Diplomacy in the 21st Century: A Brief Introduction by Paul Sharp

Author:Paul Sharp [Sharp, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Diplomacy, General, Political Science, Political Freedom, Security (National & International)
ISBN: 9781351371469
Google: A1OWDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 45868905
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-05-02T08:13:36+00:00

Diplomats, Putin, and Xi

We noted above that Putin enjoys a reputation for being competent in terms of shrewdness, ruthlessness, and willingness to take risks when his own and Russian interests are at stake. If he is to be regarded as bad, it is primarily in terms of the consequences of his policy for others and his moral character. We also have a sense that he likes to delegate authority to senior officials, and that he couples this with very general, possibly unclear, instructions. Officials are left to figure out what he wants and are allowed to carry on until they get into difficulties. Then, the difficulties can be presented as theirs, rather than Putin’s, and the officials associated with them can be dismissed. What might diplomats add to this picture? At a tactical level, Putin’s own diplomats seem to enjoy working for him. Holding the diplomatic ring while Russia returned to the Crimea in 2014, for example, was a challenging professional exercise. The mobilization of international opposition had to be hindered in the vital few days while Russian forces incrementally established control of the peninsula and neutralized local opposition from Ukraine. Russian diplomats displayed agility in shifting from denying that anything was happening, to saying that they did not know who the Russian soldiers – the so-called “little green men” – were, to providing benign rationales for why the soldiers had left their bases to help maintain order, to presenting the Russian invasion as a fait accompli or done deed which everyone should recognize as a restoration of what was right and normal – namely that Crimea is Russian. Russian diplomats, or some of them at least, also seem to enjoy engaging in the social media exchanges which now surround and often define major international disputes. After Russian agents were accused by Britain of trying to assassinate one of their former colleagues in Britain in 2018, for example, the Russian embassy in London skillfully employed humor on social media, first to ridicule Britain’s accusations, and then to feed the cynical attitude that Britain was being hypocritical in a world where everyone engages in this sort of activity (see Chapter 5). Not everyone does, of course, and certainly not everyone makes quite the incompetent job of it that the Russian agents managed to, attracting attention to themselves and putting members of the British public at risk.

We can only suppose, however, that Russian diplomats, while enjoying the professional challenge of distracting attention from the mistakes of their intelligence services, regretted the position they were placed in and what this said about Russia. Similarly, we can only suppose that Russian diplomats regret their state’s weakness and the absence of strategic vision which leaves it locked in frozen disputes with its neighbors and, on occasions, forces Putin to make Trump-like reminders that Russia has nuclear weapons and that no one must forget this. Holding on with no clear way forward is as depressing for diplomats as it is for anybody else if they stop

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