MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAVE just seen the January number of Foreign Affairs. This excellent American quarterly, which has for long been edited by Mr. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, is today the most influential, as well as among the most reliable, of all periodicals devoted to the subject of international relations. Mr. Armstrong has every cause to feel proud of this great instrument of instruction and opinion, the high standards maintained by which are largely due to his own scholarship and energy. The first article in this January number is one devoted by Lord Vansittart to the problem of what he calls "The Decline of Diplomacy." Much as I admire Lord Vansittart's career and personality, I find it very difficult to forgive him his style. His is not the illiteracy of some film star who is induced by the desire for even more publicity to venture into print. On the contrary, Lord Vansittart is a highly educated man. He has written several volumes of poetry, three of his plays have, if I mistake not, been performed with success, and at least one of his many novels is likely to find a permanent place in literature. He has achieved high office, mingled on terms of equality with the leaders of his age, rendered himself familiar with the ways of men in many European, American and Asiatic countries, and consorted with all manner of human beings, both the grand ones and those who are not grand in the least. Lord Vansittart is what I should describe as the perfect type of civilised European, namely, a natural Bohemian who dislikes physical or intellectual squalor. Yet when this man, so richly endowed, so widely cultivated, begins to put his pen to paper he becomes muscle-bound ; so anxious is he not to appear superior, esoteric, aesthetic or intellectual that he draws his metaphors from the football scrum, and then mixes them with sly allusions to the Neveu de Rameau or to some paper which has been sent him recently by a fellow-member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. All this is highly disconcerting, since the football fans are unlikely to recognise his allusions to Diderot, and his colleagues of the Institut will certainly not under- stand his wall-game metaphors.
* * * * If, however, one has the strength of mind to detach what Lord Vansittart says or writes from the ways in which he says or writes it, much pleasure and profit will be obtained. His present article, for instance, upon the " Decline of Diplomacy " contains much useful meat, nor should we resent the fact that the dish is garnished for us, on the one side with parsley and turnips, and on the other with topinambours His main contention is that Diplomacy (by which he means not foreign policy, but the practice of negotiation between sovereign States) has declined sadly in the last twenty years owing to the abandonment of established principles and the dis- carding of traditional methods. Lord Vansittart starts with the axiom that the aim of all sound Diplomacy is the maintenance of peace. The experience of centuries has taught us that this aim can best be achieved if certain fundamental principles are observed and certain traditional methods are followed. The first of these principles is the establishment of confidence. As a necessary con- dition of confidence there must exist some general respect for law and, above all, an agreed sanctity of contract. Obviously, when once one party to a contract assumes that he has the right to repudiate his engagements, you reach what Lord Vansittart calls "the futility of treaties," and all subsequent negotiation becomes inoperative. We, with our sound commercial instincts, have for long regarded it as axiomatic that there can be no dealing or negotiation unless contracts when concluded are maintained. The Russians do not appear to have grasped this elementary axiom.
* * * * A second principle cherished and practised by the Old Diplomacy was that if confidence were to be furthered, .it was necessary to cultivate what was called " good relations." It sometimes occurred, as Lord Vansittart would be the first to admit, that the desire of an Ambassador to cultivate good relations with the Government to which he was accredited created a haze of benevolence in his mind, which prevented him from seeing with clarity the evils of the local system or conveying with the necessary sharpness the often unpleasant instructions which he received from home. Yet it was an excellent principle which did much both to cool and lubricate the heated machinery of international intercourse, and it is unfor- tunate indeed that it should now have been superseded by what Lord Vansittart well calls a desire " thoughtfully to create bad relations." In the old days an Ambassador was scrupulous in his avoidance of any activities which might cause offence or irritation to a foreign Government. Today we have, under the immediate aegis of an Embassy, such infuriating practices as spying, sabotage and propaganda. Lord Vansittart rightly points out that the im- mensely swollen staffs of foreign Missions are in themselves a cause for suspicion and disquiet, and that a disturbing point is reached when a foreign Embassy can claim diplomatic immunity for Press correspondents or news agencies. • The friendship societies, moreover, which are now so frequently organised under Embassy supervision, may become organisations " to cover the knaves who recruit the fools." A third principle which was regarded as im- portant by the Old Diplomacy was the principle of knowledge. Today some foreign Governments seem to aim solely at " the deepening and widening of ignorance." They do not permit our people to know about them or their people to know about us.
* * * * Entirely do I agree that, if these principles of confidence are abandoned, then assuredly the wheels of negotiation will be blocked. And what about the new methods ? Lord Vansittart rightly regrets the increasing tendency on the part of successive Prime Ministers since 1917 to ignore the advice of the Foreign Office and to be guided by private advisers of their own. He reveals the fact that during the three years when he himself was Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government he only had three interviews with Mr. Neville Chamberlain, and never alone. He has little sympathy for the methods of " popular diplomacy," which. is all too apt to become diplomacy by insult. In fact, he regrets the decay of international manners. In the old days, he avers, " diplo- macy could flourish only so long as there was a loose, tacit and general agreement to behave more or less like gentlemen." The new mode now adopted behind the iron curtain is that of the " aggressive drunk," with the result that the diplomatists of the East and West now approach each other in a state of " permanent bad temper." I am not sure that this is an accurate description of the relations between our own negotiators and their colleagues from behind the curtain ; there is little bad temper ; their attitude, and our attitude, is one rather of wary cheerfulness, of breezy disbelief. Which in itself is bad enough.
* * * * It is not fashionable today to laud the old principles or to defend the methods of tradition. Yet most sensible people are fully aware that the machinery of international negotiation has almost completely broken down. The Russians today do not desire to inspire confidence: they desire to inspire alarm. They do not aim at good relations: they wish to maintain a condition of septic distrust. Once the principles are discarded, the methods, which were the servants of those principles, also go by the board. We cannot hope to change the Russians: all we can do is not to change ourselves. Any imitation on our part of the methods now practised by those behind the curtain would be a clumsy and futile imitation ; there would always come a point when we were unable to bluff or behave as outrageously as they. Our only course is for our- selves to maintain the old principles and the old methods in the face of every provocation. In the end they must prevail ; since they are demonstrably correct. We should always remember that there may come a time when the Russians actually want to believe and to be believed.
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