Diplomacy - Classics of Strategy and Diplomacy

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Diplomacy as the Art of Continuous Negotiations: Cardinal de Richelieu and the “Political Testament”

May 27, 2022

The hard-won trajectory of his career enabled Richelieu to develop the temperament and experience to step into the role of Prime Minister for a struggling France in 1624. At the time, the kingdom was not ready to challenge the dominance of the Habsburgs, whose extensive borders almost surrounded France. Years of war, religious turmoil, and bitter domestic conflict had weakened France’s finances, military, and foreign policy institutions. Therefore, the first decade or so of Richelieu’s appointment was occupied with strengthening the state administration, tempering heated domestic divisions, and solidifying the monarchy’s power by crushing threats to it. His tactics against the Habsburgs in particular tended to be oriented to the long-term, employing exhaustion, harassment, and the solidifying of other alliances—at times in opposition to Catholic hardliners who disliked forming alliances with Protestant powers. Despite being a cardinal of the church, Richelieu was responsible more than any other individual for turning this conflict from a primarily religious one into a primarily political one. He was able to do so through his focus on strengthening France’s international relations once the domestic relations were put in order. Richelieu’s influence on France came at a critical moment in the evolution of diplomatic practices, from ad hoc missions to resident embassies, which ushered in what has been called “the golden age of diplomacy.” He particularly aided in solidifying the practice of continuous negotiations, being one of the first prominent political figures “to insist on [its] importance to a community of states,” and its compatibility with the doctrine of raison d'état in modern European history.

A Most Ancient Statecraft: The Idrimi Statue Inscription

Paul Edgar

December 22, 2021

The Idrimi Statue Inscription is perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date. Written on a statue of Idrimi sitting on a throne, the inscription is a generally chronological abridgement of King Idrimi’s political and military activities in fifteenth century northern Levant (BCE). While there exists more biographical information about the lives and acts of earlier political figures, information about those figures is usually spread among many sources, requiring synthesis in order to construct something that resembles a complete biography. In contrast, Idrimi’s inscription presents a whole story. It addresses his youth, his rise to power, his activities while in power, and, implicitly, his death.The advantage of an inscription like Idrimi’s is that it provides access to a complete political story of a known leader, composed by his political and familial associates in their own words, from their own perspective. While telling us about Idrimi and his work, the inscription also identifies what made for successful strategy and statecraft in a particular milieu.

JQA, Chronicles of an American Diplomat: Dispatch 2

Patrick J. Garrity +

February 13, 2021

John Quincy’s introduction to Washington’s diplomacy came when the president invited him to a reception for a delegation of Chickasaw Indians. This was John Quincy’s first experience with the uneasy relations between the federal government and the various tribes along America’s frontier.

Chronicles of an American Diplomat: John Quincy Adams

Patrick J. Garrity +

February 06, 2021

John Quincy Adams was born into politics and war. As a small child in Boston, John Quincy lived in a town under British occupation. From the heights near the family farm in Braintree, he and his mother Abigail witnessed the distant fire and smoke of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. John Adams, while serving in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, sent home to the family detailed reports of the move towards independence; and of the military resistance and diplomatic steps needed to sustain the revolution. He encouraged John Quincy and his other children to contemplate these profound events and to prepare themselves, as future statesmen, to meet the challenges to the new country.

Henry Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822 (1957)

A. Bradley Potter

February 05, 2016

A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problem of Peace, 1812-1822, Kissinger's first book, was written in the early 1950s while Kissinger was a young doctoral student at Harvard. The book was initially not as famous or as influential as his later books. Its focus on diplomatic negotiations following the fall of Napoleon was seen by his peers as esoteric and out of tune with the times. In a world featuring nuclear weapons, why dissect the diplomatic wrangling of the 19th century? This view may have characterized the dissertation turned book at the time of its writing, but today Restored is widely regarded as essential reading for the student of strategy and diplomacy.

François de Callières, The Art of Diplomacy (1716)

Carolina Kenny

October 07, 2015

In The Art of Diplomacy, secret diplomacy is considered as embedded in the art of negotiation. In this regard, Callières notes that secrecy is absolutely necessary for the generation of confidence and understanding. He advocates that secret negotiations could help maintain peace and thus are necessary to manage relationships between states. Callières believes that before a diplomat could progress towards a negotiated settlement of a dispute, confidence and confidentiality have to be established. He explains that “an able minister will take care that no man shall penetrate into his secret before the proper time.”

Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse (1954)

Patrick J. Garrity +

December 09, 2008

The German Empire created by Bismarck inherited from Prussia a highly rationalized, professional trained, permanent bureaucracy, an important part of which was the Foreign Office (the Wilhelmstrasse). The prestige of this bureaucracy as a whole was enormous. Its personnel was recruited not only from the aristocracy but from the commercial and, later, industrial middle class. By the turn of the 20th century it represented an amalgam of the "liberal" nationalist and conservative elements of German society. The early Weimar Republic attempted to democratize German diplomacy by introducing "new blood" into lower career-service posts and appoint non-career officials into higher positions. The experiment failed.