The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age
Who will be in power in the 21st century? Governments? Big business? Internet titans? And how do we influence the future?Digital technology is changing power at a faster rate than any time in history. Distrust and inequality are fuelling political and economic uncertainty. The scaffolding built around the global order is fragile, and the checks and balances created over centuries to protect liberty are being tested, maybe to destruction. Tom Fletcher, the youngest senior British ambassador for two hundred years, considers how we – as governments, businesses, individuals – can survive and thrive in the twenty first century. And how we can ensure that technology can make it easier of citizens truly to take back control.
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William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published as Naked Diplomacy 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: 9780008127589
Ebook Edition © June 2016 ISBN: 9780008127572
Version: 2017-02-20
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.
Contents
INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
PREFACE: The Diplomat Who Arrived Too Late
INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION: Here Lies Diplomacy, RIP?
PART ONE – Glad-handing on the Shoulders of Giants: A Short History of Diplomacy
1. Early Diplomacy: From Cavemen to Consuls
2. Diplomacy By Sea: From Columbus to Copyboys
4. From Telephone to Television
6. What Makes a Good Diplomat?
PART TWO – Statecraft and Streetcraft: Power and Diplomacy in a Connected World
7. iDiplomacy: Devices, Disruption and Data
8. The End of Secrecy? Assange, Snowden and the Death of Bond
9. Building New Power: Bombs, Books and Beckham
10. Using New Power: Only Connect
11. Selling Ladders for Other People to Climb Down
14. Who Runs the Digital Century?
15. The Battle for Digital Territory
As evening fell the day’s 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’
INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
I would obviously like to claim that 2016 proved this book right. After all, in a post-truth world, we can all claim anything. In my favour, it was a year in which many of the themes of The Naked Diplomat – truth and lies online and offline; coexistence versus wall building; open versus closed societies; the implications of our inability to reach angry and frustrated parts of our societies – have been thrust into centre stage.
But nobody really called 2016. I predicted that of the United Nations, US, France and the UK, two would be run by women in 2017. I may have got the wrong two. It has been a logic-defying, irrational year, in which three acronyms officially entered the dictionary – ‘LOL’, ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’. And many began to worry that liberalism could be confined to the dictionary.
Among the many ironies of 2016, Germany emerged as the bulwark against Fascism; the Pope emerged as the leading spokesman for freedom; China emerged as the defender of the Davos consensus; and a TV celebrity billionaire emerged as the voice of the ordinary American. Empowered citizens voted for policies they knew would make them poorer; for liars to clean up politics; and to take back control by reducing their global influence. And experts responded to accusations that they were no longer needed by being consistently wrong. Meanwhile, Russia bombed Syrian civilians to save them from terror. George Orwell, take a bow.
The beginning and end of chapters in history books can be pretty arbitrary. But 2016 is the end of the chapter that started in 1989, or maybe even 1945 or 1789. It could be the end of the American Age. It might mark the (hopefully temporary) resignation of America as a driving force for liberty throughout the world. Donald Trump’s election created a vacancy for leader of the free world. For the first time in my life, we can take nothing about the next year for granted, let alone the next decade: because 2016 is the new normal. We are in new and uncertain terrain.
