7. THE AMBASSADOR

The moral limits of the diplomat and “going too far”

“You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction. It is here that philosophy finds its niche as essential to the healthy progress of society. It is the critique of abstractions. A civilization which cannot burst through its current abstractions is doomed to sterility after a very limited period of progress.”

Alfred Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

“You must realize this: that a prince and especially a new prince cannot observe all those things which give men a reputation for virtue, because in order to maintain his state he is often forced to act in defiance of good faith, of charity, of kindness, of religion. And so he should have a flexible disposition, varying as fortune and circumstances dictate.”

Machiavelli, The Prince

(After Machiavelli…)

The ambassador is at the summit of his career.[44] These are the days for which he has been preparing all his life. He has been honored by his country, with medals and titles, and doubtless will receive more before he retires. People call him Sir, unbidden.

His clothing is elegant, understated but projecting a style of his type. Dark, well-cut, his suits hang well on him, as they are tailored to. His shirts are pressed and without wrinkle. His collars are clean and crisp. His tie is colorful, but never idiosyncratic. His socks have no holes, though they may, in a flash of self-expression, occasionally be red.

His demeanor is friendly but grave. His expression says that he is a man to be taken seriously: he has much on his mind. He may frown but he will never grimace. He may raise his voice, but he will never shout. Measure is his mien. In all things, measure.

The ambassador is the apotheosis of the diplomat. The young diplomat may be exuberant, may laugh and shout (occasionally); the ambassador, never. In the years leading to this point, the ambassador has learned to hold any emotion in check and to articulate what he has to say precisely and efficiently. Few words are wasted, except when many words are needed.

He is above all professional. I watch him as he chairs meetings of other diplomats. He is careful to show that he listens, nodding when others speak, acknowledging what they say when they have finished. When it is his turn to speak, he does so with a soft voice; it helps that his voice is deep. People listen.

If he disagrees, he says “I disagree,” not “You are wrong.” He never gives anyone a reason to dislike him, or to complain that he has wronged them. Personal difference cannot be allowed to intrude into business. He is charming and polite, though you can never really tell whether he likes you, or anyone else.

He is a successful diplomat. He is the vessel for his nation’s wishes. He has traveled the world, lived in many of its countries. He can say hello and how are you in about six different languages. Maybe more, no one is ever sure.

I have been with him for many days and nights of hard diplomacy, of discussion of war and peace. I have watched and tried to know him, but have never succeeded. One night we went to war and for the first time I saw in him a kind of excitement. His eyes glittered as we watched the television with its images of explosions and the bombers that caused them. But that was the only time. Otherwise, a wry smile might be all you see of the man beneath. And what signifies the smile, no one can tell, perhaps not even him.

The stuff that we work on together is of infinite moment and importance. On our work rests the lives of many, sometimes conflict and sometimes peace. Great issues are at stake, of freedom, of democracy, of rights and human suffering. But while I am in turmoil and a frenzy of doubt and questions, he is serene.

I envy his serenity and for a time thought it a sign of great wisdom.

His government gives him a large and expensive car, and a driver, to whom he is always polite. The car carries a flag on some special occasions. He lives in a huge house, where servants prepare his meals and make his bed. Though magnificent, the house is not his. Its style is generic, designed “not to offend”. A panoply of historic prints and tasteful wallpaper, it conveys no personality, for there is none behind it. No single mind has designed it. No one loves this house, since for no one is it a home.

The house sees an endless procession of guests. Official guests come from the home country to visit “abroad”. A ceaseless round of receptions, lunches and dinners is held there. The waiters are discreet and courteous, and know how to serve a good wine, though it is never the best (government spending being what it is). The food is good, but never great. The furniture is attractive, but not splendid. It must serve a thousand guests, after all. And after a few years of use, it will be replaced, like the ambassador.

The ambassador’s office is the embassy. Some embassies are exquisite, some are ugly. But wherever they are in the world, they carry the air of the home country within them. Pictures of the Queen adorn their walls. The corridors ring with accents of home; discussions of the latest soap-opera or football game caught on satellite television. The ambassador’s office is a little different from his staff’s. It is larger, and has comfortable sofas on which to seat his many guests. There is the silence of an important place: the chatter and tickering keyboards of his secretaries are banished to an ante-room outside. If you visit, you will quickly be offered tea.

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There is nothing like a war to help map the moral limits of those who work on it.

Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. One afternoon, as the coalition prepared to retake Kuwait, I was telephoned at my sleepy West European desk and summoned to join the war effort. The office needed staff to run the political-military liaison unit in what was called the Emergency Unit. The Emergency Unit was located in a special suite of offices underneath Whitehall. Quite why it needed to be situated down there was never clear to me, since there was no threat of Iraqi Scud missiles destroying the offices above ground. The absence of natural light and the necessary descent through combination-locked doors to the rooms certainly contributed to the sense of “emergency” and drama. The head of the unit did his bit to heighten the feeling of disorientation and crisis by immediately instituting a shift system of twelve hours on duty and twenty-four off (the unit had to be manned twenty-four hours a day). Thus within about two days of starting work, our sleep patterns were totally disrupted, we were exhausted and, on leaving the unit to emerge on to the streets above, we would never know whether it should be night or day.

My job consisted of sitting in a small office and reading reams of intelligence reports and summarizing them for senior officials and ministers. Naturally, this was fascinating, though I soon learned that there is little information with a scantier connection to reality than “intelligence” information. I would often read blood-curdling reports of the imminent use of nuclear weapons — I remember one which gave a specific time for the launch of the nuclear-tipped missile — or the torture of British POWs (one supposed eye-witness report stated that captured British pilots had been dragged in chains by a pick-up truck through the streets of Basra, something which thankfully never happened). I would relay this to my seniors and they would say things like, “thank you, very useful” although I was never told what this information was useful for, and, looking back, I suspect it was not useful at all since the Foreign Office was not at all involved in the military prosecution of the war.

I had other tasks. Before the war, each bleary-eyed shift in the Pol-Mil Unit, as we were known, had been given instructions on what to do once the operation to retake Kuwait began. We were to be telephoned by a senior official who would give us a password —“Mikado”— and a time at which operations were due to begin (if Iraqi intelligence had been bugging our phones perhaps they were supposed to think that we were opera buffs). On receipt of the password, we were to telephone each member of the British Cabinet to inform them.

So it came about that one January night I was on duty with another officer. It was a regular evening without much to do. We had eaten the revolting food provided for our supper and were settling in for another night of watching television. Suddenly, CNN began to report explosions and gunfire in Baghdad. How exciting, we thought, perhaps it’s a coup, since no one had called us with the password. This went on for about half an hour until eventually the phone rang. “Mikado”, said the disembodied voice, adding a time which was some thirty minutes later. And we then rushed about to call the Cabinet. I remember watching my fingers shake so much that I could not press the buttons on the telephone. I put on my most serious Foreign Office voice to say, “Minister, this is the Foreign Office Emergency Unit. Operations to retake Kuwait have begun.” Most of them politely thanked us. One said, “Thank you, I know, I am already watching it on television.”

There was a large room of the Emergency Unit filled with banks of telephones for consular calls, i.e. for ordinary people, whether in trouble or merely worried. In order to maintain surprise, none of its staff had been told that hostilities were to begin that night (indeed none of us had been told except Mikado). So no one was on duty. We rushed into the room. Every telephone was ringing furiously. On the wall was a counter showing the number of unanswered calls. Its digits were racing like a stopwatch. At random, I picked up a telephone. An hysterical woman screamed “Get my husband out of there!”, meaning Saudi Arabia or somewhere else in the Gulf. Another phone, the same thing. I asked the head of the unit what the advice should be to these callers. He replied, “The official advice is ‘Keep Your Heads Down’”. I offered this to various of the panicked callers. It did little to calm them.

The war added a glamour to my private existence. I had to carry a beeper which I would ostentatiously parade at social occasions (“just in case I’m needed at the Foreign Office” I would say self-importantly if someone, as I hoped, noticed it). I would emerge from a night shift into a gray Whitehall dawn feeling somehow part of the great scenery of “history”. And indeed in a minuscule way I was. There had been reports that Allied bombers had damaged Shi’ism’s most holy sites at Najaf and Kerbala. I wrote a press line about how every care was taken by our aircraft to avoid damaging sites of “cultural sensitivity”. It was a convincing, well-crafted piece of text. The only thing to note about it was that I had no idea whether “our” aircraft were taking such care. I certainly didn’t ask the Royal Air Force people in London, let alone in the region. I assumed they were, but for all I actually knew they could have been directing their bombs on to the very tomb of Imam Hussein himself. Yet I wrote the press line, and it was used with considerable conviction by both our ministers and indeed by Colin Powell.

Buried in our bunker, I learned and practiced the arts of propaganda. Before the war began, the Allied governments talked up the awfulness of the Iraqi threat. I calculated that Iraq had more main battle tanks than all the armies of Western Europe combined (as long as you counted them in a particular way). One of our Ministers (it might even have been the Prime Minister) said that the Iraqi army was the third largest in the world. Some journalists had queried this claim. I was therefore tasked to “prove” this statement. I duly consulted Jane’s Armies of the World and performed the necessary calculations. I could only “prove” the Prime Minister’s assertion by including Iraq’s enormous reserve forces (which amounted to over a million) and ignoring the reserves of the other contenders for the third-largest spot. But I need not have worried. The “fact” that Iraq had the third largest forces in the world had become one of those factoids, believed by almost everyone (except those who bothered to read the books), validated merely by multiple repetition.

Operation Desert Storm proceeded. Some members of my unit pasted large maps on the walls of our subterranean offices, showing the dispositions of our and the Iraqi forces. As the intelligence came in — or as CNN reported movements — they would move little flags and symbols up and down the maps. You could tell that they loved doing it because we had no need for the maps as we were not involved in any way with actual military operations. It reminded me of the fun I had playing wargames at school, massing Russian divisions, symbolized with little cardboard hexagons, against the Germans on the Eastern Front on a large boardmap of Europe. I had my own duties. Behind my desk was a row of old-fashioned bakelite telephones. Occasionally one would ring and it was my job to answer it. A voice would say “A scud [missile] has been launched towards Dhahran [or Tel Aviv or wherever]”. I would say “thank you very much” and replace the receiver. I would then announce to the unit that a Scud had been launched towards Tel Aviv and we would all turn on CNN to see shots of people frantically putting on gas masks in Tel Aviv. There was no other purpose for the telephone calls.

Although there was an undoubted excitement to these moments, there was also something terrible about them. We had seen plenty of information, from a variety of sources, suggesting that Iraq would use chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons. We never knew if this Scud launch might be the one that would bring hideous destruction with it. One night I read a report indicating a specific time when Iraq would launch a nuclear-tipped missile towards Israel. It was a tense night. But, I don’t care to admit, there was also something “real” about it, even though we were experiencing the war only remotely. There was a verve and punch to those days. The eyes of the officials in the unit, despite the strange hours we worked, were alive and sparkling. People loved to work on the war. Staff would come in to the unit even when they weren’t on duty. There was no work for them to do (truth be told, there was often very little for any of us to do), but they clearly wanted to be part of the “action”. One senior official made a fetish of coming to work and announcing to all about how his marriage was collapsing or he was missing his daughter’s birthday because of his work, yet he didn’t need to be there. There was a ghastly machismo about it. I remember us all having a good manly guffaw at the news that only one of the five bombers the pathetic Italians sent had managed to reach its target.

All of the officials in that rabbit warren of offices, including me, would say then, and perhaps now, that it was all terribly serious, but I suspect that many would know in their deepest senses that they enjoyed it. There is nothing like the excitement of war, particularly one where you yourself are at no risk whatsoever.

At the same time as I began, in a somewhat scattered and incoherent way, to realize why people, especially men, are driven towards the excitement of conflict (as I was too), I also became aware of a strange disconnection. One night, a British Tornado pilot was interviewed on the television. Asked what he thought of the rightness or wrongness of what he was doing, he replied that he simply did what the “politicians” wanted. He added that he did not have time to think about the “whys and wherefores”, as he put them – he just did his job. I pondered this statement and realized that we officials too, though in a less pointed fashion than the man who actually dropped the bombs, were in the same position. Although we were involved in the enterprise of war, none of us seemed to feel any real sense of responsibility for it.

I thought about this during the 2003 war with Iraq, when British officials (by that time my former colleagues) would tell me that they thoroughly disagreed with the war, even though — they did not add — they were thoroughly involved in executing it too. The ultimate conclusion of this logic is that only the ministers who decide to engage in a war are morally responsible for it.

There are reasons to question this comfortable assumption. Such a logic runs counter to the evolution of international law which, since the Nuremberg Trials, has emphasized that “obeying orders” is not a legitimate defense. This is not to suggest that our various wars with Iraq involved war crimes, but instead to point out the inconsistency of the logic which many government and military people seem to adhere to. For, whether bomber pilot or backroom official, we were all of us actively involved in the enterprise: the material facts of our actions could not be denied.

The argument of the pilot, which I think would have been shared by many if not all of the officials I worked with, is as follows. War is decided by “the politicians”; they are accountable through parliament; we — the functionaries — do what the politicians tell us. Our accountability is to them. We have no wider moral accountability. This reasoning fails some fundamental moral tests, such as Kant’s belief that you are morally responsible only for that which you can control. (For the more religious, God sees everything we do.) For the pilot and the official both have control in that they can choose not to participate. They are not forced to collaborate in policy. They can resign. There may be penalties for doing so, but they do nonetheless have that choice. This objection notwithstanding, the belief, whether rationally articulated or believed in some less coherent, emotional way, is widespread in government service. We just do what we are told.

The powerful and dangerous consequence of this mental habit is that it contributes to an undoubted moral numbness, although it felt not like numbness in the Gulf War Emergency Unit, but like complete indifference. It simply wasn’t our job to worry about the moral implications of what we were doing. To believe so would have been seen as hopelessly naïve. I have noticed the phenomenon particularly among some senior officials, whose sensibilities have been blunted by years of experience. The moral limits of the “system”, of “politics”, have become their own moral limits, so that they exhibit no separation between their own personal moral sphere and that of the political system in which they are working. Moral ugliness is breezily dismissed, “that’s just politics/the way the world is/the system, get over it.” Worse, this moral indifference is presented as a virtue: that those like them who see things as they “really are” are the more “practical” and “realistic”. Those who dare to exhibit their own moral judgment or criticism are condemned as “romantic”, “sentimental” or just plain “immature”.

There is a particular sobriquet that attaches itself to those who exhibit their moral sensibility too often or too openly, one which speaks also of the unspoken, class-derived norms of Foreign Office manners, that of “going too far”. In the 1990s there was one particular senior ambassador to a large Middle Eastern country who, it was felt, was “going too far”. He would send telegrams to London suggesting that Western policy in the Middle East was iniquitous: the Palestinians were being treated terribly and the Israelis should be more harshly censured. And he would say this quite often. For this expression of views, it was said in the Foreign Office (phone calls among colleagues, office gossip, muttered asides at meetings) that Sir X had “gone too far”, that he had abandoned that fabled quality: “balance”. Occasionally, I too was called to order in my performance reports for “going too far”. Debating at a staff dinner in Bonn, I had attacked a colleague for his defense of Britain’s inaction to prevent the Holocaust in World War Two. This, my report said, showed a tendency to “go too far”. My performance rating was duly downgraded.

One important point to notice about both these examples is that the tendency to “go too far” was in both cases exhibited in private, within the confines of the Foreign Office’s walls. I have little doubt that the senior ambassador did his job and was duly loyal to government policy when he was in foreign company, just as I was in pursuing what “we” wanted in my official work. But “going too far” was nonetheless condemned as a dangerous character flaw.

It only slowly became clear to me where the boundary lay between “balance” and “going too far”. “Balance” lay in never questioning the broad thrust of what “we” wanted or were doing. One was entitled to question and debate small details, but suggesting, for example, that sanctions were morally wrong was very much “not done”. Indeed, to mention that there should be a moral component to policy was regarded, in the unstated and inexplicit way that a culture operates, as naïve and unprofessional.

This was very much the culture of the officials in the Foreign Office. I always found that ministers (i.e. the politicians), by comparison, were much more willing to debate and hear criticism of the fundamentals of policy. I would have to seek them out in private, in order to avoid another “going too far” remark in my next personnel report, but whenever I did so, I invariably found them receptive. This was paradoxical because I was told by my seniors on a tedious number of occasions that officials were not supposed to question what ministers wanted. In fact, I often found that ministers wanted us to do just that, provided it was in private.

Ministers seemed to show an instinctive understanding that policy was about something more than just the allegedly-empirical world of “facts” (however dubiously derived) like states, security and interests. For “going too far” in some ways represents crossing over into the non-empirical realm of morality. To remain “balanced” was to choose to remain in the world of the state system, the world as it is: a world of statistics, even invented ones like Iraq’s third-largest army in the world, and cold-eyed “realism”. To accept such a reductionist version of the world is to succumb to the worst kind of cynicism, where that cynicism is not even declared or admitted as such. Sometimes when I looked in the eyes of those senior officials I thought I saw a kind of death, that some part of their soul had shriveled and died with disuse.

But at the time of the “Gulf War” such meditations were far in the future.[45] My interior moral debate did not prevent me from enjoying the exterior experience. Indeed it gave it a certain ambiguous drama.

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To think that the state and its servants must embody a different morality from that of ordinary people is widespread in the world of diplomacy. It is an acceptance often expressed with weary cynicism or an indifferent shrug, “it is the way of the world”: realpolitik. It is an idea whose antecedents stretch back into antiquity. Its most famous philosophical proponents are the Greek historian Thucydides, Machiavelli (most notably in The Prince) and Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan). The more recent exponents of realism include Henry Kissinger and the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who infamously dismissed those who sought Western intervention in the Yugoslav meltdown as the “something-must-be-done brigade”.[46]

In academic circles they are known as proponents of the “realist” view of international relations. For realists the laws governing politics have changed little if at all through the years. Although there are some differences between so-called neo-realists and classical realists, all theories of realism are skeptical of universal moral principles. The state, they argue, is by far the most important institution in international relations. They claim that collective action (for instance in the UN) is unlikely to work beyond short-term agreements, that a balance of power will emerge between rival alliances, and that war cannot be eradicated from international relations. Raison d’état governs the world.

I suppose my views represent more of what is known as the “liberal” view of international relations. Alongside realism, liberalism remains one of the predominant strands of Western political thought and practice. Like realism, liberalism has a rich heritage, encompassing such figures as John Locke, J.S. Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Though difficult to generalize into one paradigm, it offers a more universalist approach — law, human rights — to international affairs. As liberalism evolved in the twentieth century (and some called it neo-liberalism), it argued that cooperation and collective security in a multipolar system of democratic states and strong international institutions would best serve the interests of stability (echoing Kant’s “perpetual peace”). Many contemporary liberals viewed the end of the Cold War (the realist paradigm of a bipolar system) as the ultimate confirmation of liberalism as the only viable mode of political life.

Champion among such thinkers was Francis Fukuyama who, in his seminal book The End of History and the Last Man, argued that political history had come to a close with the death of the Cold War and, by default, the triumph of liberalism. Not only will liberal democracy and capitalism spread through an ever-globalizing world, but also such a system would be ideal. A world wherein all states adhere to liberal democratic norms, institutions and universal political values would be one that neutralizes war and conflict. From Kant onwards, liberals embraced the idea that representative democratic governments would never resort to violence because rational, free-thinking individuals would never consider war in their best interest. Additionally, growing economic interdependence means that states have increasingly higher stakes in ensuring mutual peace and prosperity.

Meanwhile, in the US, a new school of thought, neo-conservatism, emerged, which reflects elements of both realism and liberalism. Unlike the proponents of these other schools, the neo-cons are more policymakers and politicians than theorists. The most definitive exposition of neo-conservatism as a movement has been put forward by the Project for the New American Century, a think-tank whose statement of principles carries the names of Vice President Dick Cheney, former Vice President Dan Quayle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense and current World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and another twenty-odd prominent American policymakers and academics.

In brief, contemporary neo-conservatives promote four key foreign policies: maintaining and expanding US military forces, openly challenging hostile regimes, promoting economic and political freedom and shaping the international order to one best fit for American “security, prosperity and principles”. In short, neo-conservatives hold that the advancement of American goals and interests is important and beneficial not only for the US but for the rest of the world.

With some echoes of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal idealism in promoting American ideals of government and economics abroad, neo-conservatives differ from other conservatives with their aggressive and moralist foreign policy stance. (Many neo-cons for instance, although not in government at the time, supported the decidedly anti-realist position that the US should intervene to stop Serb ethnic cleansing and seizure of territory during the Yugoslav wars.) That neo-conservatism draws on the ideas of Wilson indicates the ideological diversity within the movement. Indeed, many neo-conservatives once affiliated themselves with liberal or even far-left political ideologies; many considered themselves neo-conservative in the past but are no longer. Apart from their common interests in foreign policy, neo-conservatives are almost universally united in their opposition to communism. The “War on Terror” and the “Bush doctrine” show the significant influence of the “neo-cons” on American policy today.

In any debate on foreign policy, you will observe these strands emerge: morality vs raison d’état; intervention vs persuasion and nonmilitary coercion; confrontation vs negotiation or cooperation. Added to the mix is the dichotomy of soft vs hard power, an idea (originated by Harvard professor Joseph Nye) that power has many expressions other than military force, including cultural and institutional persuasion. As Nye himself says,

“The basic concept of power is the ability to influence others to get them to do what you want. There are three major ways to do that: one is to threaten them with sticks; the second is to pay them with carrots; the third is to attract them or co-opt them, so that they want what you want. If you can get others to be attracted, to want what you want, it costs you much less in carrots and sticks.”

The contrast is often made between the “soft power” of the European Union, which encourages states to behave better through the carrot of EU membership or other EU-granted advantages, and the “hard” militaristic approach of the Bush administration.

These theories were developed to help explain international relations, and in some cases — the neo-cons being the most recent example — to help shape policy. Looking back at my experience of policymaking and implementing foreign policy, I find however that their relevance is limited. I have argued in earlier chapters that realist concepts still play a large role in shaping how diplomats think about the world — states identifying their interests and interacting, and sometimes fighting, on the basis of these interests. Liberal ideas of projecting universal values — rights and law — also have an influence, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the circumstance. But the very coherence and neatness of these theoretical explanations of diplomatic behavior betrays the reality, and the complexity, of what actually took place.

In government, officials tend to think in a “realist” manner, defining their interests and choices according to realpolitik. While I have argued that such thinking is still far too dominant in policy-making, there is also a substantial “liberal” sentiment at play too (and this was true of Conservative as well as Labor governments in Britain, Republicans and Democrats in the US): that we should be driven by more universal concerns for human rights and the diminishing of suffering. There can be no doubt that neo-conservative ideas played a substantial part in driving the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, but as I have discussed in chapter 4, they cannot have been the only factor. There were doubtless many others at play. Only in newspaper columns is the argument put into simple dichotomies.

What one finds in the world of diplomacy today is rarely distinguishable into these theoretical boxes. Policymakers are influenced by a mass of different factors, some historical, some cultural, some emotional and some indefinable. To pretend that decision-makers or policy-framers look at the world in terms of theory (whether liberal or realist) is dangerously reductionist. The more subtle and complex reality I experienced suggests a certain skepticism about the explanatory utility of these theories. In short, policymaking is more random, more arbitrary, just simply messier and more human than theory would have us believe.

(One consequence of this reality is, again, to underline the requirement for greater scrutiny of those within the system. For if decision-making is as arbitrary and unsystematic as I claim, then all the greater is the power of those within the system — since they are not following a consistent theory — and thus greater the need to query and check their actions.)

This is understandable. Foreign ministers and diplomats are human after all. But the desire to fit real events into these conceptual structures often diminishes, not increases, our understanding. NATO’s intervention in Kosovo is often presented as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention”, namely the idea that states can intervene in other states, against their governments’ will, in order to protect civilians against genocide or widespread oppression. This right is not yet incorporated into international law.

But NATO’s intervention was driven by many factors, including guilt over its failure to prevent genocide in Bosnia and in particular the Srebrenica massacre. Other factors included the fact that the majority in Kosovo (the Kosovo-Albanians) were being so clearly repressed by Milosevic’s Belgrade, the power of the almost real-time imagery of Kosovo refugees being driven from their country, the diplomatic isolation of Milosevic and the sense that he was near the end of his power, the overwhelming military superiority of NATO which allowed intervention without risking Western troops on the ground, the power of the pro-Albanian lobby in the US, the role of the UN Security Council and international law (the Council neither endorsed nor condemned the intervention), the idea that the West could not admit more chaos and genocide in Europe (though it was ready to allow it in Africa), and of course the personal inclinations of the leaders concerned which must perforce have comprised their own private narratives of the meaning of morality, history, the nation state and their own emotional motors. This combination of factors came to a head at a particular moment in 1999 and pushed the decision-makers towards intervention. Had the crisis arisen in 1996 or 2002, it is hard to believe that they would have made the same decision. And even this account is inevitably simplistic.

It seems to be something intrinsic to discussion of foreign relations that we tend to conceptualize in such generalized terms. When Machiavelli was writing about international relations, his world was divided into states which traded and occasionally went to war with one another, but that was about all, and their trade and other interactions were but a tiny proportion of their total economic and other activity. It is a very different story today where the interactions of states (with the exception of a few isolated hermits like North Korea) are massive and heterogeneous. The world is not divisible. Hobbes’s ideas were very much driven by the need to avoid civil war (which gripped England during his lifetime) not international war, yet his ideas of the state and the alternatives to it still influence basic, and often unspoken, assumptions about international relations.

One of the oddities of the discourse of international relations is that it treats the world of states and their doings as on a separate plane. It is as if states float above the realm of ordinary people and that therefore they require different forms of analysis and moral scrutiny. Perhaps this is because we are taught, by the inevitable simplifications of history, to regard states as separate entities, discrete and with agency. Perhaps our natural desire for order and patterns encourages us to do this too. History we prefer to see as a linear progression, indeed as “progress”, until the present moment.[47] Like us, the world betrays little order, and as we advance into the twenty-first century, the neatness of past centuries (though were they ever really neat?) falls away, and we encounter something that looks more and more like entropy, disorder.

There is danger here too. The more complex the world becomes, the less it will respond to our simplistic models of how it should behave. The temptation will arise to make it respond. This is one way (and only one of many ways) of viewing the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq (whose putative motivations are discussed at further length in chapter 4): it was an attempt, post the devastating ruction of 9/11, to reassert an American order on the world, an order more reflective of the realist analysis of the 2001 National Security Council strategy document: a world of states and threats which must be countered. The post-invasion history of Iraq has shown how inappropriate that form of analysis is. As I write in 2006, the removal of a dictator has spawned not stability but chaos in a country that barely warrants such a designation, where many post-national (or pre-national) forces — religious, ethnic, anti-American, fundamentalist — are at play in a confusing and violent mêlée.

Thus to understand the world internationally today, we need more than the theory of how states behave. We need to understand that a state is a mere agglomeration of individuals, not a singularity. To understand these groups and their leaders, we must acknowledge their great complexity, and develop a debate about their moral behavior in the international context (not deny its relevance). We must apply the tools with which we understand other forms of human behavior, whether collective or individual: psychology, anthropology, and perhaps the more arcane means of interpreting hidden motives such as semiotics and even art. We must employ too our understanding of our physical space — the environment, natural resources — in order to accommodate its effects upon our behavior and our lives. None of these factors is separable without artifice; even together, they lend themselves poorly to generic theorizing. We must be humble before these many signals, and aware of the limits of our capacity to interpret them.

And while theory has its limits, even words and terms themselves sometimes cannot convey all that is important.