ne hundred years ago, in the days when diplomatic summits followed wars, carved up continents and sometimes lasted months (today’s attendees complain if they run past midnight), Harold Nicolson attended the Paris Peace Conference as a junior U.K. diplomat. His conclusion: “Amateurish diplomacy leads to improvisation.”

“Nothing could be more fatal than the habit (the at present persistent and pernicious habit) of personal contact between the Statesmen of the World,” the Bloomsbury-set diarist and author wrote in his account of the 1919 talks. “Diplomacy is the art of negotiating documents in a ratifiable and therefore dependable form. It is by no means the art of conversation.”

Fast-forward a century, and things could not be more different from what Nicolson prescribed.

Global leaders are carrying out foreign policy by Twitter and WhatsApp. U.S. President Donald Trump is improvising summits with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, writing crudely worded letters to Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and proclaiming in the home of multilateralism, the U.N. General Assembly, that “the future does not belong to globalists.” Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron is scrapping G7 communiqués because “no one reads them,” even as he freelances on Iran, China and NATO (calling it “brain dead”).

For career foreign policy staffers, it’s a diplomatic Ice Age. Those schooled in what the satirist Ambrose Bierce described as “the patriotic art of lying for one’s country” are feeling increasingly sidelined by the era of mano a mano diplomacy — or, worse still, singled out by political leaders as part of a “deep state” that wants to subvert the will of the electorate.

“People say it is all becoming transactional at diplomatic level. Trust is being undermined. And this is not good for the international system" — Jan Melissen, Dutch academic

“Traditional diplomacy is becoming archaic,” said a veteran U.S. State Department official, acknowledging that not everybody in Washington, London or Brussels might believe that that’s a bad thing. “It’s like the coal industry — should we really rescue it?”

The question matters because, at its best, diplomacy promotes shared values and shared prosperity, and prevents conflict. As Winston Churchill said, “Jaw to jaw is better than war,” so the quality of the jaw-jaw is important.

Trump in a china shop

he State Department official was speaking as Trump’s hand-picked ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, was being hauled before Congress to explain his role in shady diplomatic dealings in Ukraine.

There was a touch of Schadenfreude in that spectacle — nowhere more so than in Brussels, still bristling at the hotel magnate’s reported remark that his mission was “to destroy the European Union.” (“That’s the opposite of the job description,” muttered a German diplomat with a more traditional view of an ambassador’s role.)

The contrast between Sondland’s methods and the pushback from foreign policy professionals has highlighted the downside of Trump’s instinct to sideline career diplomats in favor of political appointees who are less likely to question his commands.

The American Foreign Service Association (a sort of diplomats’ union) says that approximately 45 percent of the 166 ambassadors named by Trump are political appointees, versus 55 percent career diplomats. That’s compared to about 30 percent political to 70 percent career in the Obama, Clinton and both Bush administrations. The association warns that the work of the foreign service must “not be politicized.”

The warning has likely come a little late. Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, took the machete to the State Department’s budget to such an extent that Chris Murphy, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has said America spends “20 times as much money on the military and intelligence agencies as we do on diplomacy” (which he described as malpractice).

Tillerson’s successor Mike Pompeo came to office in 2018 promising to restore “swagger” to the State Department and hands out #swagger badges with key words like “cool,” “respected” and “patriotic.” But the situation hasn’t got any better for the department’s career staffers. According to some long-serving diplomats who have let loose upon retirement, U.S. foreign policy is in “desperate straits.”

William Burns, a former deputy secretary of state who is now president of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, lambasted the Trump administration’s “profoundly self-destructive shock and awe campaign against professional diplomacy” in “The Back Channel,” his memoirs published in June.

Not all career diplomats are completely averse, however, to the well-established practice of political appointees. Some point out that, subject to proper vetting, it can inject “fresh blood” into the profession.

People with a business background like Sondland and Pompeo (who ran an aviation business) are better qualified than career civil servants — the argument goes — to shake up foreign policy and ensure that multilateral institutions like the U.N. are, in the words of one senior administration official, “delivering outcomes” that benefit ordinary Americans.

“Spending 20 years in the rarified atmosphere of the [U.K.] Foreign Office or the State Department isn’t necessarily going to give you better skills to be the public face of government than someone who has skills in business or culture and close ties to the national leadership,” said the State Department official.

What’s certainly true is that envoys like Sondland and U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who appear to relish rubbing their hosts up the wrong way, are a more faithful reflection of Trump’s approach to foreign policy than suave old-school diplomats.

Grenell, who speaks openly of wanting to “empower” conservatives in Europe, “is not playing to the traditional crowd but to Trump, who wants that kind of message,” said the State Department official. “If it smashes the china, that’s okay — he’s being a disruptor.”

Sondland described himself a few months back as a “disruptive diplomat,” though he probably didn’t know at the time quite how much disruption he would cause.

Here come cowboys

n Europe, the disdain for Trump appointees like Sondland and Grenell betrays a hint of snobbery. They are regarded as an invasive species from North America, louder and more aggressive than the native breed and likely to wipe it out. “The rules-based post-war order is being broken by those who made it,” said one EU diplomat. “It’s becoming the Wild West, and they’re sending in the cowboys.”

For European tastes, too much boardroom-style quid pro quo in diplomacy undermines trust, according to Jan Melissen, founder and co-editor of the Hague Journal of Diplomacy: “People say it is all becoming transactional at diplomatic level. Trust is being undermined. And this is not good for the international system.”

It’s an open question whether the Trumpian brand of diplomacy is proving effective. “Current American diplomacy is less effective in defending U.S. interests than the current administration appears to believe,” said one senior German diplomat.

Grenell can, however, point to numerous successes, including his campaign to get Germany to ban Iranian airline Mahan Air over its links to the Revolutionary Guards, and signs that Berlin is yielding to U.S. pressure to reach the NATO defense spending target of 2 percent of GDP (albeit by 2031).

One U.S. official rubbished talk that Grenell gets no access, citing his regular meetings with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Cabinet and staff, and lawmakers from across the Bundestag, adding: “People criticize his style, which is different — he’s not a ribbon-cutter. He’s much more political than other ambassadors. But to say he has no accomplishments is crazy. He’s a foreign policy guy.”

Best of British

or Tony Gardner, Sondland’s predecessor as U.S. ambassador to the EU, the Trump administration is simply “ripping apart the relationship in a needlessly destructive way. If they think they are promoting U.S. interests in the EU, they are delusional,” he told POLITICO.

Gardner is just as aghast at what could happen to diplomacy in the U.K., his adopted home, as it faces its greatest foreign policy challenge of the post-war period — Brexit. “Britain will lose a world-class asset if it allows the civil service to become politicized or dogmatized,” said Gardner, whose memoir, “Stars with Stripes,” comes out next year.

Gardner’s view is shared by some U.K. politicians including Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative MP who chairs the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee. “The Foreign Office is in exactly the same place [as the State Department], and that’s why it has lost influence,” Tugendhat said, adding that the FCO is “the shadow of its former self.”

“Lots of people are deeply concerned about the collapse of U.K. influence around the world,” he added.

Another Tory MP, the former Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt, said diplomats were too “positive and enthusiastic” to complain but “are incredibly stretched” by a lack of investment, which was bound to become even more evident after Brexit. “The political will to be a ‘Global Britain’ is very strong, but it has to be more than a slogan,” he said.

One former U.K. diplomat said Downing Street under Conservative Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson has tended to see civil servants as “binary thinkers” who are more likely to point out problems than provide solutions. “They only want gung-ho types,” said the former diplomat.

Foreign Office morale was particularly damaged by the resignation of two ambassadors whose advice was not welcome, though in different ways. Britain’s man in Brussels, Ivan Rogers, resigned in January 2017 criticizing politicians’ “muddled thinking” on Brexit; Washington envoy Kim Darroch quit in July over leaked cables in which he called the White House “diplomatically clumsy and inept.”

Johnson’s failure to support Darroch (whom Trump described as a “pompous fool”) was a cold bath for the diplomatic service, whose head, Simon McDonald, told a parliamentary hearing about the leak: “People are shaken. The basis on which we have worked all our careers suddenly feels challenged.”

Diplomatic relaunch

he demoralization of the U.K. diplomatic service comes just as it is working to renew itself. Many in its ranks have long grasped the need to adapt in order to remain relevant in an age when the proliferation of digital communication means — in the words of Tom Fletcher, a former British ambassador to Lebanon — that “anyone can be a diplomat.”

Fletcher’s 2016 book “The Naked Diplomat” calls for a radical update of a profession weighed down by “procedural method — summits and communiqués — [that] was designed in 1815 for an age of monarchies and great states.”

“Now is a good moment to stand up for diplomatic values, and diplomacy as a civilizing force" — Jan Melissen, Dutch academic

His ideas — which also appeared in a 2016 report called “Future FCO” — became the seeds of an overhaul designed to drag British diplomacy into the 21st century, such as opening up some senior overseas posts to non-diplomats, which had previously been very much the exception.

In June, FCO chief McDonald tweeted out a job ad for the top posts in Gibraltar, Luxembourg, Kuwait and South Korea, saying: “We want the best to represent the UK.” (One of the first responses was “sorry I didn’t go to Eton.”) At the time of publication, the jobs had not been filled, though the salaries on offer (£70,000 a year for an ambassador to Luxembourg) may not be enough to tempt top British business leaders.

Don’t shout about it

iewed from Brussels’ European Quarter, where it can sometimes seem that every other person is a diplomat (the EU capital has more accredited diplomats than London and Washington), warnings of a crisis in the foreign service may seem far-fetched.

After all, predictions of the “death of diplomacy” have come thick and fast for decades, in parallel with the steady decline in the relative clout and budget of foreign ministries in relation to other international portfolios like trade and, more recently, technology.

European Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to boost spending on foreign policy, aid and development by 30 percent in the EU’s next long-term budget — music to the ears of the External Action Service, charged with managing the bloc’s international relations, even if inflation may eat up a chunk of that increase. One EU diplomat said it demonstrates that “the EU remains ambitious in foreign policy.”

So if it is true that, as one British official put it, “what happens in America always finds its way to the U.K. first and then to Europe,” then signs of disquiet spreading to the EU’s diplomatic corps are more subtle.

But they can be detected. French President Emmanuel Macron caused some queasiness by warning French ambassadors in August not to act as a “deep state.” The statement was regarded by many as further evidence that in Europe, as in the United States, there is little political capital to be gained from defending an élite breed who, in the popular imagination, live in exotic palaces and spend their time at polite receptions, and whose successes are generally invisible to the public.

“Now is a good moment to stand up for diplomatic values, and diplomacy as a civilizing force,” said Melissen, the Dutch academic. “But in an electoral sense, it’s not something you want to shout too loudly.”

Morale in the External Action Service has also taken a few knocks in its decade of existence, with its signature success — the Iran nuclear deal — unravelling, and its place in EU hierarchy sliding. The EU’s first high representative for foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton, was the Commission’s second-in-command, but her successors have been progressively downgraded: Federica Mogherini is third in the ranking and her successor Josep Borrell will be fifth in the pecking order.

“Look at the Irish — they are brilliant. On the Hill [Capitol Hill] they know every senator" — Tom Tugendhat, Conservative MP

At the same time, the Commission and the European Council, which represents national governments, are gradually clawing back tasks they had delegated to the External Action Service when it was being set up.

In Brussels, there is a widely held view that Brexit has provided the EU with a diplomatic victory, of sorts. While the remaining members of the EU failed to convince the U.K. to stick around, they did hold the line against successive British prime ministers’ attempts to buddy up with individual national leaders on Brexit.

That’s not completely good news for the EU’s career diplomats. Just as the FCO was sidelined by the Pythonesque-sounding Department for Exiting the EU, the cool hand guiding the EU27’s Brexit task force has been French politician and former Commissioner Michel Barnier — not the External Action Service. Strictly speaking, however, the service’s remit is dealing with third countries, and Britain is still an EU member.

Top of the Hill

f Brexit has burnished any country’s diplomatic credentials, it is Ireland. Dublin has emerged from the first three years of tortuous negotiations as a sort of poster child for ambassadorial elbow-grease.

“Look at the Irish — they are brilliant,” enthused Tugendhat in Westminster, citing Dublin’s remarkable ability to persuade the EU27 to hold the line on Brexit, and to rally top U.S. politicians to the defense of the Good Friday Agreement. “On the Hill [Capitol Hill] they know every senator.”

Such results “didn’t come out of thin air,” said Dan Mulhall, Ireland’s veteran ambassador to Washington, who previously ran the Irish missions in London and Berlin. “It was the product of concerted effort at political and diplomatic level.”

Mulhall said he had been in constant contact with the Irish-American delegation in the U.S. Congress, whose message was “amplified” by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi when she said on a visit to London that there was “no chance whatsoever” of a U.S.-U.K. trade deal if Brexit weakened the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to the island of Ireland.

Outspoken in his opposition to Brexit while he was ambassador to the U.K. during the 2016 referendum, Mulhall has been equally public in his criticism of U.S. support for Brexit and attacks on the EU. The Trump administration’s position, he said, is “shortsighted, as the EU and the U.S. have so many values and interests in common.”

Mulhall combines old-fashioned glad-handing with modern public diplomacy, speaking in public five or six times a week while addressing more than 22,000 followers on Twitter. “There is a sense of ambition now that I haven’t seen in my 40 years in the foreign service,” he said, adding that Ireland has opened up eight new embassies in the last year and plans 26 more.

Mulhall is a scholar of W.B. Yeats, whose portrait has pride of place in his office on Washington’s Embassy Row. Asked about the Irish poet, he enthusiastically recites the 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” His emphasis is not on the most often quoted passage, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” It’s on the later lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

Asked if that’s a comment on the state of world affairs, he smiles. Diplomatically.