How Diplomacy Works, Part II: Diplomatic Campaigns for Grown Ups
How Statesmen Get What They Want By Means Other Than War
Or: Getting to the toast
It took me another fifteen years or so to realize as a rookie Foreign Service Officer that the campaign that I used to get my father to buy a color TV resembled what American diplomats do all the time in pursuing national goals. Journalist and educator Nicholas Kralev defines diplomacy as the pursuit of national interests by measures short of war. Diplomacy is the tool of statecraft meant to implement national strategy by peaceably influencing the behavior of states, international organizations, or other actors in the international arena.1 As a tool of statecraft, diplomacy shares the statesman’s toolkit with military force, international economic policy, information operations, espionage, and the organization of national security-related institutions.
The planning and execution by statesmen and diplomats of campaigns designed to maximize our persuasive force2 is a central diplomatic activity. Using tools and tactics employed by generations of their forebears, along with some new ones like social media, statesmen wage diplomatic campaigns to signal our intentions, explain our behavior, or achieve desirable diplomatic outcomes. What we want could be a peace agreement, assent to a proposal, a concession in a negotiation, support for our position on an issue, or an alliance or entente to counter an adversary. Some diplomatic campaigns may aim to achieve nothing tangible at all but rather to signal to a rival the strength of our determination or to reassure our allies of our commitment to their security.
The diplomatic campaign falls within the operational level of diplomacy.3 Diplomacy at the operational level links the overall goals of strategy with individual diplomatic actions at the tactical level. Most people are familiar with the tactical level. Individual diplomatic actions take place at this level: the negotiation, the demarche, the senior level visit, the diplomatic reception. These are the most publicly visible aspects of the diplomat’s art. We see the President stepping off Air Force One on a foreign visit, the President meeting foreign leaders in the Oval Office, the text of a joint statement, state dinner guest lists, and news of ongoing negotiations.
Diplomacy at the tactical level: The negotiation.
Senior officials who practice diplomacy, like the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State, consider diplomacy at the strategic level when they meet with the President in the White House to define our goals, articulate options, and define courses of action designed to achieve our aims. When a full National Security Council meeting, including the President, the Secretaries of Defense, State and Treasury Departments along with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA Director resolve to persuade our allies to support us in resisting Russia in the Ukraine, the decision is not self-implementing. They need a plan to elicit that support; they need to determine exactly what we want allies to do by when; and they need to decide how they’re going to bring persuasive force to bear on our partners — and Russia.
Diplomacy at the strategic level: Strategizing in the White House Situation Room .
This is where the diplomatic campaign comes in. Think of a diplomatic campaign as the execution of a well planned and coordinated course of action or series of steps intended to achieve the goals that statesmen have decided to pursue. If it’s success in negotiations they seek, leaders might implement a campaign to magnify our persuasive force by:
— making the issue our highest priority or our only priority
whenever we talk to target country officials;
— raising mention of the issue to the highest levels of our government, i.e., have the President raise it;
— increasing the domestic public profile of the issue to generate support at home;
— demarching foreign governments soliciting support;
— pressing with shameless persistence at all levels of the target government or governments;
— using the meetings and other events on the global diplomatic calendar (like the G7 or the UN General Assembly) to generate momentum; or
— enlist the public support of allies or partners.
If we want to signal our determination to deter an adversary or reassure our allies, we might:
— dispatch senior officials to allied and partner capitals to meet with their leaders;
— have leaders issue public statements demonstrating allied solidarity;
— deploy military forces to demonstrate our deterrent capabilities;
— have the President or cabinet secretaries call their counterparts in like-minded capitals;
— encourage friendly commentators to publicly support our course of action.
In all of these actions we aim to impart psychological effects, which can include encouraging assent, changing perceptions, strengthening deterrence, instilling fear, or bolstering solidarity. The use of military assets to intimidate or deter may be employed in this process, but these actions are subordinate to the achievement of a diplomatic outcome, in this case, signaling determination to the Russians and reassuring allies of our commitment. Military operations are not ends in themselves when used in the context of a diplomatic campaign and civilian leaders must exert sufficient control over senior officers to ensure that military goals do not supplant the task of achieving assent from the target government.
The political scientist Aaron Friedberg captures the importance of psychology well in describing the U.S.-China rivalry. He states:
“Central to the strategies of both competitors is an effort to exert influence over one another and over third parties…At its core, the Sino-American competition is a mind game. Each contestant seeks via various channels to influence the other’s perceptions and calculations, and through them its strategies and goals.”4
Henry Kissinger once commented that the United States is more focused on military power while China is focused on psychological impact. Perhaps Kissinger had the old Northrop Grumman advertisement shown below in mind. That ad equates the threat of military force represented by an aircraft carrier with the conduct of diplomacy. Worse, it suggests that all we need to achieve our national goals is big enough warships. But the image below, and Kissinger’s characterization of the differences in Chinese and American statecraft, are exaggerated, especially since China began intimidating its neighbors with larger and more capable military forces. American statesmen wage psychological campaigns all the time, to signal our intentions to allies and adversaries, to change other countries perceptions or behavior, or to achieve success in negotiations. Diplomatic campaigns are psychological campaigns.
It’s really 90,000 tons of intimidation. There’s a difference.
A good example of the use of a diplomatic campaign to signal adversaries and allies is the Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific campaign of early 2021, which I will cover in the next installment.
1
Nicholas Kralev, Diplomatic Tradecraft, p. 3.
2
I am indebted to Chas Freeman for his thoughts on persuasive force. See his The Arts of Power.
3
The American diplomat Paul Kreutzer takes a slightly different approach to “operational diplomacy” in Ten Principles of Operational Diplomacy, a Proposed Framework, American Diplomacy, June 2014, accessed at Article
4
Aaron Friedberg, The Contest for Supremacy, p. 182.