Let me start with two personal stories

In 2010 I was the European Political Director in the British Foreign Office. One of my briefs was Gibraltar, that famous rock at the mouth of the Mediterranean transferred by Spain to the UK in the early 19th-century, and what diplomats call “an irritant to the bilateral relationship” ever since. It was my role to represent the UK in what was called trilateral talks between the UK, Gibraltar, and Spain. For Spain this was a significant concession; their traditional position was not to talk to Gibraltar direct, and only to talk to us about Gibraltar, without Gibraltar in the room. The Gibraltar Chief Minister of the time was both a great master of detail and a great master of dramatic emotion. At one point he declared himself shocked and offended by something our Spanish colleague had said; he got up and stormed out of the room, saying the talks were over. But did he really mean it? Or was the drama a show, designed to break the rhythm of the negotiations and give him time to shift position with dignity? I thought it was probably the latter. So after leaving a few minutes, I got up, went to his room, coaxed him with a face-saving formula which allowed him to return a few minutes later to the talks, which then went swimmingly. There was plenty of common ground, but human nature made it complicated to arrive there. Just another day in the diplomatic world.
Remembering that episode, I was taken back a further 35 years, to the front room of my family home in south London in 1975.
When I was a teenager my mother, I, and my sister lived together in London. This was stressful for my mother since she was working in an inner-city school as well as bringing us up; my father was away from home on a royal naval ship; my sister was going through all kinds of growing-up pains. All that stress led to cross words and tears between my sister and mother; what you might call a breakdown in negotiations. And it was then my job to imitate Henry Kissinger and undertake shuttle diplomacy between the two parties, however long it took, until they came back to the same room and we could resume our 1970s lives. Because I knew that they, too, wanted to be coaxed back into the room. There was common ground, if only we could get there.
So you could say that diplomacy is in my blood; finding common ground; keeping the channels of communication open.
This series of lectures of which tonight's is the third of five has tried to look at what diplomacy is going to be like this century. We have already heard from Koji Tsuruoka, Japan's former trade negotiator and current Ambassador in London, about the centrality of the Asia Pacific to this century, as the heart of the US/China relationship which will define global power for the century, and the location from next year of over half of the global economy. We've heard Yamina Karitanyi, Rwanda's outstanding High Commissioner 25 years on exactly from the Rwandan genocide talk about the way success in Africa this century will be about breaking free of the donor/recipient mentality, and about how to balance democracy and development effectiveness. In a few weeks we will hear from one of the world's leading and most original science diplomats, Peter Gluckman, who is one of those credited with the concept of Chief Scientific Advisers to Prime Ministers, and who will talk about science diplomacy: the global fight against contagious diseases, climate change, and other transnational scientific challenges. And finally in October, we will be hearing from Nick Burns, one of the greatest US diplomats, currently at the Kennedy School of Government, an expert in the values-based and rules-based diplomacy which has steered the world post-war, and which is unarguably under serious assault from a whole range of fronts.
Tonight I want to start not with a great thesis on 21st-century diplomacy, but some of the lessons I personally have learned, including by watching some of the masters and mistresses at work. Diplomacy is fundamentally about how we work with those who are different from us, and how we identify where we don't differ so much, or at least can understand each other. Samuel Beckett memorably talked about language as a cataract, making communication bumpy and jumbled; diplomacy is all about smoothing that cataract, getting the water to flow less confusedly. Some of this is small detail. Some is understanding whether or not you really are trying to change the world, or simply take a position for domestic consumption. I want to say a little about how the best diplomacy often requires more negotiation at home than abroad. And then I want to say a little about how, this century, the classic post-war dualism of diplomatic practice realist versus idealist has been replaced by a new and more fundamental dualism between rules-based and power-based diplomacy.

Personal diplomacy

Some of this is really small scale. When I applied to the Foreign Office, the great Peter, Lord Carrington (who died in 2018 and who Chris Patten describes as his best boss ever) had just resigned as Foreign Secretary in the wake of the Argentine action in the Falklands. I noticed that whenever on TV he came into a room, he had his jacket buttoned up; but as he sat down he undid his jacket button, which gave an imperceptible impression of a man both confident and relaxed. I started trying to do the same thing. On a 21-year-old it didn't really have the same impressiveness as on a Foreign Secretary. But it taught me that the greatest diplomats are deliberate about the smallest things.
Good diplomacy does involve understanding all the little things which make up your interlocutor's judgements of you, both conscious and imperceptible; and interpreting all the evidence which their behaviour offers you of their good faith, their nerves, their anger or their shock. Understanding whether a smile means your interlocutor is happy or awkward depends on the culture in Asia it is more likely to be the latter, awkward; in Europe the former, happy; and in Russia a smile often means and is seen as weakness. Understanding whether the Chief Minister of Gibraltar really was leaving the room in disgust, or really wanted to be invited back. Understanding whether my sister really wanted to be upstairs angry in her room, or whether she wanted to come back downstairs. And sometimes when a person displays anger, it can be a clever tactic to change the dynamics of a discussion, putting them at the centre of the power games rather than anyone else as President Trump can do very effectively.
In diplomacy the words we use can be very bland indeed; the professional will try to give away as little as possible during a negotiation. So you need to know, when you are negotiating say arms reductions, or air rights, if a person is smiling with both their mouth and their eyes or not; whether their crossed arms and crossed legs indicate defensiveness “I am not going to give you that!” - or tension “I fear you are winning this game!”; whether their leaving pauses in the conversation’’like that’.. is aggression (“I want to make you feel ill at ease”, as I have experienced with some elderly African leaders) or consideration (in Japan, leaving space in conversations allows you both to think and take your time, and is intended as an act of kindness) ; whether they have a “tell” the obvious clenching of the hand, repeat crossing and uncrossing of the legs, or scratch of the nose, which indicate that they really are angry, or on the back foot, or lying. So in the diplomat's toolkit, an ability to interpret faces and bodies is as useful as it is to a Poker player in Las Vegas’. though it won't earn you as much money.
As for the practice of diplomacy, the key point is that the best diplomats aren't necessarily the most “diplomatic”. They just use styles which work on that day, in that context, with those people. In Japan, calm, polite clarity is essential. In much of Africa and the Middle East, a style which puts a personal relationship front and centre is absolutely necessary sometimes to the point where it's not obvious to a British participant that anything has been achieved at all. In dealing with Russia, China and perhaps now the US, showing “strength” is key. Saying to a Chinese official what you think he or she wants to hear doesn't get you respect from Beijing, and is more likely to confirm in their mind that they have you where they want you.
In the EU, or in NATO, or in the Commonwealth, the culture of negotiation is fundamentally based on being and looking “constructive”, very often with an appeal to “Common values” or a “common good”. I once attended a NATO Summit with new members from the East. Consensus was emerging around an issue, but one new member was standing out against it. The Secretary General quietly urged the representative to understand that, unless this was a matter of critical national interest, now was the time to fold with dignity; and behind the scenes, they were told that always ensuring they had constructed a ladder to climb down was an essential part of NATO and European diplomacy. This may not fit with the particular current British view of plucky sovereignty, but it has for more than six decades been the way in which peace is kept. It has been backed up in the European Union by something called “The Luxembourg Compromise”, which meant that any country could cite the Luxembourg Compromise and they would not be pressed further. The paradox is that, precisely because member states had this right, they very rarely chose to use it. It was used only ten times between its creation in 1966 and 1981.
The challenge in diplomacy comes when those two cultures “strong” diplomacy and “consensus” diplomacy - meet and don't understand each other. When the East European state joins NATO and can't understand why its normal behaviours are no longer acceptable. Or equally, when a negotiator from a consensus culture country visits China or Russia, offers a concession, and discovers that China or Russia pockets it and moves on, rather than using it as a prelude to mutual concession and agreement. It's not surprising that this leads to bad feelings!
There is a whole field of emotional diplomacy which I think has yet to be explored; and I'm indebted to Todd Hall of St Anne's College here at Oxford for the phrase “emotional diplomacy” I should add that he has just published a book with that name which I'd encourage you to read.
All of which is a long way of saying that good diplomacy means understanding the culture, norms and rules of behaviour of both the country you are working with (in some ways the more straightforward part) and the culture, norms and rules of behaviour of your own country (which is often much less easy to see in full).
We are very often more perceptive about others than ourselves. I remember one very domestic example of getting this wrong. When I first moved to Pakistan in 1994, I wanted to buy myself a car. The Japanese used to make a great little car called the Suzuki Mehran, a little less robust and less spacious even than a Fiat 500. It was famous for being sold without a seatbelt this you could purchase as a luxury item, at a tax rate of 100%, so very few of us did. The conversation reached the point of bartering. The salesman set his price. I countered with another price, but (to my mind subtly, and with a mild joke) suggested that price would include the seatbelt for free. He accepted my price, and all was done until I realised that he'd completely missed my subtle seatbelt deal. I just hadn't put it clearly and confrontationally enough. I ended up being upset that he'd broken the trust I thought we had; he was upset that I hadn't spelled my conditions out clearly enough. All in all, it was a mess; and had I understood that the British can be much too subtle for their own good, I'd have been more explicit, and probably got a better deal.
You will all have your own theories about the British character, but among the lessons I think I have learned about how to deal with the British I would include:
• They are congenitally indirect in speech, but will often think they have spoken straight and frankly
• They distrust the use of emotion in diplomacy, and aren't good at dealing with it. So an interlocutor who can use histrionics or bullying can often embarrass the British into a corner
• They really are very pragmatic, to the point not just that the French despair, but where appeals to principle can fall on deaf ears (I remember one continental European diplomat saying that, for a pragmatic nation, we objected in principle to an awful lot of European legislation)
• They are excellent at humour; but humour isn't much good if others don't get it. A British speech which opens with humour is regarded by the British as an endearing ice-breaker which establishes trust; but to a Japanese or German interlocutor, more often as a sign of lack of seriousness, which can undermine trust. The fact that I started my speech today with a humorous personal anecdote will have worked well with some of you, but others will have felt it indicated I wasn't the serious speaker you expected.
Some of you will know the story of the British Ambassador to the UN. A New York magazine in the sixties asked the Soviet, American and British Ambassadors in New York what they wanted for Christmas. The Soviet Ambassador wanted “the march of global socialism”. The American Ambassador wanted “a world of liberty and freedom.” The British Ambassador said that for Christmas he wanted “a box of crystallised ginger”. Does that endear him to you, or undermine him?
So one way of thinking of diplomacy is in that very personal and emotional sense: how to interpret others' behaviour, understanding how you come across, how to know whether you operate in an environment based on consensus culture or a more confrontational culture. Those skills are timeless.
But another way of looking at diplomacy is systemic not personal. Let me start at home. It was always an old-fashioned and trite criticism that the British Trade Department looks after trade, the Environment Department looks after the environment, the Defence Department looks after defence, and The Foreign Office looks after foreigners. They don't they look after British interests overseas. But the extent to which foreign policy is about what happens at home isn't often enough understood.
The founding Editor of “The Economist”, Walter Bagehot, wrote an outstanding book on the British constitution in the nineteenth century in which he talked about the difference between the dignified and the efficient parts of the British constitutional make-up. The efficient were those parts which actually did things and made a difference fundamentally the government and parliament and the dignified the monarchy and much of the symbolism. His point wasn't to denigrate the dignified, but to understand that for a constitution to work well you needed both parts to function smoothly, and you needed to be very clear-minded about which part is which.
I would argue that foreign policy is similar. There is the efficient actual deployment of peacekeepers to a war zone, actual trade negotiations, lobbying of a foreign government which leads them to introduce legislation to end the death penalty. To be efficient you have to know what the scope of the real world is. You have to be pragmatic to achieve your ends, as well as ambitious.
Then there is what Bagehot would call the “dignified” and theatrical, and what I might nowadays call the rhetorical diplomacy, which is not really interested in changing facts on the ground, but with setting out a position. Sometimes this can be reasonable a small European country will not be able to change the actions of say North Korea, but it is decent for them to set out their views on a North Korean nuclear test; a British minister asked by a Member of Parliament about her views on a natural disaster in the South Pacific can express solidarity and compassion without many means to change the situation.
Being rhetorical isn't always a bad thing. Grand rhetoric can summon audiences out of a sense of helplessness, and make them realise that “yes we can”. Sometimes rhetoric is a great thing if its passion and logic persuade people to expand their sense of the possible or increase their sense of responsibility. I do think any diplomat and any politician should learn the tricks of the trade from the Greek Schools of rhetoric; devices such as aposiopesis, pausing mid-sentence’ for effect or the clap trap, three phrases (“faith, hope, and love”; “liberte, egalite, fraternite”) which almost force the audience into applause.
But there are also occasions when rhetorical diplomacy is not clear-eyed, and believes its own rhetoric. When it is easy and popular to condemn an action by a foreign leader whose intentions are good but whose room for manoeuvre and survival are seriously constrained (think Aung San Suu Kyi); when it is easy and popular to criticise someone who therefore finds themselves compelled to fight back, making a bad situation worse (think Michel Barnier, or Jacques Delors); or (worst of all in the current climate) describing a complex situation as simple, with simple remedies, when in fact it is deeply intractable, and persistence and tenacity are more effective than rhetoric (think perhaps Syria, or Congo, or dare I say it British membership of the EU).
Of course, we too operate in a world of political constraint. One friend of mine from a developing economy said that in his country he had the freedom of speech; what he didn't have was the freedom from arrest having exercised his freedom of speech! There are also things which European and north American governments and politicians cannot say or do and then stay in power or office. It is unacceptable in public to try to understand the motivation of terrorists you are immediately branded a terrorist sympathiser. It is unacceptable in public to try to understand what led Tony Blair to take us into Iraq you are then called an apologist for the war. It is pretty difficult to try here in Oxford, in public, to understand why the British people voted Brexit you are branded a Brexiteer yourself. These are the limits of democracy, perhaps. And I am certainly not foolish enough to make any of these cases in public today! But I do think it would be a helpful and honourable task at home for our political leaders to expand the realms of the possible, to increase our room for manoeuvre, so that we can do more which is effective and not unhelpfully rhetorical.
So we need to be as clear-eyed as we possibly can be whether we really are trying to make the world a better place, or whether we are primarily signalling our virtue. Whether we really want to be players in serious situations around the world, or whether we want to be in the spectators' stand, shouting at the visiting team and even more loudly at the referee.
Which leads me to my final thoughts on diplomacy this coming century. If being a player is a good metaphor, the key issue now, in 2019, is what are the rules of the game; and indeed, are there rules of the game?
It would be fair to say that the post-war world was divided between the West, the Soviet Union and its allies, and the developing or Third World. The West was dominated by the US, and as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times recently put it very well “US policy had four attractive features: it had appealing core values; it was loyal to allies who shared those values; it believed in open and competitive markets; and it underpinned those markets with institutionalised rules. This system was always incomplete and imperfect. But it was a highly original and attractive approach to the business of running the world.” The relations between the West and Soviet Russia and its satellites were tense and complex, but the one thing both sides strived to achieve was to make the relationships predictable and hence less tense. The stakes were very high; both sides held firm for many decades to their values, political and other; and both treated diplomacy and foreign policy as the ultimate strategic contest. The big debates in diplomatic theory were between the realists the Kissingers, Gromykos and the idealists the Carters, more recently the Robin Cooks. The realists argued that their job was to advance national interests and not export values, though they were happy to use the idea of values for many cynical purposes. The idealists argued that without a moral compass foreign policy would lead to endless conflict, and that the post-war global system was perhaps the greatest ever example of the diplomacy of idealism.
Sadly, until the Brandt Report in 1980, and well beyond, the developing world scarcely entered the minds of people in those other two worlds, other than as a battleground for that original Manichean struggle between the two blocs.
Fast forward to 2019, and it is an entirely different picture. One of the astonishing things about 35 years of being a diplomat is that you can have lived in two such completely different worlds.
I would argue that the two biggest schisms in diplomacy now are between strategic and transactional approaches; and between rules-based and power-based diplomacy. Let me explain a bit more what I mean by that.
President Xi of China is a strategic thinker. Prime Minister Abe of Japan is a strategic thinker. President Macron of France is a strategic thinker. All weigh up their national interests, opportunities, risks, and set a course. You may or may not agree with them. Chinese actions to advance their claims to South China Sea islands are driven by a long term objective which is realistic, even if against the interests of others in East Asia. Japan's interests in bringing an end to the 70-year state of war with Russia are clear, even if it leads them to take decisions which bring them into conflict with allies. France has a vision of its place in Europe which has been pretty consistent for over fifty years. Looking back at the Cold War, the actions of both sides for most of that period were driven by an entirely clear strategic vision of their global aims. When I became a diplomat in 1983 the Berlin Wall was still up and the Soviet Union was still apparently monolithic.
Transactional diplomacy is different. It emphasises deals, and it emphasises moving on. It worries less about precedent and more about opportunity. It is in some ways nimbler on its toes; Presidents Trump and Putin are the modern masters of transactional diplomacy. It's easier to outwit your competitors if you are transactional. The Russian annexation of Crimea was remarkably bold, a rapidly seized opportunity. So too the engagement of Russian troops in Syria while the Obama administration considered its position. President Trump's visit to Singapore to meet Kim Jong Un, his urging on Chairman Kim to “think about this from a real estate perspective; imagine those hotels on your beaches” and taking an executive decision to postpone US/South Korea military exercises was done at a speed which previous US administrations would have found impossible. Similarly recent US decisions on Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
And I have to say that, through 2018 and 2019, transactional diplomacy has been growing and dominant. Advocates of strategy and critics of transaction are on the back foot this year, and probably next year. The transactionalists can point to several successes.
And yet, and yet. Much though I think consistency can be an over-rated virtue, and constructive ambiguity a friend, this flexibility goes too far and in the end will never win against a strategic diplomacy. I hope it is not merely because of my age that I believe in the time needed to deliver a strategy, and distrust the brevity of transactional approaches. Strategic diplomacy understands the need to develop long term allies, to build long term rules rules for example that say you just can't get away with stealing territory by force of arms, in Crimea or Golan - , and to accrete an international culture. Transactional diplomacy believes you can just move on after your deal; all the evidence suggests that you can't. Do please come and listen in October to Nick Burns from the Kennedy School of Government here at Wolfson; he seems to me one of the most powerful voices making the case for strategic diplomacy this century.
Which leads to my second schism, between rules-based and power-based diplomacy.
Rules can sound constraining and dull surely we should burst free from our shackles, take back control, innovate.
Certainly there is a difference between a rules-based approach to diplomacy, and an approach which argues that the current rules should be unamended. The Bretton Woods System, the current UN Security Council, the G7, the way the Asian Development Bank operates all these are systems which were designed for a post-war world which has now changed. And they too need to adapt. The G20 more fairly represents the full range of global power. The permanent members of the UNSC need to be updated. The position of China in the Bretton Woods system needs to be strengthened. The key point is that the system still needs to be based on rules, even if updated. The risk is that if current rules are not updated, those disenfranchised will look at other ways of running their international relationships. Indeed I would argue that the best diplomacy involves changing the rules of the game, but not undermining the idea of rules of the game.
The international rule of law is a fragile creature. I remember being in London in the summer of 2011, when all of a sudden riots broke out across London, starting in Tottenham and over 48 hours spreading like wildfire, down south as far as Croydon, near where I was. Suddenly Londoners realised that law and order in London depended, critically, not on the number of police officers on the street, but the sense among citizens that law and order should exist. It was a construct we all chose to believe in.
The international rule of law is similar. Over the years the body of precedent has grown; Nazi fugitives from justice are found and tried; the European Union fines member states who do not honour their legal commitments; the backing of the UN Security Council is required for international military action; an International Criminal Court is established to investigate and try those accused of crimes against humanity. To the extent that these things work, it is because nations and governments choose to make them work; they do not wish to be treated as pariah states; they wish to develop international reputations as good global citizens. It is the power of reputation and moral suasion rather than gunboats and police forces. Good citizenship rather than an assertion of independence.
In an interview with the Financial Times recently Henry Kissinger was both characteristically profound and characteristically Delphic. He suggested that President Trump “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.” But, he added, “It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this or that he is considering any alternative. It could just be an accident.” Later he suggested that what the President might be presiding over was a collapse of the international rule of law: and if so, “America would become a geopolitical island, flanked by two giant oceans and without a rules-based order to uphold. Such an America would have to imitate Victorian Britain but without the habit of mind to keep the rest of the world divided as Britain did with the European continent.”
So, to avoid that fate, the international rule of law needs nurturing. I have seen a number of occasions when UK media have called for international action against a particular egregious behaviour by some unpleasant state. Successful international action, based on international law, enhances the reputation of international law. But any action which is unsuccessful undermines and diminishes international law, and the wise diplomat is one who asks not just whether such an action is right, but what its chance of success is. A morally right action which does not achieve its end is not noble, but actually impedes our ability to do morally right actions in the future. Grandstanding is not just short-termist. It also undermines our long-term capacity to enforce the rules.
So the best diplomacy is not just about understanding the rules of the game; it is about ensuring that there are rules of the game. If diplomacy is about building trust; and if trust is about building predictable behaviours; then rules are the heart of predictable behaviours. Rules bring moderation. And moderation is, I would argue, the most advanced and most civilised state a nation can reach.
We should all remember the words of that great British/Irish philosopher and parliamentarian Edmund Burke admittedly a spokesperson for conservatism when he said: “rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” At least in international law, he was spot on.
After my years in diplomacy, and in the midst of one of the most severe challenges to the international system I have encountered one where force and extremity, rage and frenzy are in such abundance the quiet and ineluctable force of a rulebook is one of the most powerful tools we have in international relations.

Conclusion

Let me end with a story to illustrate these themes. For some years I was based in Pakistan. Because of the war in Afghanistan the messy decade which followed the Russian withdrawal, and before the organised brutality of the Taliban rule it was not safe enough to have a British Embassy open in Kabul, so we would travel there from Pakistan. As some of you will know, Afghanistan has a remarkably diverse geography. We know the south well the Khyber Pass, the sharp mountain peaks, the valley hideaways. But the north of the country is very different. Mazar-e-Sharif, capital of the region, sits on a plain. The Oxus river, flowing down from the high Himalaya, marks the Afghan border with Uzbekistan to the north. Over the centuries that flat plain between the Oxus river and Mazar, originally infertile, has developed an elaborate series of irrigation channels, bringing food and prosperity to the region. The most significant decisions in these communities have always been who gets the water; when water goes one way, when the other. The people responsible for these decisions were the religious and political leaders of the community; as they got the balance right, the irrigation network spread, and with it the ability to make a living in the desert. They kept the channels open and the water flowing.
With the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and then the Mujahideen uprising, all this changed. The easiest way to undermine authority was to kill those in charge of the water. Short term deals were done to direct water in one way or another. But the long term effect was to guarantee that the whole area would dry up and return to desert. An elaborate system of balances, moderation and authority was replaced in a matter of a few years by a lawless, immoderate and partisan power structure. The channels clogged up. The water stopped flowing. We returned to desert.
I hope that's not a metaphor for the world over the next decade. The channels are still there; water is still flowing; we are not in an international desert. There are still leaders and governments with a visceral and passionate belief in taking time, in rules, and in strategy.
But we need to cultivate them, and the diplomats, young and old some of you here tonight - who support them in making the wise choices our world needs. The unassuming business of diplomacy. The critical work of diplomacy.

• Siblings portrait, 1977
• British Embassy Tokyo, 2013
• Meeting Minds in Asia, 2019