The shrinking space for diplomacy

The need for foreign policy arises from the fact that the world is populated by multiple states, each pursuing its own interests. The challenge for a state is how to maximise its interests relative to other states; by the same token, it cannot define its interests in absolute terms. Finding the right balance is a complex but necessary exercise and diplomacy is the means to achieve it. Diplomacy inhabits the grey zone between black and white articulations of national interests. If national interests are articulated in absolute terms, then only victory or defeat in war can settle who prevails. The room for diplomacy shrinks towards irrelevance.

Diplomacy requires designated representatives of states or diplomatic agents to work the grey area to craft mutually acceptable compromises. By their very nature, these involve carefully curated inter-personal engagement and interaction. These diplomatic agents share a common ethos, a common idiom, and often elaborate and ritualised rules of engagement. Silence may speak louder than words; and words camouflage as much as they convey. Diplomacy is, therefore, a specialised and even sophisticated profession. It is demanding and there are certain attributes that diplomats are expected to master. Again, Benjamin Franklin articulates it best: “Sleepless tact, immovable calmness and a patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunders can shake.”

This echoes more ancient advice — contained in the 11th century Nitisastra of Kamandiki — for a royal ambassador: “He should patiently bear with abusive words (of the adversary) and himself avoid sensual impulses, and anger as well as sleeping in the company of others. He should by all means maintain the secrecy of his own feelings (or plans of action). On the other hand, he should ascertain the feelings of others.”

The art and craft of diplomacy that my generation of foreign service officers learnt from our peers, placed high value on careful deliberation and reflection, and discretion in communication. Maintaining credibility at all times vis-à-vis friend and adversary alike is indispensable. It is the most valuable asset in diplomatic interactions, especially in crisis situations.

Related to this is a careful separation of the domestic political space from the external. Diplomacy is outward-oriented; its target is a foreign state, not one’s domestic audience. Domestic politics will always influence foreign policy and the reverse is also true. A diplomat must be aware of the domestic fallout of foreign-policy decisions but the two must not be conflated. If diplomatic messaging is crafted to influence or win over domestic audiences, the whole dynamic of diplomatic interaction changes. One is no longer engaging in good faith with the representative of another state to manage or resolve outstanding interstate issues; the objective is to convince domestic public opinion how strongly national interests are being defended; how cleverly the other side is being bested. We have witnessed how a performative domestic political intent overrides the external imperative. Here is an example: A confidential understanding had been worked out with Myanmar to allow Indian security forces to pursue insurgents fleeing across the border during anti-insurgency operations. This very useful understanding was undermined by an Indian minister declaring publicly that Indian forces had pursued insurgents across the border into Myanmar and that this was a message to our neighbours not to play with India’s security. It made more sense to him to claim brownie points for domestic political ends but neglected the irreparable damage caused to a painstaking arrangement built patiently and quietly through diplomacy. Traditional diplomacy took place mostly out of public view, enabling officials to speak more freely and explore positions that diverged from official declarations. Sometimes, it is calculated ambiguity that enabled progress in negotiations; at other times, greater clarity and precision. The objective was always to get the best deal for the country rather than the best-sounding deal. This does not imply that “packaging” a deal is not important but it is secondary to its substance. The two must never be confused.

This longstanding architecture of diplomacy is under strain in the age of social media and artificial intelligence (AI). The deliberative and discretionary aspects of diplomacy are being undermined by the need to respond in real time to a viral clip or a trending hashtag. Statements are “leaked” or made in haste, and they harden into positions. Revisions after reflection may be seen as retreat. AI compounds this by imparting even further acceleration to the process. To insist on not reacting on impulse may be costly because it may enable an inconvenient narrative of an adversary to take hold. There appears to be more value in instantaneity of messaging, less on its content. AI has its benefits for diplomacy. It enables due diligence and background checks on issues in minutes whereas in the pre-digital days, one may have had to spend days if not weeks, poring through musty files, to familiarise oneself with the issue at hand. The ubiquity of social media has diminished the role of diplomats since heads of state/government are often in direct contact with one another, sharing tweets and even making video calls. These may be mediated by professional diplomats. Often they are not. The diplomat has to play catchup with his principal, explain away indiscretions, and salvage what may have been inadvertently given away. One has a firsthand view of this in the United States (US) with President Donald Trump relying almost exclusively on social media to run American foreign policy, with professional diplomats reduced to outraged witnesses. Diplomacy is running on parallel tracks — there being the traditional engagement among professional diplomatic personnel and then the personal track on which the president operates.

It is not only presidents and prime ministers who are engaging in the diplomatic game. So are captains of industry, leaders of hi-tech multinational corporations, some with trillion-dollar revenues, surpassing most countries around the world. Their objective is corporate profit, for which they are able to bend the foreign policies of the states they are incorporated in but also those of states in which they have large business interests. Business interests have always influenced foreign-policy decisions, but they now have the capacity to literally dictate policy. The US administration, for example, is ready to penalise foreign governments that seek to regulate American hi-tech firms like Google or SpaceX. There are cases where governments expend diplomatic capital to safeguard or promote the interests of their favoured corporate interests even if these undermine the national interests of a state. A professional diplomat faces a dilemma when his government instructs him to promote the interests of a favoured company even if this may lead to the erosion of larger and vital interests of a state. Multilateral negotiations on climate change have been progressively stalled and ambitions diminished due to the powerful lobbying of fossil-fuel corporate interests. While business influence on foreign policy is not new, the scale is different. Social-media tools are mobilised to counter green initiatives. In the recent heatwaves in Europe, public attention has been focused not on why this makes climate-change action more urgent but on why citizens should begin to install air-conditioning at home and in workplaces. This will only compound the problem. In a subtle manner, the burden of dealing with climate change, which should be the responsibility of the state and which demands that it negotiate a global, collaborative response with other states, is deflected on to the citizens. The scope for diplomacy shrinks and, as a consequence, so does the role of diplomats.

A related shift is increasing reliance on a transactional model of interstate relations, with its emphasis on short-term, immediately visible and calculable costs and benefits from each discreet interstate interaction. Our era is marked by impatience, which is the very anti-thesis of good diplomacy. The timeframe within which the diplomatic calculus operates has shrunk. A transactional calculus may be appropriate to business transactions although here too the long term counts. For a perpetual entity that defines a state, the calculus must weigh more towards the long term than towards the short term. A transactional approach results in the framing of issues in zero-sum terms, where any gain for the other side is by definition a loss for one’s own side. An example of this is my experience promoting hydropower cooperation with Nepal and Bhutan. In the case of Nepal, any projected benefit accruing to India from a proposed project was seen by interlocutors from Nepal as necessarily being at the cost of their interests. But in the case of Bhutan, both sides sought to make reciprocal gains from their collaborative hydropower projects in that country. India gained from enhanced energy security. Bhutan became one of the richest countries in South Asia, thanks to the revenues received from the sale of power to India. In Nepal’s case, transactionalism prevented mutual benefit. With Bhutan, a longer-term calculus of costs and benefits enabled mutual benefit. Related to the resort to transactionalism and the short-term framing of issues are the denigration of restraint and its projection as weakness or, worse, appeasement. This is often the inevitable consequence of social media, which amplifies negative, angry and hateful sentiments while overwhelming the voices of reason, of compromise, and of abjuring violence. There is a premium on swift retaliation and recourse to coercion. This leaves no place for diplomacy or reduces it to a means of dealing with the aftermath of coercive conduct, which may include war. The traditional role of diplomacy has always been to prevent war, to preserve peace. In this sense, diplomacy should serve as the first line of defence, with resort to arms as the last resort. As one has witnessed in the recent Iran war, how the first resort to war by the US and Israel has led to unintended consequences, with diplomacy left to pick up the pieces. The paradox of power is that it is most effective when it is exercised with restraint. It is diplomacy which enables that.

It can be argued that the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action, which patient and painstaking diplomacy achieved in 2015, was a better instrument to deal with the Iran nuclear issue than the recourse to war. Despite suffering extensive damage from the war, Iran retains significant nuclear capability and has probably been convinced by the war to hasten its acquisition of nuclear weapons. The challenges to diplomacy in the age of social media and AI require it to adapt to a radically altered environment, but that does not render it obsolete. As long as there is a community of states and relations among them need to be managed, diplomacy will be indispensable. AI has the potential to enable better diplomacy because it enables speedy access to the history of previous interactions and the lessons learnt from them. It makes a foreign language less of a constraint, with instant translation and interpretation becoming commonplace. It may enable more comprehensive case studies, more sophisticated scenario building, and locating the grey zones where compromises may be sought. What we need are a refinement of diplomacy, upholding its basic principles, and pursuing long-term partnerships based on trust rather than seeking instant gratification. States should invest more in diplomacy, nurture a larger corps of accomplished diplomats, and learn to locate short-term tactical measures in a longer-term strategic context. Most importantly, diplomacy must remain focused on the external; its target is the foreign interlocutor, and not the domestic audience. More is to be gained through relationships based on trust and credibility than through one-upmanship. Diplomacy requires engagement, whether with friend or adversary. These values are as much relevant in the age of social media and AI, which must remain instruments for practising better diplomacy rather than be allowed to overwhelm it.