A bright, middle-ranking woman diplomat told me recently that she was a member of a group of dissident Young Turks inside the Foreign Office. “If,” she said, “we go on the way we are, we will just end up a ministry for consular affairs, rescuing distressed tourists.”
The Foreign Office has, according to numerous witnesses, fallen on hard times, surrendering swathes of responsibility for foreign policy to other players in the Whitehall community. The notion that “the foreign secretary is responsible for the overall conduct of overseas relations in the broadest sense of the term” (to quote a 1978 government white paper) has been undermined by the activism abroad of the prime minister’s office and the autonomy given to the Department for International Development (DFID), which, with a budget at least three times that of the Foreign Office, pursues its own agenda.
How is it possible that the careful Lord Hurd, a former foreign secretary and professional diplomat, could get up in the House of Lords this year and speak of an organisation that has been “hollowed out”, because it is no longer “a storehouse of knowledge providing valued advice to ministers and is increasingly an office of management”?
What lies beneath accusations made in 2008 by Couraud, the human resources consultancy hired by the Foreign Office itself, of “institutional timidity”, “a cultural fear of failure” and “people getting to the very top of the Foreign Office by never making any mistakes”? The use of outside consultants is itself the symptom of weak leadership that cannot see what needs to be done; or, if it does, dares not make changes without some sort of validation from the private sector.
It was during the Thatcher years the Foreign Office first got it into its head that, to deflect charges of being fuddy-duddy, it should organise itself on business lines. It got worse under new Labour. The culture of targets, set by the Treasury, acquired the madness of Soviet statistics.
In Washington as ambassador, I had to engage in an annual objectives-setting exercise. I was instructed by London to put into my personal objectives a set number of public speeches for the year. There was no interest in their subject or audience. I plucked the number 35 out of the air. Fine, was the response. At the end of the year, I duly reported that I had met my quota. Well done, was the response.
The Foreign Office website continues to be riddled with the jargon of management consultancy: corporate leadership, audit and risk, business strategies, “change owners” and what appears to be the terrible sin of “change-bunching”. Innovation has become a virtue in its own right, as if permanent revolution were necessary for the effectiveness of British foreign policy.
In reality, the qualities that make a good diplomat have not changed in 500 years. The ability to negotiate; to win the confidence of the powerful and to influence them; to drill down deeply into a foreign society and understand what makes it tick; to acquire and analyse high-grade information and to report it accurately, succinctly and fast; to have the courage to tell your government what it may not want to hear, without losing its confidence in you; to have the courage to act on your own initiative without instruction from London. To do all this, guided always by the lodestar of your nation’s interests, has been the mark of effective diplomacy since the beginning of time. It requires a quick mind, a hard head, a strong stomach, a warm smile and a cold eye.
These talents should be as in demand in the early 21st century as at any time in our history. This is the age of transnational issues, managed and negotiated within permanent, multilateral conference systems under the umbrella of institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. They are by definition hotbeds of intergovernmental bargaining.
There is barely a speech made on foreign affairs, however, that does not contain the clichés of “globalisation” or “interdependence”. These terms are frequently deployed to uphold two dubious propositions: that the age of the traditional nation state is over; and that in international relations there is necessarily a new harmony of interests created by the mutual dependence of nations. The second argument is made explicitly by the DFID to justify its enormous budget and to lay claim to a role in the safeguarding of national security.
It is perfectly true that national frontiers have become increasingly porous, as information, money, business, culture and people move back and forth across them in ever growing volume. But the phenomenon does not have the automatic consequence of making feasible an international system based on “global values”, as some such as Tony Blair have argued. To the contrary: globalisation has, if anything, strengthened around the world the sense of nationhood and nationalism. Five minutes in Beijing, Washington, Moscow and Delhi will tell you that.
You can be quite sure that in the capitals of the G20 group of nations — those that will shape the world in which our children live — policy-makers will not have as a first, second or even third priority the elevation of wispy ideas about global values. They will start and end, as should we in Britain, with a hard-headed calculation based on a view of their national interest — an unsentimental cost/benefit analysis of competing policy options.
It is the job of diplomats in capitals to understand and, where possible, to influence the decisionmakers. That is why abandoning the notion of national interest is a form of unilateral disarmament.
In its actions overseas, the state has a number of instruments and assets at its disposal: aid workers, spies, entrepreneurs, members of the armed forces, diplomats and BBC correspondents. In the past decade, diplomacy has been the under-utilised poor relation. We have pursued grinding military expeditions and spent a fortune on international development aid, for all practical purposes inside a foreign policy and diplomatic vacuum.
If I have heard it once, I have heard it a dozen times from army reservists returning from Iraq and Afghanistan: there has been scant joined-up government between the soldier, the aid worker and the diplomat. War has no meaning unless directed by a political goal. Yet after nearly eight years in Afghanistan, there is still no clarity about why we are there. Is it to stop Al-Qaeda returning on the shirt-tails of the Taliban? Or are we trying to create the conditions to transform Afghan governance and society? Depending on whom you speak to — British or American — it is either, both, or something in the middle. A punitive expedition against Al-Qaeda is one thing; but to seek, against the grain of history, to rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up, in the name of a western concept of democracy and human rights, is futile.
The poor, bloody infantry can win a thousand firefights in Helmand province, and earnest officials from the DFID can make their plans for a bridge here, a dam there; but until these efforts are linked to a political process, underpinned by diplomacy, they are so much waste of blood and treasure.
If this madcap venture is to take 40 years, as General Sir David Richards, chief of the general staff, averred this year, no conceivable national interest can be served by such an eccentric concentration of resources on a country of marginal importance. To the contrary, while America, Britain and others waste lives and treasure in this benighted land (in our case, for the fourth time in little more than 150 years), AlQaeda has moved its training camps elsewhere.
Worse, we continue to pursue an illusory stability in Afghanistan at the cost of destabilising Pakistan, where the risk of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of jihadists threatens the core of our security, the supreme national interest.
Recent history has taught hard lessons. The more grandiose our proclamation of values, the more we lay ourselves open to the charges of incoherence and hypocrisy. We are self-appointed apostles of democracy and moderation around the world.
But these two fixed points of our foreign policy are in permanent contradiction. Our “moderate” Arab friends are despotic regimes such as those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. We judge Hezbollah and Hamas to be extremist, though each has been legitimately elected to legislatures in Lebanon and Palestine. By bringing elections to Iraq, we have entrenched ethnic, religious and tribal divisions by giving them democratic legitimacy.
British foreign policy needs to regain a clear understanding of the articulation between war and politics, and between force and diplomacy. It needs to relearn some of the old arts of negotiation: that no agreement is better than a bad agreement (make sure the other side knows that you will, if need be, walk away from the negotiating table); that reciprocity is the heart of a good agreement; that it is sometimes more necessary to play hardball with your friends than your enemies; that a negotiator without a bottom line is like a helmsman without a compass.
Because of the strain on our armed forces, Britain may well need a defence review. But before that, the paramount requirement is for a foreign policy review — or, if American terminology has to be used, a review of national security. Its purpose would be to define Britain’s national interest: to decide what advances it; what damages it; what our priorities should be; and what we can afford. Then, it becomes possible to construct a coherent foreign policy, backed by a correspondingly resourced diplomacy.
Such a review will be so much wasted effort unless one matter is clearly understood from the outset. There has to be a single, guiding hand on the tiller of British foreign policy in all its dimensions, the guardian of a strategic vision, to which all else is subordinate, including, especially, defence and development policies.
The alternative, as in the past decade, is strategic incoherence, poor co-ordination between departments, military expeditions without clear political goals, and even rival foreign policies pursued respectively by the Foreign Office and the DFID. This cannot go on.
There is talk of creating a British equivalent of the White House National Security Council or even a Whitehall version of America’s review board on defence policy, a kind of council of foreign-policy wise men. But the last thing Britain needs is US bureaucratic gigantism, with its turf wars and agonisingly complex decision-taking, just to ensure that the prime minister has all the options laid before him.
The answer is less, not more bureaucracy. If in Margaret Thatcher’s time, a notably successful period for British diplomacy, policy could be made by a combination of a single senior adviser in No 10 in the shape of Charles Powell; a properly functioning cabinet committee system to ensure co-ordination across Whitehall; the occasional seminar for the prime minister’s benefit with outside experts; and a Foreign Office with a secretary of state who was indeed responsible “for the overall conduct of overseas relations in the broadest sense of the term”, there is no reason why the next prime minister could not do the same.
© Christopher Meyer 2009 Extracted from Getting Our Way: 500 Years of Adventure and Intrigue: the Inside Story of British Diplomacy by Christopher Meyer, to be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on October 29 at £18.99. Copies can be ordered for £17.01, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0845 271 2135
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