If by some miracle Joe Biden is re-elected president of the United States, he will probably want to reshuffle his cabinet. He could do worse than appointing Chris Coons Secretary of State. Coons, one of the few people who has Biden’s ear, is wasted in the Senate on a leaderless committee. Talleyrand does not know him or much about him. The little that can be said is that Coons appears thoughtful, dignified, civil, and, well, real. Which is saying quite a lot.
The Biden administration’s practice in foreign relations now follows a certain pattern. There is a crisis. The Secretary of State pretends to do something. (The Pentagon, which used to perform that role, is almost always silent.) Little or nothing positive happens. Then the Director of the CIA announces that he has made a secret journey someplace (sometimes when the Secretary of State is there on the very same day), and reveals a ‘secret’ menu of discussions, all meant, evidently, to remind people that he is the de facto foreign minister. Then comes another round of vacuous public statements, followed, after a decent interval, by some sort of action on the margins of the problem. Finally, there appears a long, legalistic, and widely circulated celebration of a foreign policy achievement, almost certainly from the pen of the administration’s chief advocate, the National Security Adviser.
‘The worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers’, Harold Nicolson has written; ‘the best kind are the reasonable and humane sceptics’. To the former list we may now add stenographers and altar boys. That they are now celebrating the release of hostages more frequently than any other action is not just undignified; it is unseemly. A change of tone and, one hopes, of substance, is overdue.