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

William Collins

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London SE1 9GF

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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 text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008127565

Ebook Edition June 2016 ISBN: 9780008127572

Version: 2016-05-19

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.

As evening fell the days 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

PREFACE

Shen Weiqin was the diplomatic adviser to Emperor Qin Er Shi during Chinas 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 masters mind and his masters 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 sherpas 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. Shens carried him.

Shen must have anticipated a routine months work as he set out for the Congress of the Tribes in Xianyang in 208 BC . His emperors 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 victors 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 Qins ranks, caused by the despotism of his favourite and most intimate adviser, the flamboyant eunuch Zhao Gao (who deserves his own book). Shens 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 historys first human rights activists, to argue in 1198 for the abolition of lingchi, which is the only reason we now know about the case. Again, probably no consolation to poor old Shen.

Shen discovered the hardest way that diplomacy is Darwinian: its practitioners need to evolve to survive.

In todays diplomatic services, the consequences for poor performers are more time-consuming yet less draconian than they were for Qin. But given that the alternative to peacemaking is often war, our diplomatic failures and mistakes can still have the gravest fallout.

It matters that we get it right.

Historical tales of grisly deaths aside, formal diplomatic encounters with contemporary Asian governments are friendly but often fairly dry affairs. Perhaps it is the heat, the time difference, or the lengthy delays caused by translation. With our Chinese interlocutors it was often striking that the army of note-takers stopped writing when their leader spoke not only out of deference, but because they already knew exactly what he was going to say. They would tell me that they found it odd that our prime ministers were so much less well disciplined.

So I was perplexed at one of these heavily choreographed exchanges to see several counterparts on the other side of the table stifling uncharacteristic giggles and passing notes. My diplomatic antennae were well attuned to spotting potential gaffes, especially those that would appeal to our mischievous travelling press lobby, ever ravenous for stories of incompetence working with the UK media for the UK government is often like playing for a football team whose own fans have decided should be relegated.