Of Property Developers and Diplomats

How much outside thinking can we cope with?

A newly-minted diplomat will conventionally spend time learning on the job surrounded by colleagues, quite quickly picking up the fundamentals of the “desk” they’ve been assigned. In my day, largely by reading through the files, today by logging to the Ministry’s databases of telegrams, emails, policy submissions and so on, supplemented (much more easily than in the past) by all kinds of information from the online FT to Wikipedia. But all this probably won’t have fully prepared them for their first office meeting with a Minister. No doubt accompanied by more senior diplomats who’ll do the talking, it probably won’t take long for them to be taken off guard by an unexpected question from the only politician in the room, coming from an angle or with a breadth of vision which wasn’t apparent from the files. That encounter contains an important lesson: even though in some languages the media will routinely describe a Foreign Minister as the country’s “top diplomat”, Ministers are not more senior officials but political masters with whatever legitimacy their country’s constitution or political system confers on them.

That legitimacy is essential to the operation of the system. Politicians are answerable to their people, in one form or another - via elections or the threat of removal via a window, depending on the system - whereas diplomats and other officials are part of the bureaucracy, hired most of the time like any other corporate employee and in need of a good appraisal at the end of the year. Whatever your views on the “blob” or the “Deep State”, it’s clear that these are two different species. They work in different structures and are judged differently, the timeframes in which they hold their positions are usually very different (Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov is an exception to prove the rule) and, crucially, “what success looks like” is often different for the two species, however both might talk in similar terms about the “national interest”.

In the British system at least, bureaucrats rarely become politicians and when they do they are not in every case self-evidently better at the job of being Ministers than those from other backgrounds. In France, it’s probably more common for senior officials, albeit in a differently-structured system, to move across. In the US, there are several levels of politically-appointed senior officials whose role bridges the two worlds, not least in that the most senior have to submit themselves for Senate confirmation. The current Indian Minister of External Affairs, Dr S Jaishankar, is rare indeed in having previously served as the Permanent Secretary of his Ministry (confusingly for Brits, the “Foreign Secretary”) at the end - or not, depending on your use of language - of an extensive diplomatic career. In Britain today, there is often talk that too many politicians have spent too much of their earlier careers in the world of politics, but it’s only sometimes in the bureaucracy and then not often for long. So the difference between Minister and official very much remains.

Looking at the British Foreign Secretaries since I first entered King Charles Street, only one (Douglas Hurd) had been a career diplomat, though one other (Dominic Raab) had worked as a legal adviser in the (then) FCO. Several others have had a legal background (Geoffrey Howe, Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw, David Lammy) and the rest had worked for a time at least in some form of private business (John Major, William Hague, James Cleverly, David Cameron) or had come up primarily throuhg the trades union or political career paths, including in think tanks (Robin Cook, Margaret Beckett, David Miliband, Liz Truss). Only Boris Johnson had been mainly a journalist. But once you become a politician, your allegiances tend to be to your new identity not your previous professional affiliation. As a junior member of the then FCO staff association, I recall a conversation as to how sympathetic Douglas Hurd would be to whatever we were asking for at the time, probably something to do with overseas allowances for diplomats. Someone noted that he, at least, had been a diplomat. A more senior and wiser colleague, who later went on to some of the top diplomatic jobs, commentled drily that “he isn’t one of us any more”.

Politicians, largely coming from outside the bureaucracy, often sense limitations in the bureaucracy and fairly soon come to crave outside advice to complement the continuous flow of red boxes. In 1997, in addition to his (misquoted) “ethical foreign policy”, Robin Cook, the first Labour Foreign Secretary since 1979, early on emphasised his wish to bring in outside thinking into the Foreign Office. William Hague and several others also put an emphasis on acquiring a wider range of views. Although none of this was entirely new (Margaret Thatcher famously looked beyond the Foreign Office for ideas on the big issues), it’s another area in which the accelerating trend underpins the initiatives of individuals. The young diplomat today with the internet on her desk would find it absurd how we were once not really inclined to believe that something had happened across the world until we had seen the telegram from the Ambassador.

Now David Lammy has launched an initiative by the name of “Industry Mixer”, to bring private sector expertise into FCDO, with the help of a number of blue chip consultancies. As the Government has often said that it wants to more on internal capability than external consultancies, the aim here seems to be to develop talent to support what the Foreign Secretary has called improved “delivery” of foreign policy. I confess to be nostalgic for the time when delivery was primarily for the post and babies, but the use of the managerialist term in the Foreign Office is not unreasonable: much of what the Department has to do is essentially process of one kind or another, making lofty policy ambitions happen in practice. And in many of the areas citizens (ie voters) see and feel most, for example consular services to those in distress abroad, good process is exactly what you need. The last thing a Government Department, least of all a Foreign Ministry which already attracts quite a lot of prejudice about its usefulness, is any sense of amateurishness. We can only hope that this initiative bears fruit.

But - and this is the crunch - how much is “real” foreign policymaking able to survive assault from outside? For example, what when a New York property developer takes the diplomatic lead for the world’s most powerful country? I won’t try here to give a commentary on the rapidly-changing dynamics of the transatlantic relationship, but rather want to ask how much diplomacy - or indeed any other profession - can and should be opened up to disruption from outside.

While, as the last few days have shown, the immediate next steps of Donald Trump’s diplomacy may be very unpredictable, he has always been open about his negotiating style and the world from which it comes. It is patently not that of the career diplomat nor of the politician who, whatever the differences in motivation and sense of “what success looks like”, tend most of the time to follow the conventions briefed to them by their officials. However diverse the modern FCDO and its analogues like to think of themselves, the underlying assumptions, approaches and styles of modern Western diplomacy have evolved since the end of the Cold War into a very recognisable pattern. A western-set agenda, assumptions about democracy and autocracy (confusing for example when the world’s largest democracy, India, doesn’t always “act Western”), the primacy of the international rules-based order, the language of values, the belief in “nation building”, the search for consensus via endless summitry and pre-cooked declarations, have all been taken for granted in a “fish don’t see water” sense whatever the problem of the moment may be. Nothing else seemed imaginable.

Around this post-Cold War consensus has grown up a foreign policy industry - diplomats, academics, activists, journalists, think tankers (full disclosure: I’ve been part of it) - which has shaped the practice of diplomacy to its own capabilities and interests. To them, Donald Trump is a disaster for the world if he fails - and quite a disaster for the profession if he succeeds. They are, of course, smart people and so racing to adapt to the new world they find themselves in which, as I argued in my last post, is the product less of one man than a long-term trend so likely to be enduring. A few days back I participated in a panel in which I took a fairly tough realist approach to the future of the multilateral system and was surprised to receive rather more positive feedback than I could have imagined had the event taken place a month or two ago.

It’s clearly far too soon to judge whether Donald Trump’s second Presidency will be a foreign policy success or disaster. Either way, the world won’t go back to where it was before January 20, not least becasuse it wasn’t really there at all on January 20, as the changes we are now seeing have been long in the making. But in a more realist world, the conventional post-Cold War diplomatic style will need rethinking: endless summit declarations of values just won’t cut it. Instead, a clear sense of interests underpinned by hard power, defence capability backed by economic strength, rather than endless words and international conventions, will be the required currency. Some have learned these lessons already: working in the Balkans, I was often struck by the ability of smart regional leaders to turn the EU’s legalistic use of conditionality (“we’ll give you benefits if you’ll comply by our rules and values”) to their advantage through a realist intepretation of what they could get away with and what little they’d actually need to give. The Brits, perhaps a bit too “Western”, found this harder to pull off in the Brexit negotiations.

What can the world beyond diplomacy learn from this dynamic? In one sense, it’s ahead of the game: Trump has effectively disrupted diplomacy in the way that upstarts have long been disrupting established businesses. Disruption is always good when you’re doing it or admiring others who’ve done it successfully, but less desirable when you’re on the receiving end.

Professions that benefit from legal protections have been better at fending off disruption than some other businesses. But there can be advantages in a survival strategy that looks for genuinely outside insights that come from taking a risk on hiring those without what’s conventionally regarded as “relevant” expertise. The best commercial disrupters often fit this description. I’m not expecting David Lammy to build on his new initiative by offering Donald Trump a job, but increasingly we all stay in our bubble at our peril.