Western diplomacy is dead: a post-diplomacy world

Why western leaders refuse dialogue with their adversaries while pursuing unwinnable wars

We have established a post-diplomacy order in the west in which our leaders deny or disrupt diplomacy in wars that they cannot win.

The unwinnable wars in Ukraine and in Iran perfectly illustrate the post-diplomacy order.

This leaves citizens impoverished by those wars their leaders continue, vulnerable to the consequences of wars their leaders won’t resolve, and at risk of dying in wars that they didn’t choose.

Long-term, it is citizens who will wake up to this and realise that, in fact, their leaders are the real adversaries.

Even if our leaders realise the catastrophic path they are leading us on; it will take a generation to rebuild a culture of diplomacy in the west.

What is the post-diplomacy order?

In confronting the wars in Ukraine and also against Iran, western leaders almost universally see diplomacy as unnecessary or a distraction from resolving the conflict on terms favourable to them.

Diplomacy is parked because western powers are convinced they are going to win. In the case of Ukraine and Iran, the USA, Britain and Europe refuse diplomacy or misuse diplomacy fundamentally because their foreign policy is rooted in the defeat of the adversary rather than compromise.

Foreign policy isn’t diplomacy. Diplomacy is merely a tool that a state can use to pursue its foreign policy instead of, for example, warfare. In both cases, Iran and Ukraine, war, or proxy war is chosen over diplomacy.

So when people ask, why isn’t diplomacy used to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, the answer is quite simple: the US, Britain and Europe are pursuing a proxy war as an alternative to diplomacy, as an article of foreign policy.

A post-diplomacy world is not the same as an absence of diplomacy

If total victory was certain, then there would be no need for diplomacy. Warfare would take primacy until diplomats swept in to finalise the treaty of surrender.

During World War II, there was limited contact between Nazy Germany and the Allied Powers, and such contact that there was happened through neutral intermediaries, The Allies committed to the unconditional defeat of the Axis powers at the Casablanca Conference of 1943. This was the first time that total victory looked achievable after the Germans had suffered defeats in El Alamein and were on the verge of Defeat in Stalingrad. From that point on, diplomacy became unnecessary.

However, there is no compelling evidence that Russia and Iran will be defeated and surrender, quite the opposite. But despite this, diplomacy is not pursued.

Post-diplomacy is different precisely because it operates in circumstances where complete military victory appears unachievable but western powers are nonetheless unwilling to recognise that victory is unachievable and continue to deny diplomacy while allowing the war to fester at great cost.

This creates a state of permanent conflict which our leaders are unable to escape from having over-invested emotionally in military success, either through a direct or a proxy war.

When did this post-diplomacy it start?

What we see today, particularly in Ukraine, started in the Summer of 2014 with the UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, immediately after he assumed office on 15 July.

With the UK left out of the Normandy format of dialogue between Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine. he cut off all high-level ministerial dialogue with Russia and insisted that there could be no business as usual, a position that has remained frozen in place to this day, arguably worsened.

Essentially, Hammond’s position was that because we disagreed with Russia’s actions, and didn’t recognise Russia’s concerns about British involvement in the overthrow in Kyiv, the UK would deny diplomacy until Russia completely changed its position, withdrew from Crimea and ceased its actions in support of Donbas separatists.

What the UK was not offering to do was to send troops to Ukraine.

So, this was the first time that the UK ended in a position of not being able to inflict a defeat on Russia to force its withdrawal from Ukraine yet refusing diplomacy to deliver a settlement.

The UK had rendered its efforts irrelevant and, not wanting war with Russia and not wanting peace with Russia, sanctions became the only foreign policy tool available, even though they did not change the status quo.

However, in this early phase, the UK was relatively isolated among western nations.

The US, under Obama, had a difficult relationship with Russia but even through the opening phases of the Ukraine conflict, they maintained high level diplomatic contact, through the Secretary of State John Kerry to keep channels open to prevent the conflict spiralling out of control.

Despite the hijacking of the Minsk II agreement by the Americans in early 2015, the conflict in the Donbas was stuck in an uneasy equilibrium until the war started seven years later. Most of the civilian casualties inflicted by the Ukrainian Army in the Donbas, happened prior to that time. The Ukraine conflict was largely in a holding pattern during the first Trump Presidency.

The Germans and the French in particular maintained active dialogue with Russia and helped to broker the Minsk II agreement. Even though Merkel and Hollande have tried to claim that Minsk II was cover to allow the Ukrainians to re-arm, I think that is dishonest. As in the February agreement with Yanukovych for a phased hand over of power, so too the Minsk agreements were significant moments in European diplomacy, which were both, ultimately, hijacked by the Americans and British.

At this early stage, the European Commission played a very limited role with the three major Member States taking the lead.

Indeed, with Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary in 2020 and 2021 Ukraine was dropping down the British foreign policy priority list like a stone.

All that changed with the arrival of Joe Biden. On the day that the war started, he said that ‘NATO is more united than it has ever been and I have no plans to talk to Putin’. We also know that US intelligence thought Ukraine would lose the war quickly and Zelensky would be overthrown. Two years later, he said ‘I don’t need to talk to Putin.’

While the Istanbul talks were ongoing, Boris Johnson said ‘how can you talk to a crocodile when it’s got your leg in its jaws?’

The Europeans gave up on talking with Putin to end the war and fell in line. Since the war started, western powers have been unified in their rejection of diplomacy to end the war, yet lacking a clear military plan for victory. The European Commission has now assumed a pre-eminent role and its unelected officials act as guardians of this post-diplomacy order.

This British inspired post-diplomacy initiated in 2014 is precisely the stance taken by the whole of Europe today.

What does post-diplomacy look like?

Ukraine manifestly cannot defeat Russia. The European continent is held hostage to a war that is making them poorer and less safe. Diplomacy has been denied completely, with first the Americans and now the British and Europeans viewing economic warfare and the funding of proxy conflict as sufficient to resolve the matter in their favour. And by that, I mean to ensure that Russia fails to achieve its objectives, is structurally, economically and politically damaged by the endeavour, possibly even broken apart, leaving Europe uncontested and able to shape Ukraine’s future to its will.

Likewise, it’s clear that the USA cannot inflict a strategic defeat on Iran. As a result, the global economy is at risk of meltdown because of Trump’s inability and unwillingness to find a diplomatic offramp,

The Americans have offered a pretence of diplomacy, but this has either been tactical, or a smokescreen for impending military action, or ill handled, rooted in a view that the US is in the stronger position and can dictate terms.

Direct use of military force by the USA has been preferred. Confident in its status as the largest military power in the world, diplomacy has never been seen by the Americans as the best route to deliver their strategic objectives in the gulf which are to derail its putative nuclear ambitions, to deliver regime change and to place limitations on its ballistic missile programme.

What are its causes

Fundamentally, post-diplomacy has emerged because western leaders have stopped trying to understand what makes their adversaries tick, disinvesting in diplomacy and falling back on weak analysis and exaggerated or fabricated forecasts. Remember Alastair Campbell’s ‘sexed up’ post 911 intelligence dossier anyone?

Warnings from seasoned diplomats like Kennan and Matlock were routinely dismissed and ignored.

Hatred and distrust of the adversary is sufficient to withdraw from diplomacy.

Western leaders have become unable or unwilling to recognise even now that modern wars are probably unwinnable in a traditional land warfare sense, where one side raises the flag of surrender. Their mindset is stuck in the twentieth century, rather than in an increasingly multipolar world, in which they cannot secure their political ambitions to the detriment of the interests of other sovereign nations.

This may in part be rooted in a neo-colonial mindset, in which large civilisational nations like Russia and Iran are considered to be economically, culturally, socially and racially inferior. That their difference and unwillingness to follow western norms is a threat to be extinguished rather than coexisted with. And because of this, that they need to be framed as adversaries to be countered and defeated, rather than global actors that are driven by their own interests and need to be engaged with, at the very least to avoid conflict.

Why do western powers take this stance?

They believe that western interests trump the interests of their adversaries. That as they are economically and militarily more powerful, at least on paper, they can impose their interests on their adversaries and expect compliance.

That EU and NATO bloc politics trump Russia’s right to express its security concerns and that America’s unconditional support for Israel removes Iran’s right to be a regional power in the middle east.

A key aspect of a post-diplomacy world is the belief by western powers that their adversaries, in this case Russia and Iran do not have legitimate interests.

Russia has no right to reject NATO expansion is one. It’s not for Russia to decide whether Ukraine joins is a mantra often stated.

Iran has no right to develop its own sovereign nuclear capability or to support proxies neighbouring Israel who fight back against Zionist expansion.

This places western powers apart from the UN system which since the agreement of the UN Charter in 1945 gives every nation sovereign equality. It presumes that sovereign nations decide what is in their interest and that any disagreement with other nations is addressed through dialogue and diplomacy.

However, the US, Britain and Europe simply do not see Russia and Iran as equal sovereign nations and therefore refuse to engage in diplomacy.

Instead, they have confected their rules -which they call the Rules Based International Order – a set of rules that isn’t written down on paper, but which is understood by people in the developing world to mean, ‘do as we say or there will be consequences’.

This makes conflict inevitable with nations that refuse to comply with an outdated western hegemony.

Agree or disagree, Russia does see NATO expansion as a threat to its sovereignty and territorial integrity and has decided that it is in its interests to prevent that.

Iran does see Zionist expansion as a threat to Muslims and rejects continual efforts to pursue regime change and to limit its ambitions as a threat to its sovereignty.

Both are willing to use military force and other hybrid methods to halt what they see as hostile actions by western nations.

Diplomacy should seek to find a modus vivendi for those countries with the west, and yet western powers reject diplomacy because they see compromise as failure at the hands of an inferior enemy.

Let’s be clear, at all times both Iran and Russia have shown themselves willing to enter into diplomacy.

It is a western choice to refuse diplomacy and, in the case of Ukraine, has been for twelve years, at least, for Britain.

What are the features of the post-diplomacy order

George Orwell used the phrase “History is written by the winners” in a 1944 essay. And yet modern conflict defies outright victory. It seems unlikely that any side will claim outright victory in either Ukraine or in Iran.

Few believe the USA will conquer Iran and by the same token Iran can only inflict severe damage on America’s standing in the world and its alliances in the Gulf, without undermining its position, for now, as the preeminent military power.

Britain and Europe’s attempts to defeat Russia in Ukraine will ultimately prove to be unsuccessful and also self-defeating, as Ukraine is turned into an angry failed state on its periphery. Nevertheless, Russia simply doesn’t have the means either fully to conquer Ukraine or indeed, Europe, an even more fantastical idea.

But herein the central truth of the western post-diplomacy model.

The US, Britain and Europe refuse diplomacy because this would require an admission of failure to their publics who they have repeatedly assured of victory.

When a clear victory appears unachievable, they settle for ongoing war and media manipulation to ensure that their voting publics maintain their support.

By claiming stalemate as success, they can position Russia and Iran as both losing, even if western powers aren’t winning.

History, however, will likely record the wars in Ukraine and Iran as catastrophic for western powers in terms of their global standing and credibility.

Media manipulation

In the post-diplomacy world, the key task of the government is to convince their publics that they are winning, that the adversary is the malign party and that there is no other choice but to maintain the current approach.

Post-diplomacy is a state in which western governments focus their energies on convincing their voting publics that victory will happen one day, actively suppressing the realities of the war effort when they are not going according to plan, repressing dissent, and emphasising that the adversary is the malign party in the conflict and that they have no choice.

This is best characterised by talking about the enemy not talking to the enemy.

Because western nations have refused direct dialogue, they choose instead to communicate with their domestic and aligned international audiences through media and social media.

This also started with the British who established a vast strategic communications operation in 2014 not long after the Ukraine crisis started to take the fight to the airwaves. From that time, the UK strategy was to convince European partners that they should maintain a tough stance against Russia and to maintain sanctions, while many European nations including the Germans and French sought to maintain balanced relationships with Moscow.

They also needed to convince the British public that the Russians were bad and were intent on European conquest.

Since the war started, all of the mainstream powers have settled into the media rhythm of expressing their outrage via every friendly media outlet they can find.

In the absence of diplomacy, the mainstream media and talking heads on social media produce endless amounts of propaganda to say that Russia and Iran are wrong, we are right, we have no choice but to fight and that the west will ultimately prevail.

This produces tropes such as Ukraine is fighting to save Europe, Iran is an evil and repressive regime that murders its citizens, that Russians are hardwired to try to conquer the world and so on.

Western talking heads talk about a post-truth world, as if foreign affairs can be reduced to set of immutable truths that they define. And that everything the opponent says must be a non-truth and a lie, despite western foreign policy being held aloft on a colossal tower of propaganda.

The social media castration of Ambassadors

A corollary of this is the instrumentalisation of Ambassadors within this strategic communications ecosystem, reducing their effectiveness to engage diplomatically with their host governments.

In short, giving Ambassadors and diplomats personal X accounts has done terrible damage to western efforts to engage with their adversaries. Rather than having quiet difficult conversations behind closed doors with their host governments, Ambassadors are rage-tweeting how bad the host government is, destroying what limited trust may have existed.

In fact the first case of this I ever saw was when Sir Simon Gass was British Ambassador to Tehran from 2009 to 2011. He spent much of his time criticising the Iranian government on Twitter as it was then called. Check out Peter Fischer the current German Ambassador to Georgia, who spends most of his time criticising the Georgian government on X.

It’s not just about optics. Presidents and Prime Ministers only meet after their Ambassador have laid the groundwork through careful diplomacy. When Ambassadors are talking about their hosts and not with them, then you destroy hopes for the Trumps, Putins, Al Khamenei’s and others to talk.

Another feature you see if the pretence of diplomacy through endless summits of people who agree with each other.

There have been countless summits on the Ukraine war all of which have not included Russia. These serve several purposes. One is to illustrate that talks are taking place and that Russia is not interested in talks, even though Russia is never invited.

What these summits don’t serve is peace as, inevitably they lead to commitments by western powers to provide military and financial assistance to Ukraine to fight a war that it cannot win.

Another feature is that insults have become the new language of statecraft.

Nowhere can this be seen better than Donald Trump’s calling the Iranian leadership ‘scum’. If you ever wanted an illustration of how not to pursue diplomacy, the insult the people that you are fighting against.

Joe Biden variously called Vladimir Putin a ‘butcher’, a ‘killer’, a ‘murderous dictator’, Emmanuel Macron called him an ‘ogre at our gates’, and Boris Johnson called him a ‘fucking idiot’.

Very obviously, calling someone a ‘fucking idiot’ is not a great way to conduct a negotiation with them. In fact, insults as the new statecraft prevents the possibility of negotiation. Zelensky is a master of this, in regularly insulting the Russian president. ‘A deaf bare-assed mammoth and Voldemort’ and a ‘fucking terrorist’ are two examples.

Putin generally avoids directly insulting Zelensky though he has labelled his government a band of drug addicts and neo-Nazis. People in the Kremlin inner circle do regularly insult Zelensky, though Putin normally tries to position himself above that.

One reason he does that is to allow himself the space to meet his adversaries without the baggage of having insulted them before-hand.

How do we get back to it?

Herein lies a truth about diplomacy that I talk about all the time, that diplomacy isn’t about friendship. You can make friends through diplomacy even, yes, with your adversaries. But that is not its purpose.

Diplomacy can prevent wars and it can end them, but it can’t fight them. In its latest survey of UK public opinion on foreign policy, the British Foreign Policy Group’s 60 page report did not use the word diplomacy once and yet used the word defence 69 times.

Post-diplomacy has emerged from a crisis of statesmanship. The western world has no great states-people who can see the world as it is, and not as they want it to be, who can assess the success and failures of their policy in the here and now, and can reach grand bargains with their adversaries when total victory appears impossible.

That comes from an inability of our leaders to think strategically and also from their imprisonment by the media ecosystem they have created, an ecosystem which insists that the only viable foreign policy is one which recognises that Russia and Iran are eternal enemies, and that any engagement in diplomacy is a sell-out.

Herein we see, at least in Britain, a complete disinvestment in diplomatic capabilities in the twentieth century at a time when China, Russia and Iran have all strengthened theirs.

Our diplomats spend all their time talking to people they already know at friendly Embassies or in London, while our so-called adversaries are engaging throughout the developing world to highlight the poverty of our western approach.

That lack of diplomatic engagement means that our states-people in the west are fed bad analysis by people who have either never been to or are simply clueless about the countries that we want to face up to. And our diplomats overseas have no influence at all because they barely leave the Embassies. Please read my book, a Misfit in Moscow, to learn more about this.

The Ukraine war didn’t start in 2022, it started in the 1990s when then US government decided that NATO would expand come what may at a time when Russia was greatly weakened. The war in Iran didn’t start in 2026, it started in 1979 when a western installed government was overthrown and American leaders in particular have never been able to get past the sense of having been outwitted by the Mullahs.

Our leaders have made themselves prisoners of a post-diplomacy that they have created and can not escape from.

I have been talking for four and a half years about the need for a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine. I make that call again today.

Donald Trump is not going to win the war in Iran and he should sign the best deal he can negotiate now before the terms of the offer get worse.

For America, Britain and Europe, the ending of the wars in Ukraine and in Iran in circumstances where both Russia and Iran will be able to say that they were not defeated, will come as a terrible blow to the standing of western politicians in the eyes of many of their voters.

And yet, manifestly, a diplomatic solution is the only way out, if we want to avoid a potential nuclear catastrophe in Europe and a global economic depression.

Most rational, realist thinkers can see this. If our leaders cannot see this then perhaps, we need new leaders.

We certainly need to reinvest in a culture of diplomacy in the west, shedding the neo-colonial mindset, getting back to the spirit of the UN system, talking to our adversaries not about them, recognising that we cannot dictate terms and may need to compromise, just as we expect our adversaries to compromise, seeing the foreign affairs is not a zero sum game, getting our Ambassadors to ditch their X accounts, reinvesting in our diplomatic skills, having universities that promote the understanding of countries like Russia, Iran and China, improving the quality of our foreign policy analysis and yes, perhaps holding Summits with people that we disagree with.

That is the only way to move on from the post-diplomacy order. But I fear it will take a generation to get there, even if we start today.