Common Conviction

Walter Russell Mead points out in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that “Diplomacy matters, but power matters more.”  Faced with rivals like Russia and China today, when push comes to shove, this is simply, as Mead puts it, realism.  

What is diplomacy, and what is its role?  In a way, Mead highlights a widespread lack of clarity on this point.  Usage of the word in mainstream media leaves an impression that diplomacy is what we do when we can’t or won’t commit military or economic resources to get what we want.  I.E. when some country is misbehaving, military force is the best corrective, sanctions are next best, and “diplomacy” is the last rung on the ladder.  Coup in Niger?  Send a diplomat.  Reporter or basketball player imprisoned in Russia?  Pursue a diplomatic solution.  For less dire circumstances, diplomacy is our work with others, usually friends, to concert actions or stances.  

In another perspective, diplomacy is a preferred, because ostensibly non-violent and non-coercive, mode of engaging the world.  If people would talk, we’d avoid war and end poverty.

In all these views, diplomacy is treated as a tool to make things happen.  Sometimes, with friends, or where others are afraid to oppose us, yes, words alone can induce a country to follow a course we would like.  In the ‘80s, Korean then-dissident Kim Dae Jung was reportedly spared potential execution because dictator Chun Doo Hwan was promised a White House reception.  But no amount of verbiage can make Kim Jong Un hand over an American soldier who ran into North Korea.  

It bears clarification, too, that economic aid or sanctions are tools in their own right, actions with tangible effects on others.  They are not diplomacy per se.

Rather than as an instrument of action, diplomacy should be seen as what imparts the meaning to any international actions we do take – whether of armed force, sanctions, aid, or anything else.  Sound diplomacy voices our priorities deliberately, keeps friends happy with us, defines our differences with adversaries, and keeps all of it coherent and consistent. 

Put another way, diplomacy is how a nation represents itself and its interests to the world.  Jeremy Black notes in his History of Diplomacy (p.77) how, in the old world of courts and kings, diplomats “represented their masters in the sense that when acting in a formal capacity they were to be seen as the sovereign,” as stand-in for their king at another sovereign’s court.  They carried their nation’s priorities and interests.

Mead cites the confused use of “diplomacy” in Afghanistan, where American diplomats took all the steps they saw as their duties, to no effect.   Ambassador Chas Freeman perhaps sees Afghanistan more as a case of bad diplomacy in its unclarity: “in 2002, we began moving the goalposts this way and that … Soon, no one could offer a coherent explanation of why we were fighting in Afghanistan.  You can’t accomplish a mission when you don’t know what it is.”

Overall, America lost a clear sense of mission with the demise of the USSR.  Your blogger can attest that Containment was bottom line and first priority for working diplomats until 1991.  To Mead’s point, the diplomacy of Containment rested on our military capacity, which was unmistakably oriented to that policy – the lesson of 1938 was alive and well, and our purpose was clear.  Since 1991 our diplomacy has not projected coherent meaning to our doings, and attempts to substitute it for power only indicate low commitment to the goals in question.

Today, the Biden administration has successfully bolstered alliances aimed at China, kept Ukrainian resistance to Russia alive, and engaged all sides in the Middle East. The question remains, though: to what end?  To turn our focus to climate issues?  To promote an image of peaceful American leadership?  What do all the moves cohere around?  Would any announced theme be backed by sufficient force if the world calls us on it?  If we cannot project a clear enduring purpose, what do our recent diplomatic successes add up to?  

Mead sees as axiomatic that our mission is to “preserve the American way of life and the security of our allies without triggering nuclear war.”  The question is: does America have a consensus on what that way of life entails?  Or on any national purpose, for that matter?  Would any doctrine endure a change of party in the White House?  

America faces a task of diplomatic construction.  We need to name an affirmative purpose, as strategist Ali Wyne alludes.  Any lasting purpose must transcend partisan politics, carry America’s deep common convictions, and offer coherent responses to the upheavals that today’s world throws off so capriciously.  Our diplomacy, and our diplomats, need to be able to name this purpose, to represent it credibly as our overarching drive, and for that credibility to have the capability to advise and influence civilian leaders on how to keep integrity in our purpose.  The world, and Americans, need to know automatically where we see our top priorities, where we will commit resources and resolve.  If that is clear and credible, then, yes, there will be more situations where others know how they fit in our priorities, so that our words, our diplomacy alone, will move them as we might wish.

The underlying base for an affirmative American purpose is embedded in America’s very creation.  The nation conceived itself in a creed of personal rights, equally endowed in all, and of government that exists to secure those rights.  Political partisans vilify each other, but both sides do so in the name of that creed.  Our various policies must cohere around a rationale that clearly traces back to that creed.  If our diplomats know that creed as an embedded professional capacity, they can advise political leaders of its implications, much as military professionals advise of the feasibility and implications of armed force.  In such a configuration, diplomacy can do its best job, imparting a coherent and consistent meaning to any and all US actions.  That’s how diplomacy really matters, by giving power its meaning and purpose.