Today, though, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker, James Kidman, from the Foreign Office.
He's worked in office since 1985 and has worked in Southeast Asia.
Balkans, worked on vexed issues, including the Commonwealth expansion of Europe, nuclear proliferation.
He's worked for the leader of the House of Commons and the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit.
He's Deputy Private Secretary for Prince of Wales. His Royal Highness.
In 2007, he set up his own education charity, the Coexist Foundation.
On world honours unseen, richer in a more globalised society.
He works has worked again with the FCO since 2013, with the fourth unit of the diplomatic academy.
And though there are people here involved, engaged and involved in Department Kanimozhi and in 2014,
he took up the post of working migrants, which is a member of the senior directing staff at the Royal College of Defence Studies.
We should claim her own. He has both the VA and a from Christchurch.
Oxford. And like me, he lives in Devon. So James, thank you very much for coming in to talk.
And I mean, what you want is to be gentle with you. I'm sure they want to thank you all very much and thank you all for turning up.
This sort of introductions always, always paint a picture of someone more interesting than the person you actually get.
So I must apologise in advance for that.
You'll see that my corporate loyalties are a bit flexible, and although I'm build on the posters downstairs from the Foreign Office,
I'm currently on secondment, the MSD and the Royal College Defence Studies.
For those who don't know it is the senior college of the Defence Academy.
And I encourage any of you who haven't been there to come and visit splendid offices in Belgrave Square.
And learn a bit more about what we do. It's it's a great privilege.
I said, privileged to be here. It's actually rather nerve wracking to be here,
partly because you see in the front row all these distinguished professors from across Oxford seconds who,
you know, are going to ask penetrating and awkward questions, but more actually because you were offered a sandwich lunch before you got here.
I'm always in intensely mistrustful of events that offer blandishments like drinks and sandwiches,
because you know that most of the people who are there actually coming home for the scoff and and then feel
obliged when it comes to Q&A to ask all sorts of awkward and penetrating things in order to deny that charge.
So I would hope that those of you who who have been warned that I'm going to be unsympathetic to that sort of approach,
will will temper down those awkward questions at the end. Let me just.
Click to the next slide. This isn't where I'm from. You gather that my corporate loyalties are many, but this is one place that I have never worked.
I'm putting it up there just to remind you that you will get more value out of me if we work under Chatham House rules.
If we don't, and you quote what I say, then I'll have to be rather mealy mouthed and bureaucratic.
So I would encourage you, if, particularly during questions,
you want a lively exchange to respect the fact that what is said in this room stays in this room or certainly isn't attributed to me.
I don't pretend to have many prospects of a Foreign Office career ahead of me.
But if I don't want summarily to be booted out, it would be a kindness if you keep quiet.
This is what I want to talk about today.
I want very firmly to to to alert you to the fact this is a worm's eye view of the whole issue of diplomacy and defence.
This is not academic analysis or professorial pontification.
This is what it feels like from from the office in Whitehall or from the embassy in dealing with the sort of problems
that the world is facing diplomatically and politically and engaging with the outside world with a diplomat's hat on.
It's. It's, I hope, going to cover what now?
I know I don't need to hope here because I'm giving the bloody talk. We will cover a bit about the history and origins of diplomacy.
And I don't know that any anthropologists in the good because I start with some
anthropological digressions which I don't want debunked by some clever take at the back.
I then go on to diplomacy and foreign policy and try to draw out what I think is an important distinction between these two things.
We tend to run them together. It is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that provides our diplomats.
But it hasn't always been the case.
And I think it's important that we acknowledge that diplomacy, the business of getting on with funny foreigners and foreign policy, the business,
hard nosed business of making policy to deal with them are two separate skills requiring two
different kinds of expertise and indeed kinds of personality that leads on to the human factor,
which I think is an important element in all of this. This is ultimately about relationships.
And if you ignore that element and if you try to treat everyone else around the world in the same way that you would anticipate they would treat you,
you rapidly become unstuck and then going to nod towards the really important work that's going on here,
the changing character of your program, and talk about the interface, if you can call it that, between diplomacy and defence.
And finally, I'm going to just throw up a slide that I hope enables you to see that in all of this work diplomacy,
warfare and all the continuum that runs between the two of them.
If you can capture the imagination of your political masters, of your colleagues,
of the wider public, then you've won the first and the most important battle.
But we'll come back to that at the end. Let me start with my anthropological diversion.
Now, this picture is not an early embassy away day and my first posting of us.
This is a picture from a splendid and underrated film called 1 Million Years B.C. and I encourage you haven't seen it to watch it.
It's actually a picture that has been used in in when Google were developing that Google glasses,
they were developing refinements to the software that tracks eye movement across the screen.
And this bigger picture helped in that process.
Well, why have I got it up on the screen?
Because. Because I think diplomacy is one of only three things that distinguishes people from animals.
I think it is a defining point.
When we got off of our knuckles and strapped on our fur bikinis.
Diplomacy was one of the things that distinguished us.
No animals do diplomacy. Quick diversion just to make sure you're all the way up to savages.
What do you think the other two things are that distinguish that all human societies do and no animal societies do?
Espionage. Prostitution, though, is a good question. Prostitution?
Wrong. Chimps and bonobos are ready for anything. And if you have any other thoughts.
I'm sorry. War? No. All animals do war.
Just. Yeah. Not organised. It can be pretty organised.
Yeah. Cooking. Cooking. Good man. Splendid.
Yes. Cooking is one. All human societies cook.
You can't really be a human unless you cook. You can't feed the gigantic brain that you guys have without consuming processed food.
And cooking was the way to achieve that. What's the other?
Religion could be difficult to test because, you know, I have a devout Pomeranian and its job to tell my language.
No, I mean, animals know. Even robins do language. I'll tell you it it is, in fact, stories.
We are storytelling creatures. Narrative is hard wired.
And I'm going to come back to that at the end. So anyway, this is this is the diversion I want to make.
I mean, diplomacy is what all humans do.
Negotiation is in our DNA. It isn't it isn't rocket science.
It isn't some dark art that is left to professionals. It's what every society is doing all the time and has been since the start of time.
And so I don't want anyone to think that that it requires all the special protocols that are attached to it.
Being a diplomat is about being a person. And when it is rendered to academic and too esoteric, I think people are starting to miss the point.
Right. Fast forward about a million years and you come to this image, which is the beginnings of diplomatic protocol.
This is a picture from the Mahabharata, which is written about 400 B.C. and it shows Christian mediating for peace in the Kurukshetra war.
Now, why is this important?
Because in the Magna Carta, there is the first instance recorded of of emissaries being spared precisely because they are emissaries,
the monkey God Hanuman was sent to mediate for peace and was going to be chopped up by
the Demon King Ravana and was allowed to go away because it was deemed that emissaries,
diplomats had a special role and needed to be protected.
They needed to be spared. But it wasn't all plain sailing.
This I don't know whether any of you recognise it, but it's a splendid radar statue to be discovered in Calais where you park your car and
discover more people in it when you get back to it than when you when you when you,
when you left it at the metre. These these are the burghers of Calais.
And there's some dispute as to whether they were, in fact, diplomats or whether they were they were they were hostages.
But the story is that when King Edward the third, was besieging Calais in 1347, the population of Calais had to sort of had eventually to give up.
And they sent these six burghers out with halters around their necks to bleed four times the hoses around their necks so that they could be strung up.
This is not a good recruitment poster for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office today and there've been lots of
other instances through history of this delicate necessity of ensuring that diplomats are properly protected.
You've got the stories from when Darius sent emissaries to Athens and Sparta demanding earth and water,
which were the sort of classical provisions of obeisance or giving in the Athenians through the chap
who was asking for Earth down a pit and the Spartans through the chap who was demanding water down.
Well, that wasn't quite what Darius had intended.
And the Peloponnesian War resulted. You've got a lovely story.
When the Romans were sending emissaries to Taranto, which was then the Carthaginian town, and on the way out of the gate,
having failed to negotiate terms, he was pinned down by the local Carthaginians and he came up.
History relates. He came up with a withering response.
I rather suspect it may have taken her just a few centuries to write it back in, but he said that this stain will only be washed out with blood.
And so you've got, again, this this failure to respect the honour of emissaries and diplomats,
which needs to be hardwired into the process in order that it works.
And then my last example in this in this series, Genghis Khan was was negotiating, unlike him,
for for a for a friendly alliance with the charismatic shah of what is now Iran and the stones and the charisma.
Shah made the mistake of when these three emissaries arrived.
He basically told them to [INAUDIBLE] off.
He shaved two of them, which was a dreadful insult, and cut off the head of the third, which was even worse,
and sent back the shaven ones with the other Japanese head in a bag and said, We're not interested in this.
The consequence was that within two years this entire civilisation had ceased to exist.
Genghis Khan was it was was firmly of the view that that diplomats had to be sacred and inviolable.
It's a very worthy sentiment. It's a pity about the citation.
Right. We go on now to modern history.
This is Russia in a non contemporary portrait.
And this is my only my last film reference.
But recently I find it he's obviously for everyone now tarnished by fatal association with the Three Musketeers as the sort of villain in the drama.
And and in the 1930s, a very good film was made for its standards about the Three Musketeers,
which includes the memorable line, Your Eminence, I have terrible news.
The 30 Years War has begun, with which it is a good example of hindsight bias in action.
It's interesting that they got Your Eminence right, because he was a cardinal.
But anyway, the point of there and indeed well, the point of the 30 Years War is it began again with a failure to recognise the dignity of diplomats,
something I hope you're going to remember from this talk, though.
It's that that famously the defendants tration of Prague was the Protestants of Bohemia chucking out of the window,
the Catholic notables who'd been sent there as emissaries from King Ferdinand to try to see
whether there couldn't be some sort of arrangement between these two disparate factions.
Throwing people out the window was deemed to be, even in those days, causes belli.
And over the course of that 30 years, more probably more devastation in Europe than it has ever seen before or since.
Populations down by up to 50% in large swaths of what's now Germany anyway back to reach that because he was not central
to the to the bohemian drama but what he was doing was was starting to create the the business of modern diplomacy.
He was he created the first Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1626.
The French way ahead of us didn't come until 1782, the American 1789.
So the French way ahead of it and still way ahead, actually, the work of the diplomatic academy, which which Robert touched on early on with the.
Which I was involved before coming across. The idea is in part to try to meet this challenge of a city hubristic challenge,
in my view of the Foreign Office being the best diplomatic service in the world,
whatever that means, but by a whole series of expensive consultants yardsticks.
We are currently number two behind the French. They have always been very good at it.
They do the language of diplomacy, which, as you all know, is French.
And they were there a century and a half before any of us in terms of the institutions of it.
But it wasn't just the institutions. What recently a what recently are created was or at least refined was the concept of,
as he put it, in negocio continuo the the business of permanent diplomacy.
Up until then,
more or less diplomacy had been a business of sending emissaries from one party to talk to those of another and then come back with the news.
And then possibly or not that continuing over time, but no concept that you plonk someone down whose job it is just to get on with that,
with that with that different power striking that.
I mean he was building on foundations that actually been laid by the French king a hundred
years before who sent the first permanent demonstrate to the sublime port to to Istanbul.
Byzantium. No Istanbul in 1535.
So the first the beginnings of permanent missions,
the beginnings of this concept of continual perpetual negotiation and the beginnings of a foreign ministry.
And this is my last slide in this sort of historical diversion.
You see, it develops not just its ministries and its and its underpinnings,
its structural underpinnings, but it also starts to develop its own sort of protocols and fancy dress.
This picture is actually quite an interesting picture of the American the early American diplomats talking about what diplomats should wear,
because there was a there was a real challenge within the republic of those whose job it was to go abroad,
who felt that they had to stand up alongside the elegant plumage of the European aristocrats by wearing all the feathers and top hats and so on.
And those on the right of the picture here who felt that it was important properly
to represent the new Republican simple sentiments of this brave new country.
And this is a tension, actually, that continues today,
because do you have a foreign commonwealth office that is representative of the country and therefore does that does what the rest of the UK does,
or do you have diplomats whose task it is to represent what foreigners think it ought to be, what it does?
A real challenge and something I hope we can come back during questions.
But anyway, there was a huge long correspondence about me breeches and dry coal and hats and shades and eagles and so on.
Ultimately, a circular was sent out in 1893,
which which said that the decision to wear the uniform was left to the judgement and needs of the diplomat himself.
So they didn't come down to any any clear conclusion there.
And here is a near contemporary picture.
My old boss, William Hague. And and a man who this university should love because he was a brilliant head of the union when I was here.
He's sitting the picture actually isn't of him, but it's the only picture I could find of his office when he was in it.
It is by far the grandest office in Whitehall by any standards.
No other functionary, minister, Prime Minister even sits in an office a quarter as fancy as that of the Foreign Secretary.
Why is this? Because in part, the job of the office is to make those who come to it feel a bit daunted and small.
If you are an ambassador summoned to the Foreign Office for some misdemeanour or other,
the whole building is is is architecturally designed to make you shrink so that by the time you
get up into this room and walk the 300 yards across the carpet to meet the foreign secretary,
you have shrunk to a sort of a well smaller than the foreign secretary.
Anyway, it's a sort of anthropological attempt to shock and awe, if I can put it like that, directly underneath his office,
the top civil servant, the permanent under-secretary who is also head of the Diplomatic Service,
two different roles in the same individual is in a similar office, a little bit smaller,
but it was just as magnificent until around the turn of the millennium.
Some some functionary thought that it would be good to give the furnishing contract to IKEA.
So it's rather sadly sort of more representative of the UK today than this great Victorian we see there.
Right. We've moved from record Welch through John Quincy Adams to William Hague.
And what have we established? We've established that it's got a long history and that dressing up is important and that protocol and plumage carried.
Let me go on to something that is, in a sense, the next phase of this, the distinction between diplomacy and foreign policy.
Now, foreign policy is very much the senior bit here.
It covers all of government and parliament. It's the totality of a country's international relations.
It covers culture and trade and economic links, a political all all the business of negotiation.
But diplomacy is a bit more discreet. I love this quotation from Will Rogers.
Will Rogers, the sort of Stephen Fry of 20th century America, and a really interesting guy,
a full blooded Cherokee Indian who came to public prominence because he'd gone to the circus in New York and a steer broke into the auditorium.
And because he knew how to do it, he lassoed the damn thing and laid it out.
And everyone said, Who's that guy? And he started a career that went on 30 years, Anthony, until he crashed an aeroplane and that was the end of him.
But if you want to look at the sort of pithy epigrams of America, Will Rogers is your man.
He comes up with this lovely thing, which I will supplement with another lovely saying from David Frost.
Basically, it's about using all the tools you have from the sort of shock and awe that I
talked about in the office to guile and deceit and manipulation and negotiation.
And then and this is the critical bit they prospering brings out, leaving the people you are dealing with feeling good.
That's the important part. And finally, I'm just going to quote the master of the contemporary master in this field, Henry Kissinger.
If any of you haven't yet read his world order, I do commend you.
It is for me the book of last year and should be on everyone's required reading list.
It reminds us that diplomacy is the junior art,
but it also connects with what Robb and his team are doing in this changing character of war program about
linking force with those parameters of a state's projection that matter to its population and its leaders.
Worth pointing out, and I've really touched on this until 1918, the Foreign Office and the diplomatic service were two separate bits of government.
They were two separate services. You join one or the other, and the Foreign Office had pointy headed, cerebral and and frankly,
unlovable types whose task it was to work out what policy should be with a sort of analytical rigour that didn't touch on the human element.
They would then tell their diplomats the junior service, to go and sell this to benighted foreigners,
and the diplomats would predictably whinge and moan and negotiate within the
building in order to try to secure something that would be more palatable.
This all happens still today. Endlessly there is the batting to and fro of policy between Whitehall, King Charles Street, where the Foreign Office is,
and our embassies right around the world with the ambassadors bleating that it's quite impossible in Mauritania to sell a policy like this.
And the Whitehall mandarins saying man up and just do it.
And that balance between the diplomats who were always accused of having gone native and
the the people in Whitehall who are always accused of never having any understanding
of the complexity of the world and the difficulty of all this business used to be
institutionally divided and I think was more robust for that separation in 1982.
Services were merged and you can see that there's a logic that attaches to expertise
being there within the team rather than sort of separated by a Chinese rule.
But I hope in questions we can bring out this because for me, at least,
it's it's a it's still a sort of defining unhappiness in the way in which relations are worked out.
You're needing diplomacy within you, between the diplomats, if I can put it like that.
So what about diplomacy today? It was a lovely quotation from a French diplomat and commentator, a man called Philippe, coming in about 1500,
in which he recommends that two great princes who wish to establish good relations should never meet each other face to face,
but they ought to communicate through good and wise ambassadors.
What Philip, the queen, was trying to say was, well, he was doing this from the basis that in those days,
very often your princes were not interchangeable, as these chaps are already some of these jobs.
When you look at picture, they they you couldn't change them.
And quite often they were uncouth and not fit for posting.
They were dribbling unreliable and altogether embarrassing when seen in the palace on your patch,
let alone when written out to events like the field of cloth of gold where they met the adversary or friend.
So what Philip, the Queen was saying is leave it to the masses, will do the business.
Since the Congress of Vienna, or certainly since the Treaty of Versailles,
it's been very much the business of leaders to do the real negotiation face to face at summits.
And this is an inexorable process that whatever the commission might have said is not going to be wrote back.
These people, dare I say, needs to build relationships.
And it is these days the job of diplomats to facilitate that process and to brief in
the car on the way to the meeting rather than to handle all the meetings themselves.
Now that that's altogether understood. But it does mean that diplomats themselves have moved quite a long way from being initially,
frankly, expendable into the people who risk sort of coming back with their heads in a sack.
Then through Philip Cummins, the Crimeans day, where they would where they would effectively buy time,
when negotiations could be deliberately procrastinated by shuttling to and fro.
And today they are a little more than then travel agents and events organisers.
There's a bit more to it than that, but we'll come on to that.
Warmth and engagement between principals. Say what you will about our prime minister.
He is good at this sort of thing.
There is a good rapport with Europe's most important leader at the moment, and that business of building up warm relationships is important.
It's facilitated by the work of the diplomats.
But Peter Ustinov made a lovely quotation. He said that a diplomat these days is nothing but a headwaiter who's allowed to sit down occasionally.
And it is really the business of the diplomat to bring these people together and allow that connection to be made.
And there's that vital role of helping frame the discussion that ensures that, first of all,
that put your foot in it, but also critically, that you can see where the other person's interest is.
And running through all this talk, I hope, is a theme that you that I trust you'll take away.
That empathy is the kind of currency of this engagement,
that if you can put yourself into the shoes of the other person you're on the way to, you're on the way to achieving something.
So the diplomatic round really is about analysis, about framing the discussions.
He's got the best briefing he has for that important meeting. It's about understanding and awareness, but it's also about impact and communication.
It's about getting the right messages. I mean, there's a picture tells a thousand words.
You know, that picture if number ten and the and the German foreign ministry can get it out tells a benign story,
that is exactly what both leaders would wish. We'll come on in a moment.
Two other pictures that are slightly trickier.
Another example, where did I said breakthroughs are written in the body language.
This is the ping pong moment, a remarkable breakthrough for American diplomacy facilitated by the Pakistanis.
The Pakistani role in that whole China US rapprochement is an undertow story and they deserve more credit for it than they get.
But effectively, they facilitated Kissinger's first trips to Beijing,
and then eventually we got the the Nixon Mao meeting and his here is the lovely picture that Putin needs to reflect upon,
because this is this is friendless in the cellblock era.
And this is, in fact, Brezhnev and Honecker.
But for a man who harks back to the glories of the old Soviet Union and who rails against the gay rights movement, I think it's.
This should be the pin up picture here.
Something a bit more difficult. The body language says it all.
Diplomacy isn't always about being nice to people, about being friendly, about being diplomatic.
Sometimes it's about being really tough. Politicians will always criticise diplomats for being for being too accommodating to foreigners.
Norman Tebbit famously said that we have a Ministry of Agriculture to look after the farmers and we have a foreign
office to look after the foreigners because there's a politician who's really focussed on the domestic agenda.
Who couldn't see that the business of diplomacy is about being accommodating,
but also about being tough, and that these two things happen side by side.
Stalin came up with a with a good quotation that's worth remembering.
He reminding us that diplomacy doesn't always have to be about being truthful either.
Either, he says, sincere diplomacy is no more possible than drive water or wooden.
In other words, that you had to say there's an awful lot of what diplomacy was about,
was about finding a means to get people to a point at which that could be some agreement.
Let's face it, genuine character of war is accepting that that moment cannot be achieved.
And I hope, as I say in questions and later on, that's all we can come on to that.
But accepting that being tough is part of it is is, I think, an important reminder.
And here's my last body language picture of this. This actually this photograph really troubles me.
This is of and, you know, the the the leaders of China and Japan.
And when you read about the increasing tensions in that corner of the world and you see this picture of two people who are a fair enough,
it's only one picture. It's caught them in an awkward moment.
But just as the Merkel Cameron picture tells a very positive story for me, this picture tells a story that that sometimes,
however effective the diplomacy, you cannot cover up irreconcilable differences.
And I worry that that at the moment there is a sort of drift in that part of East Asia towards irreconcilable differences.
Anyway, let's let's let's move on back back to the business of the diplomats themselves rather than the leaders who the who they're representing.
Here again, in the stereotypes, this is a picture from my Ferrero, Russia,
a school of diplomacy album where where you're on about about classic bilateral
engagement and about remembering that it's it's not just about the politics.
It's about setting the frame for the whole relationship.
It's about, I mean, whole list of different diplomacy.
There's cultural diplomacy. And that in the UK instance is about reminding people that we're not just about
the British Council and the sort of the classic arms of cultural engagement.
We're also the BBC and the F.T. and the RC.
We're about the British music.
You know, that wonderful work that Neil MacGregor has been doing, not just with the Germans but with the Iranians, the cylinder itself.
That's a fantastic example of cleverly using cultural iconography.
And I'm a great fan of what Neil MacGregor did with the with the Parthenon Marbles sending them off.
I know that it's been contentious with any Greeks present,
but it's it's remembering that Harry Potter and Manchester United are tools of this enterprise as much as as I said.
Nick Clegg. Then there's so then then this, then this defence and we can come back again to that.
But remembering that sharing expertise,
identifying gaps where different countries can help each other in different ways and alliances can be not just forged,
but then sort of rebounded by by clever defence engagement,
digital diplomacy, the whole sort of science of this,
and endless monographs written for the State Department about Hillary Clinton's enthusiasm for digital diplomacy.
It's a really difficult one, and particularly difficult under her aegis as secretary of state, because it's it's great if you can except lose control.
It's hopeless if you are of a controlling disposition, because digital diplomacy is something that,
to use the metaphor, goes viral and it doesn't always work.
And you have to accept that sometimes you get embarrassments out of the digital domestic digital diplomacy sector.
There's commercial I mean, commercial diplomacy obviously isn't just about selling stuff.
It's also about the business of framing the way in which nations can engage through trade and through economic links.
And you know, the UK has been doing it sort of quietly behind the scenes,
some pretty amazing stuff through Gaston and the World Trade Organisation that we should celebrate over the
last few decades never gets any publicity but is genuinely making the world more prosperous for everyone,
not just for us. And then this track too. And I would bang on about all this forever.
But. But tractor diplomacy is about using people like you.
It's about getting experts in that field to go and form relationships with their partners in countries where we can't use the normal,
normal tools of diplomacy because relations are that strained at the moment.
We've got some wonderful work going on, on track to on the Middle East peace process, on the Iranian nuclear deal where you're.
Using academics, retired diplomats, thinktanks, scholars, specialists who can go to and fro, carrying informal messages,
feeling out the landscape, enabling more formal emissaries to follow in their foot in their stead.
So ultimately, the role of the sort of the diplomat with all this stuff happening, the commercial,
the cultural, the tractor and everything else, the job of the diplomat is convening.
It's about bringing in experts.
It's about ensuring that they find ways to engage that can be persuasive right across frontier frontiers and different sectors.
And in the classic sort of pneumonic, it's it's time, it's diplomatic, it's information and intelligence.
It's military, it's economic. It doesn't cover all of them.
But worth remembering. And just my final point on this.
Symbolism counts if you can get the right image back to Cameron and Merkel back to.
I mean, there was that wonderful moment on the 12th of September 2001 when the Guardsmen outside Buckingham Palace played the Stars and Stripes.
After 911 had devastated America the day before.
And that very subtle but imaginative way of showing solidarity and collective endeavour was worth any number of speeches,
handshakes, condolence books.
I mean, there are other examples which we can draw them in, and lots of examples through history where actually, if you think back,
it's the imagery that counts as much as the as much as the as much as the
substance of the issue because the imagery that captures the public imagination.
Back to Neil MacGregor in the Doura cylinder,
getting 1 million Iranians to come and see this treasure and to see that the British Museum was helping share their treasures
with the rest of the world and reflecting well on both my last bit on the sort of nature of diplomacy and how it's done.
This is obviously the multi this is the Security Council in New York, which is the multilateral level,
which is about doing what those nice people in the last slide were doing.
But in three dimensions, it's about trying to balance the expedience of little caucuses where two or three of you can stitch up a good deal,
but where you then need the legitimacy of lots more buying into it.
And that's a whole new sort of skills game that has obviously blossomed really since since the creation of the first League of Nations and this.
And these days, any major crisis will obviously involve not just this,
but it'll involve whatever influence we can bring to bear through the G-20 or the G7 of the international financial institutions.
There's a whole raft of multilateral bodies where the task of the diplomat is to try to get in and to identify where your interest coincides
or roughly coincides with other people and where you can lead them a little bit further than they would otherwise have thought they would go.
And that's that's the skill that classically you're going to have is very much as my colleagues, the UK has been good at,
we are always on the front foot in these big multinational institutions because we work very hard behind the scenes to identify and
empathise with those opportunities and then move them a little further than than they might otherwise have otherwise have moved.
I mean, the classic about ten years ago when all of us had visiting cards,
the sort of sort through management consultancy to tell the world what you did in a,
in a, in a single phrase, the sort of key buzzwords were security, prosperity.
And consider the sort of three pillars of what the Foreign Office does.
It protects the UK, it ensures that we're prosperous and it protects UK citizens.
I mean, do they want to know why your passports are so expensive?
You know, when you go and get a new passport costs you. I don't know what it costs ten quid or something these days.
Do you know why it's so expensive?
It's expensive because consular services as administered through the Foreign Office are all paid for out of the sale of passports.
So it's a clever way of. Well, it's effectively it's a tax on sensible citizens who travel abroad and don't cause any trouble
by those who go to be through and get pissed and have to be medivaced with liver failure.
That's why there's a whole consular benefits in the Foreign Office, but that's, that's a diversion and, and we shouldn't stop it.
Defence. I've got to. Let me, let me sort of wrap up and bring it back to where Rob's programme is.
How does that fit in? There's a lovely quotation from George Kennan, the man who wrote the famous Long Telegram from Moscow.
You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness unpleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet force in the background,
which is a good reminder that ultimately diplomacy is the soft end of something that should have a hardness to it if it is to be affected,
if it is to be effective. Frederick the Great came up with a rather tougher one.
Diplomacy without an army is like music without instruments.
Defence is the bit where it can become serious if it has to.
And that's the awkwardness where if we continue to wish to play a prominent role on the world stage,
we have to ask ourselves the question whether we're resourcing the state.
To do that. I think that that's a question that all the political parties in the current campaign are going to be dodging.
I think that the military are all accepting that it's going to be yet another very difficult round, as it has been for the Foreign Office to.
And yet there is this expectation from the newspapers and the commentators and the general public that when bad things happen in the world,
we should have some role in, we should seek to redress them.
And if you don't resource the defence element, you can't empower the diplomats to secure the best deal they can.
I mean, we're back with straight back to Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is a continuation of policy or politics by other means.
It's. It's always not just a continuation of politics and policy, but that's where it returns to diplomacy.
Is is the wicket keeper in this game. That advert has to catch the ball that is swung out either from the from the politicians
who go too far or from the war that ensues and then has to patch it back together again.
Obviously, war is very much a sort of culminating process and it's the failure of diplomacy.
There's a quotation from Tony, from Tony Benn to that effect, what happens?
And this is a question that we all need to reflect on what happens when war has, has has exhausted its possibilities.
Again, it's the diplomat's job to go back to the white flag about anthropology.
They have to go in and secure whatever terms they can.
And securing a good peace is ultimately a key part of what the whole war process is.
Now, these days, this interface between defence and diplomacy and our political will is all, in a sense,
administered through and run by the National Security Council, and that's a much more efficient mechanism.
It's a bit like having, you know, if you're a corporation, having an engaged board,
they sit down once a week and address a particular issue that affects the security of the realm.
Quite often it'll be things like, you know, Ukraine or Syria.
It would also be things like cyber or Ebola.
But the National Security Council,
which tellingly has always been headed by a diplomat and is likely to be headed when the next change comes by email.
The diplomat is is the business of pulling together all those different strands
of government and ensuring that the Cabinet address them robustly for now,
and they do it over four or five PowerPoint slides an hour or an hour, a bit of discussion.
It's an effective mechanism. We can come back to it in questions.
But I think that everyone who's had anything to do and you've got John Day coming to give a talk soon, pick his brains on this.
My view is from everything everyone that I've talked to across government that the National Security Council is a
considerable improvement in the way in which the whole business of defence and diplomacy is effected these days.
My last line on the defence issue. I mean here we've got little green men and we've got diplomacy and the Ukraine,
we've got the, you know, is this a failure of diplomacy or is it a success?
The modest war that is being fought there at the moment has not blown up.
Again, we need to address this in questions. And here is the quote from Tony Benn.
Just Tony Benn. I mean, it's difficult quoting Tony Benn because he was meant as the historian, always unreliable.
But he did come up with some pithy epigrams. And this is one of them all.
War represents a failure of diplomacy. And and I think that what we've got here is not quite a war and certainly not yet a success for diplomacy.
But you have to compare it with what might be happening if there weren't all those figures running around on the diplomatic stage.
I'm going to have 2 minutes on a completely different theme, because I mentioned at the beginning that the sort of anthropological distinction
between men and beasts is all about diplomacy and cooking and stories.
And I just want to touch on the story bit because I think it's relevant not just for diplomacy, but for academics and what really for all of us,
what we've got in this picture, it's not a very good rendition of it, not helped by the fact that someone's written on the board.
But what you've got here is,
is the lovely Andromeda chained to a pillar for being too beautiful and offending the gods by have mother Cassiopeia boasting about it,
chained to a pillar, being devoured by the sea, monsters, sitters or creatures.
I never know what it is. Unhappily, for her, Perseus, flying back fresh from slaying the Gorgon and carrying the Gorgon head,
is a sort of prototype weapon of mass destruction in a in a bag off the horse.
You can't quite see it there. But what happens in the story is that is that Perseus flies by,
manages to deploy the the head of the Gorgon to turn the sea monster into stone releases the lovely Andromeda.
They marry and go off and live happily ever after.
And they you can still see them up in the constellations on a on a clear night in Oxford.
Why is the picture relevant? Because.
Because it's the archetype of pretty well every story.
The hapless Andromeda, chained to a pillar by this beastly sea monster could be the Greek economy chained up by the merciless euro.
It could be the National Health Service brutalised by George Osborne.
And here we have either the splendid Syriza party flying in to rescue Greece or Ed Miliband blundering in to rescue the NHS.
You have an archetype of every story. If this is the sort of generic rule here, if you can as academics and we can as diplomats,
frame the narrative to tell that story so that we in the Ukraine are coming in to rescue the hapless Ukrainians in the East.
The Russians are doing exactly the same. They're going in to rescue the hapless Russians in the East Brave Little Belgium in 1914.
Every story, if you think about it on the Today programme all through history, is frame of all within this classical reference.
Why is it important? Because those of you who write books want to sell them, and those of you who read books want to be kept awake by them.
And if you are if you are able to instil a narrative, you've caught the audience.
We see it again and again from the sort of Whitehall perspective.
We bring in academics to leaven the business of diplomatic, of, of creating policy.
And very often the diplomats will come in with a gigantic pile of stuff that we ought to read and our hearts will sing,
and then they'll produce a 38 slide PowerPoint presentation, densely written,
which we'll be obliged to sit through if they could simply capture the imagination with the story.
If we can capture the public's imagination with a story that fits into this archetype of one another, then we've sort of won the business.
And that changing character of war moment is changed to peace studies and we can all relax.
I've gone on for 2 minutes longer than I promised. I will shut up.
But please questions. It's over to you.