within “the small, tight Canberra policy circle, in the years since the Abbott government had been elected, the security-intelligence-military establishment had come to lead on China policy.” At the political level, this was supported by a group of Australian parliamentarians who self-identify as tough on China and call themselves the “Wolverines,” again after a movie.

Insiders believe that Australia has reached a point where the security mindset is dominant, with the intelligence and security agencies reportedly having more influence than during the Cold War. No less a figure than Dennis Richardson — former head of the foreign affairs and trade and defence ministries and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation — has publicly warned against “national security cowboys” running the show.

There is a gender aspect to this.. There is a danger that diplomacy thus becomes seen as feminised — as “soft” rather than “hard” — and so is sidelined.

This is not driven by public opinion. In the latest Lowy Poll, the top five threats that worry Australians are ones that will not be helped by more military hardware — drought, pandemics, global economic downturn, environmental disasters and climate change.

Arguably there is a gender aspect to this. In places like Australia where women have made inroads in serving their country in international affairs, they are more likely to be serving in diplomacy than in defence. There is a danger that diplomacy thus becomes seen as feminised — as “soft” rather than “hard” — and so is sidelined. Francis Fukuyama put this explicitly, arguing in 1998 that countries would be weakened by the feminisation of international politics: “As women gain power in these countries, the latter should become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive, and violent.”

But the privileging of the security view does not play to Australia’s strengths. No matter what Australia spends, it is not going to have the largest military in the region. But it is realistic to have the most effective diplomats promoting its interests and to be the most trusted development partner, showing off positive Australian traits like pragmatism and problem-solving.

The privileging of the security view does not play to Australia’s strengths. No matter what Australia spends, it is not going to have the largest military in the region.

Australia needs to return to Morgenthau’s precept that “the armed forces are the instrument of foreign policy, not its master.”

A widespread phenomenon

Interestingly, the sidelining of diplomacy appears to be widespread. As Varghese has observed: "In Western developed economies we see the hollowing out of foreign ministries with cuts in resourcing and less dependence on country expertise in the making of foreign policy. Governments do not perceive any big political costs in cutting their budgets.”

But the depreciation of diplomacy is not universal and will manifest in different ways in different places. For example, India has historically had a small foreign service compared to its role in the world,

• so in the last election, the government promised to “increase the strength of the diplomatic and allied cadres to keep pace with our increasing global engagement.”

  The depreciation of diplomacy is not universal and will manifest in different ways in different places.

  Several countries are increasing their funding for diplomacy. Japan is opening new diplomatic missions, and the Pacific Island nations are using diplomatic tools at the regional and global level to respond to the existential threat of climate change.

  Different countries also have varying historical attitudes toward diplomacy. In Brazil, there is a tradition of venerating diplomatic heroes, from a statue in its capital to an institute dedicated to the nation’s diplomatic history. This should mean that diplomacy had more cachet to help weather negative forces. Even so, the populist Bolsonaro administration does appear to have significantly affected Brazil’s diplomacy, with the president promising to change the “ideological bias” of the foreign ministry.

  In each place, factors that undermine diplomacy may impact in different ways.

  Idealists despair

  Perhaps one of the most significant issues for the popularity of diplomacy is its incrementalism. It is, at the base, a fundamentally realist profession that deals with the world as it is. Diplomacy requires a degree of acceptance about what is possible, acknowledging hard truths about the international system, like

  • The world is not remotely fair

  • Most other countries do not share our viewpoint and do not care about our interests

  • Aggression and escalation are seductively easy but unlikely to be productive

  • International cooperation is a hard slog.

  As Varghese puts it, “Diplomacy has to take the world as it is. It can't pretend to live in a populists’ world — where everything is simple — or in an ideological world. Good diplomacy is always anchored in hard realities.”

  Diplomacy deals with nuance (which can sound like being an apologist) and engagement (which can sound like appeasement). Diplomats have to understand how issues look from other countries’ points of view (which can sound like agreeing with the other side).

  Diplomacy means living with compromises, stopgaps and partial solutions. It accepts that friction is unavoidable; the task of diplomacy is to manage, contain and ease the effects of friction. Diplomacy deals with nuance (which can sound like being an apologist) and engagement (which can sound like appeasement). Diplomats have to understand how issues look from other countries’ points of view (which can sound like agreeing with the other side).

  Diplomacy is not often revolutionary. This does not fit well in a time that wants rapid change and immediate solutions to problems. In “a post-truth, hyperemotional world,” the “pragmatic nature of traditional diplomacy prevents it from employing a similarly emotional response. In the eyes of socially engaged publics, this delegitimises traditional diplomacy.”

  However, diplomacy does have ambition — it works towards making small improvements through grinding, painstaking work. This has been wonderfully described as “dogged low gear idealism.” Maybe that is the best we can hope for in a world where we agree on little.

  In “a post-truth, hyperemotional world,” the “pragmatic nature of traditional diplomacy prevents it from employing a similarly emotional response.

  Countries need to recall the precept, “nations must be willing to compromise on all issues that are not vital to them.”

  The promise of diplomacy

  Looking forward, what are the prospects for diplomacy? What can diplomacy offer?

  Under President Joe Biden, the US has announced a turn back to diplomacy. In his presidential campaign, Biden promised to bring back a diplomacy-first approach:

  “As president, Biden will elevate diplomacy as the premier tool of our global engagement. He will rebuild a modern, agile US Department of State — investing in and re-empowering the finest diplomatic corps in the world and leveraging the full talent and richness of America’s diversity. Working cooperatively with other nations makes us more secure and more successful.”

  This was illustrated when Biden decided to give his first foreign policy speech at the State Department, telling his nation’s diplomats “the message I want the world to hear today: America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.”

  The return of diplomacy is worth encouraging.

  Observers expect the Biden administration to break with the Trump approach. As Oliver describes it:

  “President Biden will approach diplomacy quite differently. Diplomacy may well back. It might make a return in the West and force a return to more normal diplomacy in G20 nations. Multilateralism will be back as well, with the US re-entering the Paris Accords and World Health Organization. This will also assist in bringing diplomacy back to a more normal mode."

  The return of diplomacy is worth encouraging. Varghese argues that diplomacy can contribute to the really big issues, including forging a new strategic equilibrium in the Indo-Pacific, making a case for an open economy and refashioning the institutions of a revamped international order. "To get out of the difficulties that we're currently in, diplomacy has to come to the fore again: to make sense of a period of some considerable uncertainty and to lead the institutional rebuilding we need," he says.

  Multilateralism in its current form has passed its use-by date and that diplomacy is part of the solution.

  Allan Gyngell, national president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, believes that multilateralism in its current form has passed its use-by date and that diplomacy is part of the solution: “The model we have — large, centralised, slow-moving bureaucracies with universal membership... — won’t take us through to the mid-21st century. We see the problems in organisations ranging from the WTO to the WHO. But in current circumstances, where can we find the energy and effort needed to respond? The answer will come, as it always must, from the part of statecraft we call foreign policy, and from diplomacy, which is its operating system.”

  Diplomacy has been with us for a long while. Despite the challenges it faces, it does not seem likely to go away. But with greater support, it can do more to bridge what divides us.

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