The naked diplomat: understanding power and politics in the digital age

277 Pages·2016·1.28 MB·English

by  Tom Fletcher

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Copyright
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com
First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Copyright © Tom Fletcher 2016
Tom Fletcher asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work
‘The Embassy’ (‘Sonnets from China XV’), from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden copyright © 1976
the Estate of W. H. Auden, by permission of Random House Inc.
Extracts from Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister copyright © 1980 Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay,
by permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd, www.alanbrodie.com
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design by Johnathan Pelham
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the
required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the
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decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval
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invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008127565
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008127572
Version: 2016-05-19
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Dedication
To Louise, without whom this book would never have been written.
To Charlie, Theo and Twitter, without whom it would have been written
much faster.
And to the colleagues who march towards the sound of gunfire, in
order to try to stop it.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PREFACE: The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late
INTRODUCTION: Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP?
PART ONE – Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of
Diplomacy
1. Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls
2. Diplomacy By Sea: From Columbus to Copyboys
3. Diplomacy’s Finest Century
4. From Telephone to Television
5. From E-mail to E-nvoys
6. What Makes a Good Diplomat?
PART TWO – Statecraft and Streetcraft: Power and Diplomacy in a
Connected World
7. iDiplomacy: Devices, Disruption and Data
8. The End of Secrecy? Assange, Snowden and the Death of Bond
9. Building New Power: Bombs, Books and Beckham
10. Using New Power: Only Connect
11. Selling Ladders for Other People to Climb Down
12. A Naked Diplomat
13. Envoy 2025
PART THREE – What Next?
14. Who Runs the Digital Century?
15. The Battle for Digital Territory
16. The Case for Optimism
17. A Progressive Foreign Policy ‘To Do’ List
18. Citizen Diplomacy
EPILOGUE: Valedictory
Acknowledgements
Further Reading
Notes
Index
About the Author
About the Publisher
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Epigraph
As evening fell the day’s oppression lifted;
Tall peaks came into focus; it had rained:
Across wide lawns and cultured flowers drifted
The conversation of the highly trained.
Thin gardeners watched them pass and priced their shoes;
A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive,
For them to finish their exchange of views:
It looked a picture of the way to live.
Far off, no matter what good they intended,
Two armies waited for a verbal error
With well-made implements for causing pain,
And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste with all its young men slain,
Its women weeping, and its towns in terror.
W. H. Auden, ‘The Embassy’
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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