The Ambassadors: Diplomatic insider steers clear of Brexit

The Ambassadors: Thinking about Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times

Author: Robert Cooper

ISBN-13: 978-0297608530

Publisher: W&N

Guideline Price: £25

Who are history’s most influential thinkers on the exercise of power and the conduct of relations between states? How has the international system, and the role of small countries therein, changed over time? When does diplomacy succeed and fail, and how are both assessed and measured? Who better to ponder such questions than a retired senior diplomat who worked for not one, but two separate foreign services.

Robert Cooper spent most of his professional life as a British diplomat. He developed quite the reputation as a foreign policy intellectual in the 2000s when he authored a number of acclaimed books and pamphlets. In that decade he moved to Brussels and saw out the remainder of his career working for the European Union’s diplomatic service.

“This is a book of fragments.” Never has a volume’s opening sentence more accurately described its contents. This 500-pager has the feel of a book that has been written over many years.

Most of it is devoted to concise and insightful biographies of those who invented statecraft as it exists today and those who have practiced it most deftly: from Cardinal Richelieu and Talleyrand to George Kennan and Jean Monnet. Its recounting of significant episodes in international affairs – including the congress on the future of post-Napoleonic Europe and the Cuban missile crisis – are lively and informative. For those disinclined to read at greater length about the above, and many other individuals and events of historical import, this book is something of a compendium.

From an Irish perspective, two of the book’s longest chapters may be of particular interest. One is on the respective roles of two highly comparable countries – Denmark and Finland – in the European and wider international systems. Their relations with their much bigger neighbours (Germany and Russia, respectively) offer thought-provoking parallels with Ireland-Britain relations.

The second chapter of note is on Henry Kissinger. The nonagenarian’s actions in high office half a century ago are well known in Ireland, where he is generally perceived as an ogre. He was, for instance, interviewed on RTÉ Radio Two decades ago in the manner of a war criminal. This is despite the fact that he is the holder of a Nobel Peace Price and despite his real contribution to the victory of democracy over dictatorship in the cold war, via both his actions as the US’s leading diplomat from 1969 until 1977 and via his copious writings over many decades.

It is curious that in Ireland these writings are little known even though Kissinger is viewed by scholars of international affairs and diplomats around the world as an intellectual giant in the field, whatever his moral failings. By contrast, none would view figures such as Noam Chomsky and the late Robert Fisk as authorities on these subjects, yet they are widely read here.

Maddening

Cooper’s long chapter on Kissinger correctly acknowledges his Diplomacy, written in the mid-1990s, as the finest diplomatic history ever written and reminds readers that no other author has contributed as many essays to Foreign Affairs, the world’s most prestigious journal on international relations. Whatever one’s views on Kissinger, he is essential reading for those interested in world politics and the conduct of relations between states. This book’s often critical analysis is as good a primer on Kissinger as there is to be found.

Your reviewer came to this book with high expectations based on the author’s previous writings and because, as a retiree, he is now much freer to say things that he might not have been able to say when serving as a diplomat. But this is emphatically not a memoir. Indeed, the author appears to have gone to considerable lengths not to include insights from his own career on the issues analysed in the book.

That is a disappointment, but so be it – it is always hard to criticise a book for what the author has chosen not to include. The same cannot be said of Britain and Brexit. Cooper rightly views the EU as a near miraculous innovation in the conduct of relations among states and he greatly regrets his country’s “unnecessary exit”. But apart from a six-page afterword on his home country containing some suggestions for political reforms, that is about it.

This is maddening. So much partisan dross has been written on Brexit. Cooper, having worked in the belly of the EU beast and whose feel for history is often exquisite, could not be better placed to analyse what Britain’s breaking away from the European state system means for all concerned. It can only be a missed opportunity that he did not add, at the very least, a thorough chapter on that subject.

Dan O’Brien is chief economist at the Institute of International and European affairs and author of Ireland, Europe and the World: writings on a new century