Diplomacy for grand strategy is not psychobabble or social work WashTimesOpEd
We are back to the 19th century but with nukes, in case anybody has not noticed, and China is astride the footprints of Lord Palmerston and Bismarck.
From Benjamin Franklin at Versailles onward, it was plain dress and pencil lead prose diplomacy, even when Americans wrote their diplomatic notes and dispatches in ink or on typewriter, cable or telex. Diplomacy is not psychobabble or social work, nor is it mere courtesy, which is to say cortesia, the way of courts.
Reviewing the International Arbitrations between Britain and the United States between 1871 and 1926, we realize that diplomatic conversation with Americans was at best a laconic, stoic affair, at worst a barroom brawl, though using the most temperate language, and that socially, off the subject, cordiality, hospitality and respect marked the American way of power.
It managed to do so without zigzagging or improvising in an inconsistent manner because it had the disposition correct toward far-from-friendly opportunistic neutrals that might seek war in North America, as France did in Mexico and Britain did until the Palmerston government learned the result of the Battle of Antietam.
The admirable conduct of Charles Francis Adams and of his son Henry Adams at the American Legation in London rewards close study. One of the surprises of 18th- and 19th-century diplomacy is that ambassadors and ministers at the legation had Secret Service funds. Up until World War I, British ambassadors were having to deal with bodies at the bottom of elevator shafts and other untoward places in New York, as the Russian consulate general infiltrated the Irish Nationalists. And everybody tampered with anybody else’s diplomatic bags on express trains, in the mail vans and on ships.
Yet now, it is the culture that Americans do want to “talk.” Once, though, it was just as cultural in the days of the patrician republic not to do so, at least in the way we understand it now. And one kind of talking Americans refrained from was of ideology. What did President Franklin Roosevelt do when he was fed up with Hitler in 1938? He withdrew the U.S. ambassador, and the Germans reciprocated. This is not to counsel that now, but to warn that words have a price.
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