Diplomacy for grand strategy is not psychobabble or social work

OPINION:

Despite talk about the future of diplomacy, it is more shameful to be ignorant of its recent history. 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.

The young United States brought about a sea change to diplomacy upon entering the diplomatic stage. Rising from a collection of seaboard colonies with the population of modern New Zealand or Tudor England to a great power, it did not miss a beat in the tenor of its diplomatic language. For there was an American style of communicating with other powers that was unique, exemplary and natural to the American character.

The United States entered that stage when monarchical courts dominated international relations and when the only other republics were moribund. The Founding Fathers refused to wear a Venetian mask and rejected a semimonarchical republic such as the Dutch republic.

So they discovered a new style and idiom and conducted themselves with modest decorum that refreshed diplomatic practice without disrupting it.

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.

Americans conformed to etiquette to the letter but offered an entirely new spirit of conduct. Sobriety, clarity and honesty characterized the new demeanor.

The business ethos of a commercial, farming and seafaring nation, and of lawyers, was more of a distinction at Versailles, the Court of St. James or St. Petersburg than orders and decorations and titles. The mild irony of a liberal republican polity undercut the Old World like an incoming weather front.

What is curious about the recent history of diplomacy is that there was a time when Americans were not “dialogical,” and they did not talk for talk’s sake. Americans did not smile, in their diplomatic style, even when genuinely affable.

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.

But as British Ambassador Julian Pauncefote (1828-1902) noted, beware when the Americans serve you Champagne at lunch.

In argument, Americans were stonewalling, tough beyond words and ominously quiet. One is reminded of what Diego Riviera was warned when he quarreled with Nelson Rockefeller over the Detroit murals: “Don’t you argue with these people. These are calm, cold people.”

The solidity of the Union government against Britain and France during the American Civil War is to be noticed. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward instilled this spirit.

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.

Instead of talk and empty professions of amity, there were warnings, guard rails, and managed confrontations. People then played cards for relaxation in the evening. Card games taught the art of calculus and combination without doing sums. It taught poker-faced dissemblance that was not dishonesty.

The American way of power was too secure for deceit. Always behind that unembellished pencil lead prose lay a vein of irony and mock surprise of the “you don’t say” variety.

Edward John Phelps (1822-1900), a Vermont man who was President Grover Cleveland’s ambassador to Britain, could break into a young man’s pert mock respect to the marquess of Salisbury that left no doubt as to true feeling.

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.

Before the CIA or MI6 existed, diplomats had to manage networks of informers. This is doubtless a good reason why the Custom of Nations agreed upon diplomatic immunity once ambassadors became permanent envoys.

The Adamses had to deal with a Palmerston on the one hand and yet do deep intelligence work under his nose on the other. Henry Adams did not fight in the field as his Harvard classmates did, but he ran an improvised Secret Service and kept on the tail of the Confederates on British soil.

This is why T.S. Eliot wrote his poem “Gerontion” about him and why James Jesus Angleton was right to identify it as a great poem about intelligence work. It is all of John Le Carre condensed into a few lines. What the British do in a book, an American does in a few lines, like a lightning flash.

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.

With modest resources, Charles and Henry Adams became colleagues in statecraft with Seward and Lincoln. They saved their talk and constant engagement for their fellow Americans. With the British, they had to man a two-man border post in London.

Palmerston, although opposed to slavery, was consumed with ire in the United States. Even in 1864, at 80, he was fertile in belligerent proxy war schemes to frustrate Washington and deter an invasion of Canada. Much is owed to them for their probity, calm and modesty in danger.

In doing so, they did Britain a huge favor. They altered the tone and practice of British diplomacy. Lord Lyons, the British ambassador in Washington, trained a generation of British diplomats known as the Lyons School of British Diplomacy. Britain and the United States managed the rise of the latter and the crossover of power relations with the former by knowing how to argue and how to save their talk.

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.

From the first days of American diplomacy, other powers were assured that the American Revolution did not destabilize the family of nations. An ambassadorship was not a pulpit.

When the French Revolution struck, the difference between the administration of George Washington and of the Jacobins and the Directory was evident to all. Modesty and confidence before futurity were the American comportments.

Yet the United States is the great anti-empire, defined by 2½ centuries of resisting empires. That is its dispensation. It has succeeded through deeds and strong diplomacy, and by arms and its economy, not by talking adversaries into boredom and disrespect.

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.

This meant that when the United States had to warn France and Britain off in North America, or the Americas, anytime between 1798 when the Franco-American quasi-war broke out and the Anglo-American dispute over the Venezuelan border from 1895 to 1899, its language was heeded.

One might say that the United States’ diplomatic language adhered to a gold standard when every other power was on silver. Now it is liquid and subject to strong inflationary pressure.

No doubt there is a social side and personal touch to diplomacy. Americans did not fail at that. But they did not pretend to be what they were not.

President William Howard Taft was the most cordial, generous, warm and strong president to be read in original letters for the private exchanges with the Washington diplomatic corps. He used language when illness or accident befall a diplomatic family worthy of Henry James.

He exemplified what was then a Christian republic, yet even in an age of secularity, we would find this language telling and becoming. Without a court or a monarch with a royal household to keep order in, presidents of the United States assumed the persona of a host among the guests.

So please, be tough, calm Americans again. Renew your youth like the eagle.

Diplomacy at the level of grand strategy is not psychobabble or social work. It is not the traffic on a freeway that commercial diplomacy is, for example.

It is a sail appearing over a horizon. It is a stranger riding into town with a rifle packed away and something to say.

• Bernard F. Cadogan is a historian based at Oxford University and a former adviser to the New Zealand government.