Jeremy Greenstock on Diplomacy

Shall we start with the book that dates back to 1917, Satow’s Diplomatic Practice? 

Satow’s was re-edited last year by Sir Ivor Roberts, the president of Trinity College, Oxford. It is the only book that explains both what diplomacy is and how it is organised across the world, with the UK at the centre. It’s a thick book, and it’s full of details and documents about all the world organisations – but it is an extremely interesting account of how diplomacy works and what its machinery does. As a diplomat I found that people don’t really understand what diplomats do. No Joe Bloggs sitting in the pub is going to read Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, but if you pick through it you will find some fascinating glimpses into what actually goes on in embassies, in international organisations, in governments when it comes to international relations.

Does the book home in on certain historical incidents or episodes? How is it organised?

It follows a fairly standard content list, which Satow originally put together in 1917, and has now been updated. It goes through a history of diplomacy and what diplomacy does and how it deals with politics and power. The book talks about the machinery of diplomatic relationships in countries, it talks about the technical side of diplomacy and its immunities, the way that embassies work in countries. It sets out in quite a lot of detail what the international organisations are and how they work. 

And the book is still relevant even though it dates from so long ago? Does it have relevance in the internet age? 

It’s been brought up to date six times, so this edition is from 2009 and it’s fully fresh and absolutely up to date. Your question about the relevance of diplomacy is a different one from the value of Satow’s book on diplomacy. Satow is explaining how diplomacy works and how diplomats work. What diplomacy achieves and why it’s necessary is a slightly different question.

Let’s go on to Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, and why you’ve chosen that.

The importance of Kissinger’s book is that it is fundamentally about power. It’s amazing how seldom people – newspapers, blogs, speeches – talk about power, but power is the raw thing at the heart of every political unit. The central unit in international affairs is the national government; in political affairs, there is no higher level of decision-making in the world than the national government. All the supranational stuff that goes on in the EU, the UN and NATO, is always a grouping of nation states. The councils of all these supranational bodies are representatives of the nation states. Even in the EU, in pillar one, countries can back out of things, if they really want to, as nation states.

What Kissinger does is relate diplomacy to power and to relationships between people of power. He does that by describing various stages that he’s observed of 20th-century American history – how Americans have tried to enlarge their interests and protect their nation and national sovereignty through diplomacy. He looks at the relationship between diplomacy and the use of force and the importance of individual leaders who hold power, and he talks particularly about the great power holders of the 20th century – Nixon, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, Reagan, Gorbachev. He goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to talk about the collective effort after World War I. 

Is it about realpolitik and his own personal views and experience or does he try to be more objective? 

Kissinger is a great figure of 20th-century diplomacy and therefore it is about his experience – you’re looking at diplomacy through the eyes of a great exponent of the diplomatic art. It’s about what went on around him, what went on that he had to try to promote, rearrange, manipulate and steer and how that worked and what the effects were. It’s about what he observed other people doing when he was subordinate to them – because he was only a foreign minister, not a head of state. He then relates his experience of the 20th century and his own diplomatic career to the new world order that he sees forming in the post-Cold War period. He is, above anybody else, the great link between the Cold War period and the post-Cold War period in terms of the practice of diplomacy and the effect of diplomacy. 

Is there a specific point that he makes that really stuck with you, that really rings true?

I think it is his realpolitik message. You can follow a diplomatic line of principle, as Woodrow Wilson did, and try and create a doctrine for collectivism – but power will always intervene, particularly at the national level and therefore you have to be prepared to create enough power to hold your own interests against competition from others. You have to be able to ward off, before there is the use of force – through persuasion, through words rather than weapons – the attacks that there may be on your interests and on your lines of activity. Increasingly, in the post-Cold War period, this is coming through in areas like trade, and attention being paid to the developing world, rather than between the great powers. He’s trying to explain how it needs to be adapted in this new era. But this book was published in 1995, and global change is running away from him. His example of how you relate power to interests and how you arrange a peaceful structure of international relationships round the circumstances of the age, is relevant in its lessons – but increasingly the world is looking different from the one he was looking at when he wrote the book.