The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age

William Collins

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First published as Naked Diplomacy in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016

Copyright © Tom Fletcher 2016

Tom Fletcher asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work

‘The Embassy’ (‘Sonnets from China XV’), from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden copyright © 1976 the Estate of W. H. Auden, by permission of Random House Inc.

Extracts from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister copyright © 1980 Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, by permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd, www.alanbrodie.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover design by Johnathan Pelham

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008127589

Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008127572

Version: 2017-02-20

Dedication

To Louise, without whom this book would never have been written.

To Charlie, Theo and Twitter, without whom it would have been written much faster.

And to the colleagues who march towards the sound of gunfire, in order to try to stop it.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

PREFACE: The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION: Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP?

PART ONE – Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of Diplomacy

1. Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls

2. Diplomacy By Sea: From Columbus to Copyboys

3. Diplomacy’s Finest Century

4. From Telephone to Television

5. From E-mail to E-nvoys

6. What Makes a Good Diplomat?

PART TWO – Statecraft and Streetcraft: Power and Diplomacy in a Connected World

7. iDiplomacy: Devices, Disruption and Data

8. The End of Secrecy? Assange, Snowden and the Death of Bond

9. Building New Power: Bombs, Books and Beckham

10. Using New Power: Only Connect

11. Selling Ladders for Other People to Climb Down

12. A Naked Diplomat

13. Envoy 2025

PART THREE – What Next?

14. Who Runs the Digital Century?

15. The Battle for Digital Territory

16. The Case for Optimism

17. A Progressive Foreign Policy ‘To Do’ List

18. Citizen Diplomacy

EPILOGUE: Valedictory

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Notes

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Epigraph

As evening fell the day’s oppression lifted;

Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained:

Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted

The conversation of the highly trained.

Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;

A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,

For them to finish their exchange of views:

It looked a picture of the way to live.

Far off, no matter what good they intended,

Two armies waited for a verbal error

With well-made implements for causing pain,

And on the issue of their charm depended

A land laid waste with all its young men slain,

Its women weeping, and its towns in terror.

W. H. Auden, ‘The Embassy’

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I would obviously like to claim that 2016 proved this book right. After all, in a post-truth world, we can all claim anything. In my favour, it was a year in which many of the themes of The Naked Diplomat – truth and lies online and offline; coexistence versus wall building; open versus closed societies; the implications of our inability to reach angry and frustrated parts of our societies – have been thrust into centre stage.

But nobody really called 2016. I predicted that of the United Nations, US, France and the UK, two would be run by women in 2017. I may have got the wrong two. It has been a logic-defying, irrational year, in which three acronyms officially entered the dictionary – ‘LOL’, ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’. And many began to worry that liberalism could be confined to the dictionary.

Among the many ironies of 2016, Germany emerged as the bulwark against Fascism; the Pope emerged as the leading spokesman for freedom; China emerged as the defender of the Davos consensus; and a TV celebrity billionaire emerged as the voice of the ordinary American. Empowered citizens voted for policies they knew would make them poorer; for liars to clean up politics; and to take back control by reducing their global influence. And experts responded to accusations that they were no longer needed by being consistently wrong. Meanwhile, Russia bombed Syrian civilians to save them from terror. George Orwell, take a bow.

The beginning and end of chapters in history books can be pretty arbitrary. But 2016 is the end of the chapter that started in 1989, or maybe even 1945 or 1789. It could be the end of the American Age. It might mark the (hopefully temporary) resignation of America as a driving force for liberty throughout the world. Donald Trump’s election created a vacancy for leader of the free world. For the first time in my life, we can take nothing about the next year for granted, let alone the next decade: because 2016 is the new normal. We are in new and uncertain terrain.

I think three themes run through Brexit, the rise of Trump and the polarisation of political debate that we have seen.

Firstly, the West is in an Age of Distrust. Authority is one more devalued currency. The UK parliamentary vote on military action in Syria in 2013 was rejected because Iraq had destroyed confidence in the establishment’s ability to make sound foreign policy. Likewise, many rejected staying in the EU because MPs’ expenses, the banking crisis and EU mismanagement had destroyed confidence in Westminster, the Square Mile and Brussels. And – ironically for a tycoon and TV personality – Trump is a rejection of the establishment and mainstream media. YouGov report that public trust is plummeting not just in politics, the media and the banks, but also in teachers, doctors and the police.

So, institutions traditionally based on consent, deference and trust are failing, and politics is failing. For the first time in recent history, the challenge is not states with too much power, but too little. Declining powers such as Russia are more disruptive than rising ones. And the great powers don’t seem to want to exert great power. Meanwhile, a Europe used to summits where it discussed other countries as problems – Afghanistan/Pakistan, the Middle East, North Korea – is now finding itself on the agenda. On the global balance sheet, it has moved from being an exporter of solutions to an exporter of problems. And, as US Senator Mike Enzi says, ‘if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu’.

Facing this new context, leaders and politicians are struggling to connect, to get their message through. As Shelley is quoted as saying of a rival, ‘he had lost the art of communication, but not alas the gift of speech’. And the politicians know it. One recent European leader told me: ‘We no longer think it is just the past that is another country. It is now the present that is another country.’ We all feel better connected but less well informed. For the first time, our problem is too much information, not too little. Being more in touch has reduced our ability to ‘reach out and touch people’.1 Hence the distrust.

Secondly, we have been reminded of Mark Twain’s nifty observation that history rhymes.* After economic downturns, nations turn inwards at the moment they should look outwards (and this was, of course, happening before Trump). They become nationalist when they should be internationalist. I now understand why we spent so much time at school studying the Weimar Republic. The consequences of the crash of 2008–9 could be as great as those after the crash of 1929.

And thirdly, as the first edition of this book argued, the flux we are experiencing is just the initial implications of the Internet. How humans interact socially and economically is changing at a faster pace than at any time in history. So how we interact politically is going to change too, as we are seeing in elections throughout the West. Look at the impact of the printing press and scale it up. There will be many losers. At a time of massive prosperity, inequality continues to rise, unleashing the spasms of anger we are seeing at the ballot box and that we will increasingly see on our streets. It was not American poverty that generated Trump but American prosperity.

I have a confession to make: I was on Trump’s mailing list. It started out gently. I took his questionnaire on media bias, just to disagree with it. But then I was sucked further in, like a potential terrorist being slowly radicalised. I received several emails a day addressing me as his key supporter. More questionnaires. I had one asking for debate advice – I suggested a greater focus on tolerance. One from Newt Gingrich asked for personal advice on how to win in November – ‘Change the candidate,’ I offered. So much for experts.

But thanks to my fascination with how his campaign pitched their world view to those they thought shared it – aggressive, macho, divisive, dishonest – I did not unsubscribe from this deluge of direct engagement. It reminded me of two personal experiences as a communicator. Firstly, my Indiana summer selling door to door in the Midwest – ‘Everyone’s buying it,’ we would repeat like a mantra. And secondly, the online arguments with extremists in the Middle East that this book describes. They and the Trump campaign used the same rhetorical and political devices – ‘us and them’, find someone to blame, we can make you great again.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Many of us have an inner Trump somewhere. The bit of us that is too prone to boastfulness, to anger, that seeks constant competition and that hits out at those we think are weaker than ourselves.

But the difference is that, for most of us, this is not something we’re proud of. And it is something we spend our lives finding ways to contain and restrain. Most people manage to do that at some point between the ages of three and five. But we work at it, and almost all of us get there – we contain our inner Trump. We evolve.

I worked in Downing Street during previous transitions of power – going from the Gordon Brown to the David Cameron era was like trying to master dressage after rodeo. But I also observed close-up four transitions of the crucial and often misunderstood relationship between US president and UK prime minister: Blair/Bush to Bush/Brown to Brown/Obama to Obama/Cameron. They are moments of opportunity and excitement. But they also require great sensitivity and care. Leaders have a sixth sense about political capital, and who has it or doesn’t have it.

When Senator Obama visited Downing Street some months before the 2008 election, he had it in buckets. He was keen to give a suitably presidential statement outside the famous black door. One of my jobs was to keep him in No. 10 as long as possible, so that everyone would see how good the personal rapport was with Prime Minister Brown. So I took him to Margaret Thatcher’s old study to look at the particles of moon rock that President Richard Nixon had gifted Prime Minister Harold Wilson in January 1970. As I showed him these extraordinary and inspiring souvenirs of a more ambitious age, I hoped for a moment of reflection, maybe even an unforgettable piece of Obama rhetoric on America’s future. Instead, the senator recoiled. All day I wondered why – was it mention of Nixon? Was he overwhelmed by the moment? Only later did I realise that my tie had taken some friendly fire while I was changing my son’s nappy that morning. The future leader of the free world had not had the ideal introduction to British hygiene. I hope the special relationship did not suffer too much as a result.2

I think President Obama is a humble man with much to be arrogant about. We will find out whether President Trump is the opposite. Whether he can learn to restrain his inner Trump. And whether we really are set for a period in which the most powerful nation in the world is led by a blond Berlusconi.3 Ironically, we are left hoping that he is a politician who doesn’t follow through on his election promises.

More importantly, we will learn fast whether society has evolved, has learnt from history how to contain its own inner Trump. Humankind’s story is one of the gradual – albeit with bad years, and sometimes bad decades – evolution of reason over craziness, expertise over instinct, community over tyranny, and honesty over lies. Painstakingly and with great sacrifices, we built political systems to restrain the dangerous individual who believes that only he – and almost always he – has the answers. As a species, our strength is that we know we are a work in progress.

So we need to remind ourselves how to restrain tyrants. Basic dictatorship is not complicated. It tends to follow very similar patterns: an economic crash, blamed by the aspiring tyrant on elites, minorities and his opponents; the promise of greatness, of bread and circuses (or cookouts and reality TV in the modern version); the gradual undermining of institutions; intimidation of the independent media; the reward (not confined to dictatorships, of course) of loyalty over competence; holding enemies close; the building of a personality cult; and the systematic removal of checks and balances.

At each of those moments, the dictator hopes that we stay silent, argue among ourselves, or become distracted. In the period ahead, we are going to find out if the checks and balances created over centuries to constrain our inner Trumps are being simply tested, or tested to destruction. The painful lessons of the twenty-first century stand before the firing squad, wondering if they will hear the first shot.

And what about Brexit – depending on where you stand, either Independence Day, a ‘quiet revolution’, or a suicide note.

The UK’s role in the twenty-first century will not be defined by the EU referendum itself, but how the British respond to it. The period ahead will require a sense of collective purpose that we have not had since the Second World War.

I spent much of 2016 in places that have entered an uncertain time because of the referendum: Dublin, Belfast, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Berlin, London, Cyprus. The decision of the UK people to leave the EU may have been based largely on local factors, but it is the best example of how decisions in one country now affect everyone. Ironically, our localism made the case for internationalism, because it has placed us in the position of needing to work harder on our international partnerships. It is also part of an even greater irony – a worldwide campaign against globalisation.

These are moments of peril for Europe more widely. For the first time since the Second World War, people are leaving the European centre at an alarming rate, and parties that have dominated are not just losing but being wiped out. W. B. Yeats saw it well at a time of similar upheaval in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.4

That passionate intensity is at the heart of the third symptom of twenty-first-century change, and a theme of much of this book – the polarisation of debate and the consequent rise of extremism.

As later chapters describe, I was ambassador in Beirut when the Syria conflict began, and lived through the four years in which it developed into the worst war of the twenty-first century. Let’s remember that the Assad killing machine has no pause button. Industrial terror is its factory setting, and it survives only through brutality. I will spend much of my life trying to explain how and why we let it happen on our watch. And much of my time now is spent trying to ensure that Syrian children denied education do not pay the price. They deserve better than the choice between a barrel-bombing tyrant, the box-office barbarity of ISIL, and the perils of a Mediterranean raft. They deserve more than the suicide vest or life jacket. The closing chapters of this book argue for a return to our humanitarian responsibilities.

But we cannot understand the wider challenges facing the world without looking at Syria. There is such a strong connection between breakdown in the Middle East and the polarisation of debate in our own societies. And Syria is the grimmest example of what happens when the international order fails – you get carnage, great power conflicts, and a Petri dish for extremism.

And that extremism will continue to have consequences for all of us. I describe in this book how the three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life – Paris, Beirut and Nairobi – have been victims of terror. The sociopaths with smartphones have reawakened our own versions of extremism. It is a vicious cycle in which those who want to radicalise communities in the West and the Middle East feed off each other’s messages.

So, the scaffolding put up around the twentieth century’s global order is fragile. We are still building the driverless car but seem to have achieved a driverless world. An age of austerity has combined with an age of migration and an age of massive technological change. This brings the mix of immigration, insecurity and inequality that fuels nationalism and extremism.

As a result, I believe we will see new battles in the twenty-first century. Not, like the twentieth century, between East and West, North and South, men and women, black and white, or Islam and Christianity.

Instead we will see four new dividing lines.

Firstly, between coexisters (like the caveman in my first chapter) and wall builders. The target of Islamist extremists is often the ‘greyzone’ – places where people interact across communities and races. This places them on the same side as Western extremists, on the wrong side of the twenty-first-century’s key argument: between those who want to live together and those who don’t. Their publicity machine thrives on Donald Trump, burkini bans, and any measure that makes Western claims of openness, tolerance and respect seem a sham. In the battle for modern Islam, we rely heavily on the moderate voices prevailing. Yet too often we undermine their message by not sticking to our deeply held values. There isn’t a twenty-first-century problem to which the answer is another brick in the wall. Post-US election, there is a bigger battle at stake for all of us: to ensure that it is harder for the next Trump to weaponise intolerance in the way he has.

Secondly, we will see a division between libertarians and control freaks. This will pit the prophets of complete freedom against those who argue we need secrets, in our personal lives and as governments. So we have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at one end of the spectrum and the North Koreans at the other. Most of us will find our position, issue by issue. But there will be surprises too. Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command Stan McChrystal is right that it is now more dangerous to share too little information than too much. Governments are beginning to recognise that without opening up they cannot establish the trust necessary to govern. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at this balance between security and liberty.

Thirdly, the line will be between those who want to make the problem bigger and those who want to make it smaller. This book argues that technology has created a significant shift in the power balance between global, regional, national, local and individual. All the talk in Britain at the moment is about our relationship as a nation with Europe. Yet these two entities – the superstate and the nation state – are the two that are going to lose power fastest in the twenty-first century. We’ll need better global systems; more powerful local systems; and we’ll want more individual control. That doesn’t leave the nation state or regional organisation with much. We will need to make the case to a more sceptical public that it is sometimes in the national interest to pool sovereignty.

Finally, we will see a growing chasm between ‘on demand’ winners and ‘on demand’ losers. Many of us are going to love the ‘on demand’ economy. We’ll get more of what we want when we need it. But it will take a lot of people to service that. Their time will be on demand so that ours can be our own. Make that gap between winners and losers too wide, and we create peril. Growing inequality is the biggest geopolitical risk today.5 If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-first largest in the world.6

We better mind that gap.

So how do we survive the twenty-first century as businesses, individuals and countries?

We can start by getting out of our echo chamber. I only realised the day after the US election that my Twitter timeline had no Trump supporters on it – maybe that’s a sign I’m pretty closed-minded too. One of the ironies of the final twenty-four hours of the campaign was seeing Hillary Clinton’s team singing along to ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ – I fear Gina and Tommy voted Trump.

Maybe the silver lining of 2016 is that more good people will become activists. As the murder of the inspirational British MP Jo Cox reminded us, we have to defend the progress and freedoms we took for granted with greater urgency and passion.

So the most influential generation in history, empowered by access to information and networks previous generations could never have imagined, will need to summon up fresh will to protect what my generation took for granted. They will need to establish checks and balances on the new emperors, from tech giants to tyrants, just as we learnt to do on the old ones.

Second, we can thrive by investing in education. If America changes tack on climate change, the life expectancy of the next generation just got shorter. Instead we need to better equip them with curiosity, creativity and courage. And kindness. Let’s not forget kindness. For moral and pragmatic reasons, our greatest challenge now is making more people less poor. And an individual’s freedom of opportunity should not be defined by where they are born. Right now it is easier to destroy than to build. But we need to build a global education system that can reach the seventy-five million children not in school, and give everyone equal access to the best we can teach them. Someone needs to write the first global curriculum, with global citizenship at its heart – now there’s an idea …