Kitabı oku: «The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age»

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 …

Third, we can survive by shifting our mindset from maps and chaps to networks and coalitions. If our world view is shaped and defined by hierarchies, organograms and titles, we need to see the world afresh. I tried to apply these lessons in a review of the UK Foreign Office, released by the government in April 2016. Much media reaction focused on a suggestion from one envoy that diplomats should become more like the characters in 24 or Spooks. Hacks imagined an army of social media-savvy, digitally literate e-nvoys, new Internet pioneers putting the OMG into HMG.

But the more important message of the review was that in the Digital Age we need to move our organisations away from prioritising competences, hierarchy and inputs and towards those based on skills, networks and outputs. I hope the future Foreign Office will be less male and pale, more digital, more expert, and more flexible. The buccaneering diplomats on the walls of King Charles Street will soon be joined by portraits of pioneering modern diplomats: the first female and minority ambassadors; the local staff who keep embassies running when events force UK colleagues to flee; the consular staff who rescue Brits in the most difficult of circumstances.

I am now trying to apply similar lessons to innovation at the United Nations. How can we use solar drones for better peacekeeping and provision of education? How can we create digital citizenship to increase security and reduce identity fraud and international crime? How can we use social media to engage and build a new generation of global citizens? How do we build the online rights to match the offline rights we have codified? How do we overhaul the global system for humanitarian giving? How do we respond to the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence? We need to find new ways to make the huge amounts of great work done by the UN more meaningful and accessible to the public. That takes more than a hashtag and a civil society side event. And leaders need to get much better at executing global policy, not simply announcing it.

Fourth, a successful century depends on us winning the argument for openness. There will be a temptation to pull up the drawbridge and focus purely on domestic security or nationalist politics. Let’s be in no doubt: a retreat from the world is the path to irrelevance and drift. Our national interest now depends on our internationalism. Countries are strongest when outward-looking, pioneering, exploring, welcoming. So we must marshal our best national instincts and values, and not our worst. In the battle with more isolationist and intolerant opponents, we have to show that our societies have not themselves become intolerant or isolationist.

This is not just posturing. We need a world view based on actually viewing the world, because our ability to keep pace with the dangerous political and social implications of technological change depends on our brightest minds coming up with ingenious solutions to problems, from climate change to economic instability. We should be unashamedly backing freedom of the Internet, so that the smartest people in the world can create together the extraordinary ideas that we don’t yet know we need. We should be proud when our countries are magnetic, and smart enough to recognise the economic potential of migrants and refugees, from Einstein to Jobs. We were all migrants once, and the twenty-first century might make us migrants again. This will be a century of people on the move: improved communications, the Internet, climate change and conflict will create more migration than any previous era. So we need to learn how to absorb, assimilate, coexist.

However insecure we will feel at times in the coming period, the answer to modern security threats is in fact more liberty, equality, fraternity. Not less. Or as Benjamin Franklin put it at a time of similiar uncertainty: “those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

The gadgets we marvel at today will not seem marvellous for long. The changes we wonder at won’t seem wonderful for long. The predictions we think are crazy won’t seem crazy for long. At moments in 2016, it appeared that technology had disrupted democracy. But used properly it still gives us the means to tackle inequality, improve cyber and economic security, outsmart the extremists, ensure that artificial intelligence helps not harms us, and make it easier for citizens to be part of government.

But that all depends on us – whether we are just connected to technology or can truly connect with each other through that technology. Because Facebook and Twitter didn’t create our desire to connect. Our desire to connect created Facebook and Twitter.

Progress zigzagged in 2016. So what can citizen diplomats7 do in response?

We can build networks in a time of institutional failure; consensus in a time of arguments; and bridges in a time of walls.

We can strive for expertise, patience, perspective and judgement in a time of fake news, sound bites and echo chambers.

We can aspire to be courageously calm, tolerant and honest in a time of outrage, intolerance and post-truth politics.

We can be internationalist in a time of nationalism, and open-minded in a time of closed minds.

Above all, we must remain curious in a time of too much certainty.

I’m now an ex-Excellency, a recovering ambassador. But I stand by my original conclusion – we need to forge a renewed spirit of global citizenship.

Diplomats will play our part. But naked diplomacy is too important just to leave to diplomats.

* Perhaps it is appropriate in a post-truth year that there is no strong evidence that either Twain or Shelley actually made these observations.

PREFACE

The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late

Shen Weiqin was the diplomatic adviser to Emperor Qin Er Shi during China’s Qin dynasty. It was a pretty cushy job, with steady access to the many pleasures of the royal court, a fair amount of arduous but interesting travel, and long periods of relative peace in which to study, opine and schmooze.

Shen knew his master’s mind and his master’s foibles, and was well suited to the role we now call a ‘sherpa’, the key adviser who helps the leader prepare for diplomatic summits. In modern statecraft, the sherpa’s assistant is called the yak, a metaphor that would also have meant something to His Excellency Shen Weiqin. The modern yak carries the mountains of paper generated and required by any modern diplomatic negotiation. Shen’s carried him.

Shen must have anticipated a routine month’s work as he set out for the Congress of the Tribes in Xianyang in 208 BC. His emperor’s armies had soundly thrashed the Chu tribe, burying alive all those who surrendered. This is what we now call hard power, though the Geneva Convention discourages such treatment of defeated opponents.

The victory left the field open for a strong peace treaty that would give Qin increased taxes and land rights, and the opportunity to recruit any remaining Chu warriors to fight for him. This would have been straightforward and probably routine business for Shen, who by this time had negotiated three such deals with the unburied survivors of other defeated clans.

Making peace is easier when you have shown you can make war. As he carried out his restorative and silver-tongued victor’s diplomacy, Shen was an early example of the statecraft that President Theodore Roosevelt aspired to many centuries later: ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick.’ Only the choice of weapon was more deadly.

But Shen was to be rudely awakened from his diplomatic comfort zone. The envoys representing the Chu tribe had developed a new and innovative means of passing messages quickly, by positioning rested horses along the key trade routes. This was the third-century BC equivalent of a decent social media account. As a result, they had gathered intelligence of an uprising in the west and of disquiet within Emperor Qin’s ranks, caused by the despotism of his favourite and most intimate adviser, the flamboyant eunuch Zhao Gao (who deserves his own book). Shen’s diplomatic opponents were able to use this crucial information to hold out for a much better deal than they would otherwise have got.

Shen had been outmanoeuvred at his own game. In modern language, his diplomacy had been disrupted. The chastened and no doubt increasingly saddle-sore envoy returned with trepidation to his master to report the bad news.

As is probably already evident, Emperor Qin was no shrinking violet. The previous year he had tricked his elder brother, the rightful heir to the Qin dynasty, into committing suicide. Mercy had not got him his throne, and was not going to help him keep it.

In this case, Qin decided to punish poor execution with slow execution. Shen was tied to a wooden frame and ‘slow-sliced’, a particularly gruesome demise involving the methodical removal of 999 body parts in random order as drawn from a hat: death by a thousand cuts, give or take. The process, ‘lingchi’, literally means ‘ascending a mountain slowly’, a metaphor that resonated with his pre-summit diplomacy in a way that Shen was presumably unable to relish. His diplomatic failure was classified by the emperor as an act of treason, and so no opium was administered to ease the pain.

It is not recorded at what point in the three-day process Shen passed away. But his grisly exit provided evidence for Lu You, one of history’s first human rights activists, to argue in 1198 for the abolition of lingchi, which is the only reason we now know about the case. Again, probably no consolation to poor old Shen.

Shen discovered the hardest way that diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.

In today’s diplomatic services, the consequences for poor performers are more time-consuming yet less draconian than they were for Qin. But given that the alternative to peacemaking is often war, our diplomatic failures and mistakes can still have the gravest fallout.

It matters that we get it right.

Historical tales of grisly deaths aside, formal diplomatic encounters with contemporary Asian governments are friendly but often fairly dry affairs. Perhaps it is the heat, the time difference, or the lengthy delays caused by translation. With our Chinese interlocutors it was often striking that the army of note-takers stopped writing when their leader spoke – not only out of deference, but because they already knew exactly what he was going to say. They would tell me that they found it odd that our prime ministers were so much less well disciplined.

So I was perplexed at one of these heavily choreographed exchanges to see several counterparts on the other side of the table stifling uncharacteristic giggles and passing notes. My diplomatic antennae were well attuned to spotting potential gaffes, especially those that would appeal to our mischievous travelling press lobby, ever ravenous for stories of incompetence – working with the UK media for the UK government is often like playing for a football team whose own fans have decided should be relegated.

Trying not to disturb my prime minister as he made a complex case through a flustered translator for the rebalancing of the global economy, I scoured the room for evidence of a problem, without success. Eventually I called over one of the embassy experts, who after some deliberation pointed out that it was my name plate in front of me (the wording of which was of course visible to everyone except myself) that had caused such confusion and hilarity. Someone had translated my job title – Private Secretary to the Prime Minister for Foreign Affairs – as ‘Intimate Typist for the Prime Minister’s Affairs Overseas’.

There are many, too many, bureaucratic positions around the average modern leader, but few leaders have an official to type out their love letters.

I spent four years in 10 Downing Street in the role of Private Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under three very different prime ministers: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. I also helped to advise Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg in his first months in the role, giving me experience of the unholy trinity of major UK political parties.

Though the job involved little intimate typing, it did include briefing the prime minister, joining his official meetings, and circulating an account for ministries and embassies to digest and act on. The unofficial motto of the Private Secretary should be that ‘my job will be done when historians have read what I think he thinks he ought to have said’.

In reality, writing these records was only cover for the real job: a combination of policy adviser, journalist, negotiator, bag carrier and relationship manager. Occasionally I was also a therapist, administering reassurance and encouragement at tougher moments, or urging humility at better ones. Sometimes I was a translator, who could follow a prime minister and a French president to places that the female interpreter could not reach (no doubt happily for her). I was a recruitment consultant, who suddenly found senior ambassadors awaiting news of their next position to be very friendly. And even a bodyguard, as when Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe emerged from a dark corner of a United Nations summit to seek a handshake with Gordon Brown. I wrote speeches, dreamt up policy initiatives, and procured ProPlus for David Cameron from President Obama during a long summit session when two European Commission leaders had droned on for even longer than usual. I was once job-shadowed by a prince.

Few jobs in government are more gruelling than that of Private Secretary. The first voice I heard each morning, and the last each night, was the relentlessly cheerful No. 10 switchboard. The operators could gently ruin another weekend with skills that would be the envy of the smoothest diplomat. The hours meant that I would often bath my son in the Downing Street flat, and once took him to a Top Secret meeting I was chairing – he was only three, so I hope that no official secrets were compromised. During one demanding period, my wife interrupted a long weekend conference call between the prime minister and a head of state to inform us all in undiplomatic language of how fed up she was that I was still on the line. After an awkward moment to digest this, the PM suggested gently that it was probably time to end the call.

But it is worth it. Jobs in Downing Street give you a ringside seat, and often a place in the ring. Having watched the US election result alone in Gordon Brown’s office in the early hours of the morning, I woke him to tell him of President Obama’s victory. I was in the car with Gordon Brown as he left the prime minister’s official country house at Chequers for the last time, and with David Cameron as he arrived there for the first time. I listened in to President Obama’s farewell call to Gordon Brown as I walked to David Cameron’s study to brief Cameron on his imminent congratulatory call from the White House.

Few jobs can be as exciting, and such a privilege. They give you an extraordinary insight into moments of history, and the characters who shape them.

But this is not a book about my time in Downing Street, and nor is it one in which I talk about private conversations between leaders or the confidential issues on which I have worked as a diplomat – I don’t believe that public servants should write ‘kiss and tell’ books, which undermine trust between future leaders and their advisers. The anecdotes I use are purely illustrative, and the tip of the iceberg. The ‘Private’ is more important than the ‘Secretary’.

This is also not a book about foreign policy or international relations in the traditional sense of wars and treaties, maps and chaps, big powers and bigger egos. There are plenty of those written by much smarter and more knowledgeable people, and they won’t enjoy this one much. It is not a classic diplomatic memoir, in which the retired statesman – armed with hindsight, disappointment and accumulated grievance – explains why the world would be a better place if only all the pesky politicians, foreigners or fellow diplomats had listened to him more. Nor is this a classic book on diplomacy written by a leader either anxious to shape or defend their historical record,* or to burnish their statesperson credentials prior to a run for office.

Instead, I want to explain why diplomacy matters more than ever in the Digital Age, and not just to diplomats.

During my time as Private Secretary I saw technology changing statecraft. I worked for the last paper-and-pen prime minister, Tony Blair; the first email prime minister,† Gordon Brown; and the first iPad prime minister, David Cameron.1 When I started, we had to consider how policy would look on the Sky News ticker at the bottom of the screen: 140 words. By the time I left, we were judging how it would look on Twitter: 140 characters.

This shift represents wider tectonic shifts in communications, and therefore society. The iGeneration has more opportunity than any generation before it to understand their world, to engage with it and to shape it. In the years since 9/11 the globe has been transformed more by American geeks in dorms than al-Qaeda operatives in caves. Mark Zuckerberg will be remembered long after Osama Bin Laden.

But it has been citizens from Tunis to Kiev who took the ability to network that those geeks created and turned it into something extraordinary. In years to come, people may say that the most powerful weapon in this period of the twenty-first century was not sarin gas or the nuclear bomb, but the smartphone. We have seen the power of the best of old ideas allied with the best of new technology. Regimes can ban iPhones, but the freedom and innovation that they represent will get through in the end.

This new context changes everything. Increasingly, it matters less what a prime minister or diplomat says is ‘our policy’ on an issue – it matters what the users of Google, Facebook or Twitter decide that it is. Set-piece events are being replaced by more fluid, open interaction with the people whose interests we are there to represent.

So, escaping the politics, thrills and tensions of Downing Street, there was only one place to go to maintain the adrenalin. In 2011, I moved to the epicentre of many of the earthquakes shaking the Middle East: Beirut.

My nineteenth-century predecessors as ambassadors to Lebanon went by horse, traversing the Levant region at a civilised pace that modern Lebanese traffic jams try to recreate. My twentieth-century predecessors went by air and road – one, Edward Spears, landed during the Second World War and commandeered at gunpoint the first car he saw.

By the time I got there, communication was digital. Living on the Road to Damascus, I anticipated revelations. From the beginning of my stay, it was clear to me that if we couldn’t win the argument for democracy, politics and coexistence in a country like Lebanon, we’d lose it closer to home. And that social media was a new and vital tool for us in fighting that battle, just as it was a tool for our opponents. We would need to go toe to toe, tweet by tweet.

Celebrity cook Jamie Oliver, as the Naked Chef, sought to pare back cooking to the essentials. In Lebanon, I came to realise that the diplomat needs to do the same (perhaps with an iPad to protect his modesty), while preserving the skills that have always been essential to the role: an open mind, political savvy, and a thick skin. I moved from being an intimate typist to being a Naked Diplomat.

Like the best traditional diplomacy, iDiplomacy is raw and human. The ‘tweeting Talleyrands’2 need to interact, not transmit. They will learn the language of this new terrain in the way they have learnt Mandarin or Arabic.

Equipped with the right kit, and the right courage, diplomats should be among the pioneers of the new digital terrain. They are already writers, advocates and analysts, albeit for a rarefied audience. They must now become digital interventionists. The most important thing social media does for us is not information management, or even engagement. It is that, for the first time, we have the means to influence the countries we work in on a massive scale, not just through elites.

This is exciting, challenging and subversive. Getting it wrong could start a war: imagine if a diplomat mistakenly tweeted a link to an offensive anti-Islam film. Getting it right has the potential to rewrite the diplomatic rulebook. A digital démarche,‡ involving tens of thousands, will be more effective than the traditional démarche by a single ambassador, because it can mobilise public opinion to change another country’s policy.

The Internet brings non-state actors into the conversation. That’s part of the point. Those we engage with will be a mix of the influential, curious, eccentric and hostile. Once they’re in, they can’t be ignored. Diplomacy is action not reportage, so diplomats will need to show that they can use these new tools to change the world, not just describe how it looks.

I ask colleagues who are not convinced about the power of these new digital tools to imagine an enormous diplomatic reception with all their key contacts. No serious diplomat would delegate such an event, as some delegate their Twitter accounts. None would stand in the corner shouting platitudes about warm bilateral relations, as do too many people via official social media channels. No one would turn up but lurk silently in the corner, as do too many on digital accounts. Better to be in the mix, sharing information in order to get information, hearing the best of the new ideas and confronting the worst. With or without the Ferrero Rocher.

When the way the world communicates changes, so must its diplomats. They transformed the profession when the ground was cultivated, when the stirrup was invented, when sea routes opened up, when empires rose and fell, and when the telephone came along. Someone once said that you could replace diplomats with the fax. They saw off the fax, and – in more recent years – the telegram. (Yes, in that order for the British Foreign Office.)

Now we have to prove that you can’t replace diplomats with Wikipedia, just because it knows more facts. You can’t replace diplomats with Skype, just because you can now speak to far-flung places over a broadband line. And you can’t replace diplomats with Twitter, just because you no longer need to shout from a real balcony to reach crowds of people. Diplomats must adapt their business and their mindset to these extraordinary and revolutionary new digital tools.

Many of us have made mistakes on social media, but the biggest mistake is not to be on it. It is survival of the digitally fittest.

We need to seize our smartphones.

But are we already too late?

* As Churchill said, ‘History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.’

† I once received an email from Gordon Brown at 3.45 a.m. Another time I showed him a document on my BlackBerry. I was pleased when he commented ‘This is good.’ But not for long. He clarified – ‘Not your paper, that’s hopeless, the scroll function.’

‡ French term for a formal diplomatic meeting, in which the ambassador passes on messages from his capital.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP?

‘Now listen, Mother dear,’ said Basil, ‘the Foreign Service has had its day – enjoyable while it lasted, no doubt, but over now. The privileged being of the future is the travel agent.’

Nancy Mitford, ‘Don’t Tell Alfred’ (1960)

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen has declared that ‘diplomacy – the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia – is dead’.1 He is not alone. Should diplomats be packing up their diplomatic bags and finding something more productive to do?

Diplomacy is easy when you are a country on the up. Representatives of other countries answer your telephone calls, seek you out, expand their embassies and trade delegations. Magazines put you on the cover and talk up your rise. Your leader gets invited to the country houses of his counterparts, keen to bask in his reflected vigour and success. Your business lounges fill up. You have the wind in your sails.

Diplomacy is easy when you have won on the battlefield. Your rivals or opponents are more inclined to see things your way, and your allies to cut you some slack. You can flex your muscles and set the terms.

Diplomacy is easy when your people are in a pioneering mindset. The diplomats who manage empires aren’t the people who build them. They are preceded by traders, explorers, innovators. The great civilisations were all built on great start-ups. Countries succeed when they have a magnetic quality, and an openness to the world around them: when they invest more in bridges than walls. When their world view is formed by having actually viewed the world.

Diplomacy is easy when the rules are clear, when nations are all playing on the same chess board. The subtle dance between the nineteenth century’s great European states had moments of great jeopardy, and in the end could not contain the shifts in the underlying tectonics of power. But, post-Napoleon, the key players all felt a shared interest in preserving a status quo. They spoke the same language, literally and metaphorically – they even ensured with touching but shrewd generosity that it was the language of the vanquished party. There was an elaborate code to their collective work, albeit surrounded by lashings of protocol, gallons of alcohol, fiendishly delicate etiquette, and the occasional deadly duel.

But diplomacy is hard when you are a nation or a region in real or perceived decline, when it becomes more difficult to get that White House meeting, or to schedule that telephone call. Or when your ‘podiums and president’ press conference is downgraded to a brief ‘pool spray’ photo-op. Or worse, a ‘grip and grin’. When the eyes of the world’s leaders flicker over your shoulder at the more hungry or vigorous new powers on the block.

Diplomacy is hard when your military power is on the wane, either because austerity is biting, or because your citizens are less willing to make great sacrifices to impose the nation’s interests, extend its influence or intimidate its opponents. ‘Gunboat diplomacy’ does not get you far without a gunboat. Or aircraft carrier. Threats of military force lose their potency when the dictator being threatened knows that your red lines* are easily erased.

Diplomacy is hard when you are competing with players with greater pioneering zeal, when your nation loses its creative edge or hunger for innovation. Diplomacy is hard when a lack of resources or confidence leads to an introspective national mindset rather than a drive to find new ideas, markets and sources of renewal. When your agenda is set by demagogues and tabloids. When even some on your own side want to throw in the towel and decline quietly and unobtrusively in a corner. When visitors to your embassy or ministry smell the faint whiff of genteel decay.

Diplomacy is hard is when the rules of the game are in flux, when there are players willing to turn the chess board over, when the international system is being disrupted from outside, or degraded from within. It is hard when tyrants and terrorists, pirates and persecutors, are setting the agenda. Diplomacy is hard in the periods when rival sources of power think that diplomacy doesn’t matter.

Yet the periods when diplomacy is hardest are also the periods when it matters most.

Much of the West is therefore in a phase of hard diplomacy. Diplomacy that wears out the soles of your shoes, runs up the air miles and telephone bills, forces you to innovate and adapt. During such periods of change and peril, we don’t need diplomats who arrive on a yak when the opposition has been and gone by horse.

Those who want to hammer the last nails into the coffin of diplomacy fall into three camps: diplomats no longer represent anything; diplomacy has been disrupted by technology; diplomacy has failed.

There are elements of truth in each of these arguments. If Google is more important than many states, is it not more important to be a Google ambassador than a national one? Aren’t diplomats simply courtiers, moving between hierarchies without recognising they are part of the past? Can’t diplomats be replaced by sentiment analysts with Skype accounts? If diplomats did not exist, why would we need to invent them in the twenty-first century?

Diplomacy does indeed face a crisis of legitimacy and trust.

Traditionally, representation was the main point of diplomats.2 If you were your prince’s person in a rival court, it mattered less what you did than what you were: the symbol of power and prestige. An ambassador’s legitimacy and power depended on the support of a small number of people in his ruling elite, sometimes just one.

In the era of growing democracy in the West – the last 200 years or so – that elite grew, but not dramatically. A British ambassador making pre-posting calls, getting his marching orders, would not need to step outside Westminster.

When states become weaker, so do those who represent and derive authority from them. As the trend continues towards global decision-making for the big global issues on the one hand, and greater localisation and individualisation on the other, where does a state’s representative fit in?

But the reality is that governments and states are not finished yet. Although they no longer have overwhelming dominance of information or even knowledge, they do remain the means through which questions of national interest are determined. As long as we have states, we will still need diplomats to mediate between them. They still have a niche.

So diplomats will need to redefine their legitimacy, and reconnect to the new sources of power. I was proud to be Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Lebanon, and put the letter saying so on the wall. But I also felt that I was Her Majesty’s Government’s Ambassador. And even the Ambassador of the British People. When there were monarchies, diplomats represented kings and queens. When there were great states, they represented great states. Now, with the dispersal of power, can they more credibly claim to represent the people of their countries?

We don’t yet know whether people will respond to the threats of the twenty-first century with more nationalism or less. Diplomats who derive their legitimacy solely from states must secretly hope for the former. Diplomats who see themselves as embodying something more must hope for the latter.

The role of diplomats is being transformed faster than at any point in history. But no one has come up with a better idea. Diplomacy existed before states, and will exist after they have ceased to be the principal form of geographical power. We are in uncharted waters – but we always have been. This book will try to make the case for diplomats to remain on the boat.

The second critique also has elements of truth. Diplomacy does indeed face disruption, by technology, and by others who can do diplomacy more effectively. Being in office no longer means being in power.

Digital technology will transform the way that governments engage with citizens. But while the Internet defies boundaries, most governments find it hard to escape the confines of national responses. Data is not sufficiently shared and regulation struggles to keep pace.3 Governments have not yet tackled the big questions on the balance between privacy and transparency, or found the right formula to nurture innovation.

Who disrupts diplomacy? Many analysts, businesses, commentators are already well under way.

Traditionally, diplomats divided their rivals into three groups. First, the obviously hostile, such as great power rivals or aggressor states. In periods such as the run-up to the Congress of Vienna or the Cold War, this was straightforward and neat. We had clear enemies, definable nemeses. You could chart them on a map. You could kill them in a Bond film.

Secondly, the apparently friendly states, such as great power allies, who were nevertheless competing to get a bigger slice of the cake. For the UK, Europe has fallen into this category since the Second World War. We have vastly similar values and objectives, yet still contest resources and influence, and argue over the decisions where we need to pool sovereignty. Je t’aime, moi non plus.

Third, the local rivals for authority and influence – in the case of many ministries of foreign affairs, this was usually the Treasury or the prime minister’s office.

No country faces permanent enemies or can count on permanent allies. The first, most hostile, group are now more likely to be transnational, non-traditional actors – terrorists, renegade states or information anarchists. This could be the throat cutters and concert bombers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the despots in North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe, or Julian Assange.

The apparently friendly second group are now more likely to be those competing for business or security influence, including the media, NGOs and multinationals. They will be the disruptors – think tanks, big data analysts, social media gurus – who are replacing diplomats in their ability to analyse or shape foreign policy. A proliferation of organisations now compete with diplomats by selling geopolitical analysis. The best are the Brookings Institution, Chatham House and Carnegie.4 Or the service providers who are moving ahead so fast with the way they respond to customer needs that they make government efforts – passports, visas, commercial introductions – look hopeless. I’d also include the new technology companies, with whom governments will increasingly contest key ground.

The local contenders are probably still the Treasury.

Diplomats need to understand those groups of rivals, the tools available to them, and why and how they are deploying them. They need to use social media more effectively than terrorists. They need to understand JPMorgan Chase or Google’s diplomatic machinery in the way that they understand China’s. They should be competing with the best technology they can lay their hands on. They should be on a digital war footing.

I often ask people who they think will have the greatest influence on the twenty-first century – Google or Britain? Increasingly, most say Google. I want to show in this book how they can be proved wrong. Google has been a technological superpower for a decade. Britain has been one for at least 250 years.

There will be many times when digital media feel to professional diplomats an obstacle to traditional diplomacy. We saw over the August 2013 debate on whether to strike Assad for using chemical weapons the way that digital debate makes it harder to play diplomatic poker, with the UK and subsequently US positions shifted as a result of online and offline disagreement. Governments are already much more restrained than a century ago, particularly when it comes to going to war. That is a good thing, but it makes it harder to make the threats necessary to stop our opponents taking territory or killing civilians. Our bluff is too easily called.