Keywords

For every war that ever was, a thousand others have been averted through discussion and concession. (Blattman 2022, 21)

The pro-Western camp [in Moscow] dominated Gorbachev’s last years and the first years of Yeltsin’s government… [pursuing] policies with the explicit intent of integrating with the West. . . The Western powers were ready to stop considering Russia as a foe, but politely declined the enthusiastic appeals from Yeltsin… to become allies. This created a backlash within Russian politics, and strengthened the hand of moderate conservatives as well as the nationalists who accused the pro-Western camp of humiliating the country by a conciliatory stance that achieved nothing. (Zarakol 2010, 226)

Restorative diplomacy values reciprocation of conciliation with conciliation. Conciliation rather than aggrandizement and humiliation was the response the American people and their president gifted to Gorbachev from 1985. It was not the response favored by the young neocons of the Reagan regime who became influential advisors to Reagan’s successors. By 2013 the new hawks dominated the national security establishment. One hawk was Senior State Department official Victoria Nuland. She handed out cookies in Maidan Square in Kyiv, calling for the removal of the elected President who Russian-speaking Ukrainians overwhelmingly voted for. This was not voting him out at an early election (an election that Putin said the incumbent was certain to lose). Nuland was on streets mostly overflowing with genuine democrats but also some neo-fascists who wanted immediate regime change now, and new laws to discriminate against Russians, whatever it took. They cascaded some protests to serious violence, including mass murder of Russian-speaking anti-Maidan, pro-federalism protesters, who sought safety in the Odessa Trade Union Building on May 2, 2014. Then far right protestors set fire to it and to a pro-federalist tent camp in a nearby square and attempted to prevent victims from escaping the fire, including by obstructing fire fighters from extinguishing it. Other pro-Ukraine demonstrators did help some pro-federalist people escape with a ladder (Council of Europe 2015, 14; Cohen 2014). Six protestors died from bullet wounds, 42 in the fire or from jumping from the Trade Union Building to their death, all or almost all pro-federalist protestors. Victims of the fire who survived on the roof were then all arrested. Some colleagues who did not survive were murdered by gunfire; other criminals assaulted ‘with a wooden club those who had been jumping from the burning Trade Union Building and preventing them from obtaining medical help’ (Council of Europe 2015, 17).

Primetime, Talk Show and blogger preoccupations with this event were relentless in coverage of the details in Russia of the ‘planned carnage’ and ‘extermination order’ of ‘peaceful protestors’, ‘angels’, though some of them had not been peaceful angels in their prior provocations of the pro-Maidan mob. The Russian media emphasized neofascist allegiances of the alleged murderers, leaving the Russian people in deep shock (Binder and Kaltseis 2020). Media coverage in the West was extremely sparse, leaving Western publics unmoved, human rights NGOs uninterested. Fox News mentioned it in passing, blaming it on pro-Russian provocateurs; the New York Times did mention criticism of protestors singing the Ukrainian National Anthem when they might have been rescuing victims (Svennson and Fjelander 2015).

No form of civil resistance could be more antithetical to the doctrines of nonviolent resistance, yet the Western nonviolent resistance literature, including in contributions from me, characterized Euromaidan as a triumph of nonviolent regime change. For the most part it was. But those of us writing that way failed to see why it was not so perceived by Russians. We were right in the West to see Euromaidan as a predominantly nonviolent movement in which murderous fascists were clearly a minority. We should have problematized this more than we did, however. We should have been able to attend to the Russian media narrative and why it saw an intrinsic connection between the sheer horror of ‘burning people alive’ and the brute fact that I ignored of fascists who were empowered to murder pro-federalism demonstrators. As one perhaps staged, perhaps genuine, Russian woman on the street who was not devoid of insight said to the TV news camera: ‘This is not accessible to the intellect. To detain, burn people, and to find pleasure in it. In order to do this, you have to be a fascist’(Binder and Kaltseis 2020, 198).

Euromaidan received generous funding and support from the United States. In my earlier work I ignored this. Victoria Nuland was recorded in Maidan Square communicating to the US Ambassador on who was the United States pick to become the next President and Cabinet Ministers of Ukraine. On EU views, Nuland said ‘F**k the EU’ (BBC 2014). What kind of diplomacy was this that could gift this kind of propaganda to pro-federalists, Crimean and Donbas separatists, and therefore to Putin? Not realist diplomacy. Plain diplomatic incompetence. Nuland was promoted. She is in 2024 Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.

Ayse Zarakol’s After Defeat in the quote that opens this chapter describes the tragic mistake of 1990s Western diplomacy that defeated its own purposes as it cascaded to mass murder and Russian perceptions of fascism in Odesa and Kyiv. After Ukraine, there was no prospect of Russia joining arms with NATO to become a balance against Chinese power to prevent unthinkable devastation of the planet in a great power war over Taiwan. The aim of this chapter and the next is to outline the alternative restorative diplomacy road not taken. I diagnose Russia’s and NATO’s choices as both Hobbesian, treating another society as a nation of knaves. Russians followed Putin and did act as knaves, murderously trampling upon international law and innocent Ukrainian lives.

Chapter 2 explained the narrative of the broken promise as a recurrent risk factor for war, as revealed in my Peacebuilding Compared data set. Causal process tracing suggests that the narrative of the broken promise is particularly powerful in armed conflicts that cascade to multiple wars. An example is the narrative of the broken promise to end the theft of Palestinian lands, to respect decisions reached according to international law with respect to these disputes, and to respect legal rights of refugees to return to land that is legally theirs. This narrative has not only fuelled civil war between Palestinians and Jewish settlers inside Israel. It cascaded to Israeli invasions of Lebanon, Israeli attacks on Palestinians and Hezbollah inside Syria, invasions of Israel by Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab states, and counter-invasions by Israel of some of them. All this contributed as cascading grievances to daily human rights abuses against Palestinians and then to Islamist terrorism across many countries.

Fighting rages inside Gaza hospitals as this book goes to press. It is hard to judge how this war will end. Critics of the perspective in this chapter will say that there were attempts at Israeli restorative diplomacy with Palestinians. It failed to prevent terrorism. I disagree. The highwater mark of Israeli, US, Russian, and Oslo restorative peacemaking persuaded PLO leader Yasser Arafat to announce publicly in English in front of the US President and Prime Minister of Israel that the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced terrorism and would thenceforth desist from it. Arafat kept that promise with a surprising degree of effectiveness until the day he was poisoned. Subsequent conservative leaders of Israel and the United States, the most influential being Prime Minister Netanyahu, failed to push on to build upon the gains from this restorative diplomacy. As a result of proliferating illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, occupation, human rights abuses, and denial of Palestinian freedom, Hamas rose to power first through terror against discredited PLO members in Gaza and then terror against Israelis. Terrorism by groups under the PLO umbrella from the late 1960s killed many more people than Hamas has killed since it secured power in Gaza. It was the PLO, not Hamas, who invented and cascaded mass terror by hijacking commercial airliners with innocent children onboard. Ending that PLO terrorism remains a triumph of restorative diplomacy by the 1990s generation of peacemakers. According to the University of Maryland START database, terrorist incidents were eight times as high in Israel at the beginning of that Arafat era of peace dialogue in 1990 compared to 1997, the year of ultimate collapse of Oslo hope, as the first Netanyahu government entered its second year. After that, terror increased to a Hamas high in 2015 and then an even higher 2023 peak. Failing to build on 1990s restorative diplomacy is the error lurking beneath the fall from grace of political successors to the 1990s peacemakers, such as Prime Minister Netanyahu. Netanyahu thinks he can kill off the bad ideology of Hamas terror without doing the diplomatic work to make credible an opportunity for a good ideology, like a sovereign democratic Palestine that votes against terrorism.

For the terrorists, the colonial oppression of Palestinians and Kashmiris were geopolitically powerful narratives of Muslim humiliation. Many Muslim people living in Kashmir feel promises made to them by India and by the international community have been dishonored, as does the government of Pakistan. This has fueled recurrently frequent and dangerous warfare, terrorism and armed internal conflict on the planet since 1947 over the future of Kashmir, countless skirmishes, and three separate wars between India and Pakistan. They were frequently fought with more than a million troops massed at the line of control, nuclear weapons at hair trigger on both sides (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018).

Many prolonged wars motivated by narratives of the broken promise are totally extinguished as armed conflicts, yet they continue to fuel more privatized problems like suicide, substance abuse, and crime. For example, the frontier wars against First Nations peoples in Australia and North America subsided after all outside powers ceased showing an interest in arming First Nations in the way the French had done during their wars against English settlers. The English in turn had armed Indigenous groups that fought American settlers during the Revolutionary War. Notwithstanding the duplicitousness of colonial diplomacy during these wars, a legacy of admirable restorative diplomacy endures for the West to learn from the Indigenous side. One virtue of restorative diplomacy is that it is a weapon of the weak.

An admirable thing about white Americans is that they flock in large numbers to the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. to learn that Indian nations had a remarkably restorative tradition of peacemaking that had origins in wampum documents on display such as those of The Great Law of Peace. Hiawatha and clan mothers were prominent in socializing this peace diplomacy.

On the colonial side in North America, peace treaties were seen as transactional, rather like commercial contracts that could be breached, perhaps for the price of paying some penalty for breach of contract. On the Indigenous side, peace agreements were sacralized. First Nations viewed it as important to renew, grow, and socialize peace treaties at regular anniversaries during which fine speeches by orators, song, and dance, would promise to grow the peace into something richer, more generous, and more meaningful about deep engagement between peoples to secure their mutual flourishing.

As we witness white Americans flock to learn those seemingly lost lessons today, we can wonder if it is too late to redeem them. No, they redeem themselves when Americans humbly kneel at the feet of those ancient Indigenous elders. United Nations sanctioned peace agreements today are recurrently breached, treated as pieces of paper that are barely binding on current regimes. Governments see treaties as contracts entered into by a previous regime that they can vary, sometimes by a payoff to a warlord, or like a commercial contract. The United Nations also has much to learn from the wisdom of the Indigenous peoples of the land of its headquarters on how to sacralize peace agreements through richer rituals that reinforce international law. North American Indigenous peace agreements also teach that women, ‘clan mothers’, must have a central role. Community participation must be wide. Likewise contemporary research on large samples of conflicts show that peace agreements in which women are central players and civil society participation in peace processes is wide and diverse are peace agreements that are 64 percent more likely to hold.1

Colonial redemption in South Africa was pursued through an agreement between the white Apartheid government of South Africa, the African National Congress, and other Indigenous movements to completely rewrite the South African Constitution, abolish Apartheid, and release Nelson Mandela from prison to contest an election he won to become the first black President. Mandela never renounced the right to armed struggle against Apartheid, yet he embraced a restorative diplomacy that dismantled Apartheid more effectively than armed struggle, that transformed South Africa into a democracy that espoused universal human rights, while also leaving disappointments of enduring interpersonal violence, domination, corruption and injustice in the hands of some ANC successors who were disappointments to his legacy.

There is a social movement politics lesson from these histories. It is that the peace movement can be enriched by joining arms with local Indigenous rights movements, with the global social movement for restorative justice, and vice versa.

What is Restorative Diplomacy?

Restorative diplomacy is defined as relational diplomacy that prioritizes problem-solving to repair harm over deterring harm. We can expand this simple conception by conceiving restorative diplomacy as diplomacy that seeks to transform conflict, transform prospects for members of international society to flourish together, transform narratives of grievance through deep listening and policy responsiveness, and by respectful dialogue. Its deepest essence is relationship building, and a relational approach to healing and transforming the deep structures that underpin domination. This does not mean that restorative diplomacy cannot accommodate being firm but fair. It does not require us to totally eschew armed resistance of invasions. The next section opens up this conversation with a discussion of the ways restorative diplomacy is, and then is not, super-soft diplomacy. An important introductory remark about restorative diplomacy grounded in an evidence-based aspect of the theory of restorative justice is that it involves a commitment to speaking inconvenient truths to power, and disapproval of actions of one society that violate the rights of others. This requires discussion of differences, yet respectfully, without stigmatizing or setting out to humiliate the other. That is the common ground of restorative diplomacy for international development with the theory and evidence on family development. It shows that the approach to raising children should be neither laissez-faire nor authoritarian, but respectfully authoritative and engaged, with deep listening to members of the family of all ages (Burford et al. 2019).

With both international violence and domestic violence, I integrate restorative justice theory with the responsive regulatory theory that secures minimally sufficient deterrence rather than zero deterrence (Braithwaite 2022). Just as there is no pure restorative justice, likewise restorative diplomacy is a continuous variable. There is a lot of good dialogue, deep listening, responsiveness, relational engagement, even apology and forgiveness, that creeps into otherwise conventional diplomacy. Restorative diplomacy is outlined as an ideal to move toward. It is rarely fully realized. Articulating a new direction for thinking about the future of diplomacy is ambition enough for now because it takes a whole village of practitioners and scholars to meaningfully inspire a theory to renew diplomacy. As Yan Zhang (2022) says of restorative justice in China, sometimes more can be achieved with a ‘discourse in the making’ that has different meanings in different societies and times, that eschews certainties that are fully formed.

One thing I have always insisted upon as a universal of restorative value, however, draws attention to the way core restorative values like inclusion, non-domination, equal rights to justice, and empowerment regardless of gender identity, race, religion, are enshrined in UN human rights treaties. Hence, I have argued that the civic republican ideal of non-domination underpins restorative justice values, tracking Philip Pettit’s (1997) work.

It is of course a bitter pill for realist diplomats to swallow that they should not pursue Making America Great Again when that is the mantra of their elected President, or Make China Great Again when this is an aim of the Communist Party. But I indeed do argue that restorative diplomacy means non-domination of other societies, treating all peoples as enjoying an equal right to govern themselves in the way they choose. Less controversially, I insist that restorative diplomacy requires ethical commitment to the core UN human rights conventions. They are central to the rules-based international order. The next chapter specifically argues that does not mean restorative diplomacy supports regime-change interference in other countries because the diplomat’s state rightly disapproves of the human rights record of the regime that might be unseated by regime-change diplomacy. I argue in the next chapter that regime-change diplomacy, fomenting civil war or terror in other countries, extrajudicial assassinations by spies or drones, interference in foreign elections are all strictly forbidden forms of diplomacy by the lights of restorative diplomacy. I find empirically that they happen to be usually against the long-term interests of states that indulge in these vices. Prudent states, a great many of them, cultivate an international reputation that bans these diplomatic vices without exception.

Super-Soft Diplomacy

This chapter argues that one of a number of reasons Ronald Reagan and Mikael Gorbachev achieved great things in geopolitics was their gifts at making enemies frenemies, then friends. Reagan collaboratively crafted agreements with the Soviet Union based on the creative search for a contracting space where both sides could benefit from a reset of relationships. Such statesmen of historical transitions, Nelson Mandela was another, were good at deep listening, at repeating back the grievances of the other side to show that they have genuinely digested it and that they are treating the point of view of their adversary respectfully. They don’t bully, humiliate, or stigmatize. They allow their adversary to save face, a form of respect Kennedy and Khrushchev extended to each other even though they initially detested each other. They showed common kindness and concern for the family of geopolitical adversaries. Through their kindness to the family and friends of their adversary, they hope to invoke conversations among family and friendship networks concerning their contrarian points of view about grievances.

With Ronald Reagan, I raised the possibility of insincerity, saying what Gorbachev wanted to hear without meaning it. The biographical evidence on Reagan suggests we should reject that view. The speculation is an appropriate caution, however, not because Reagan did specific things to betray his good faith negotiation, but because his successors as presidents of the United States certainly did that. Neocons who were core Reagan staffers campaigned covertly for continued containment of Russia in contradiction to the shared understanding built through Reagan’s warm, caring, bonhomie with Russian leaders in the last two years of his Presidency.

Deep listening and relationship building are also a function of Track II diplomacy that might include religious leaders, wise retired diplomats, who have the ear of a recalcitrant leader. The point and purpose of super-soft diplomacy are argued in the next section to be that it makes it more possible for leaders to be super-assertive with denouncing behavior like invasions of other countries that should be robustly denounced, whether the country invaded is Ukraine or Iraq. When diplomatic relationships are kinder, less abusive, and more respectful, than they are in contemporary diplomacy, they paradoxically have the capacity to be more effectively firm when firmness matters. The psychological research on being authoritative, rather than authoritarian or laissez-faire, to be effective in steering the flow of events, demonstrates this (Burford et al. 2019). The ugly side of disrespectful Western diplomacy, in recent years, was mimicked by post-Gorbachev Russia, then by China during its ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ era. China experts say it has muted rude wolf warrior diplomacy because it was badly received in Asia, where China most seeks to win friends.

Diverse Deposits in the Adversary’s Bank that Compensates for Competition

Beinart (2022) questioned how many lives were lost in the United States and globally from the US policy of rejecting engagement with China on vaccine diplomacy:

The Biden administration’s zero-sum view of its relationship with Beijing has undermined efforts to rebuild the public health partnerships that Donald Trump dismantled. ‘U.S. vaccine diplomacy has been aimed at competing with China over geopolitical influence’, rather than ‘cooperating with China in the delivery of global public goods’.

More US lives were lost to covid than have fallen in all the wars of this century and the last century combined. So how rational was a national security policy that subordinated engagement on covid to strategic competition? How ‘realist’ was it when China suffered massively lesser economic contraction from covid than the United States and its NATO allies between 2020 and 2023, notwithstanding unbalanced Western propaganda that Chinese lockdowns had hobbled its economy while the West surged ahead? Beinart made a wider point by drawing attention to how much the rest of the world agrees with ‘former Singaporean diplomat, Kishore Mahbubani [when he compared] the United States and China to “two tribes of apes that continued fighting over territory while the forest around them was burning”’. Then Beinart pointed to the Chinese foreign minister warning ‘The U.S. side hopes that climate cooperation can be an “oasis” in China-U.S. relations, but if that “oasis” is surrounded by desert, it will also become desertified sooner or later’. This evokes a fundamental tenet of the healing edge of restorative justice thinking that says relationships work when actors seek to maximize the emotional deposits they put in the bank of those they seek to change. When a preschooler does something nasty to another child when they arrive at childcare, and then, when reproached by a parent, a tantrum ensues, one reason can be that the parent failed to put enough positive deposits in the emotional bank of their child before departing for childcare and in the car (Covey 1994). That emotional work is reinterpreted as preparation for making the emotional withdrawal of the reproach for the bad behavior. Maximizing positive, affirming, emotional deposits is central to harm prevention.

Sadly, great power leaders have tantrums too, their moments when they play to the domestic mob with abuse of foreigners. Cataclysms can be a consequence. These are simple cataclysms to avoid by simply being polite in the way Ronald Reagan always was, thereby enabling Reagan to always be firm with adversaries. Polite firmness with enemies can certainly evoke violence, but it has better prospects than disrespect in evoking responsiveness to emotional deposits that those who reproach them have deposited in their emotional bank. The next section starts from first principles in theorizing this in restorative terms. Super-soft diplomacy that is principled in its consistency is simply better than erratic speech that obsequiously, insincerely flatters at one moment, then barks for the domestic crowd with an ethos of ‘spare the rod and spoil the rogue state’ at the next. Worse are growling threats that are never intended to be fulfilled like ‘razing’ Iran or North Korea to elicit applause from American hawks, who in turn revel in populist acclaim for refusing to succumb to ‘appeasement’.

Entrepreneurial Competition, Strong Cooperation

The shift in the last chapter from containing states to containing risks and enabling societies to flourish together requires a particular but simple skill set among practitioners. I call it restorative diplomacy. The literature on restorative practices teaches us to put the problem, not the person, in the center of the circle of restorative dialogue. For restorative justice that means putting the wrong (rather than the wrongdoer) in the center of the circle and working together to fix the problem, heal the harm together. The reason for that is that restorative practices aim to avert stigmatization and humiliation of wrongdoers. Instead of others shaming a wrongdoer, what the restorative practitioner seeks is that focus on the problem that often will lead to a wrongdoer in effect pointing the finger at themselves to say ‘I/we need to change’ if this problem is to be fixed, if this relationship is to be repaired. Securing such an admission from Soviet Premier Gorbachev was the towering achievement of President Reagan. Their summit together was as a result the most decisive moment in reinforcing the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Conversationally, and then by reporting their mutually supportive conversation in Iceland to the world, Gobachev and Reagan constituted the shamefulness of nuclear weapons without shaming each other for sometimes having moved their fingers too close to that button.

I have argued that Reagan’s successors failed to reciprocate generously, respectfully, without promise-breaking, unilateral gestures such as handing East Germany peacefully to West Germany, dismantling the Warsaw Pact, dismantling massively and unilaterally Russian offensive capabilities. US neocons won the aftermath with an historical moment of American triumphalism. The neocons thereby ensured that America’s unipolar moment would be short lived, hanging Gorbachev out to dry, ending his quest to peacefully transform the Soviet Union step by step. Neocons are brilliant at fanning flames of tone-deaf populism, bad at attuning long-run security and economic development for their country to the opportunities genuine reformers like Gorbachev provide. Neocons are unattracted to restoring enemies, preferring to endlessly punish them.

Hence, I interpret the failures of post-Cold-War NATO diplomacy as the reverse of the successes of the finest moment of the American century, the Marshall Plan, when huge American deposits were made in the banks, emotional and financial, of America’s greatest enemies—Germany, Italy and Japan. This way of thinking about generosity, consistent respect coupled to firmness with enemies, relational statecraft that works at putting emotional deposits in the enemy’s bank, containing the problem while rebuilding enemies allows statecraft to do better and do good. These are the skills required of the restorative practitioner, of the statecraft of healing to fix and contain problems. To privilege restorative diplomacy is to solve the problem by ‘doing with’ rather than ‘doing for’, or ‘doing to’, or failing to do anything at all. Neocons laid low after Reagan’s summit, creating obstacles aimed at doing nothing about strategic nuclear weapons reductions. After Gorbachev was disposed of, neocons returned to their core business of doing arms race competition to Moscow.

Some restorative practitioners conceive ‘doing with’ as definitional of restorative justice. The final section of this chapter conceives ‘doing to’ in the sense of covert meddling in the domestic politics of other countries as the antithesis of restorative diplomacy. I prefer to define restorative diplomacy as diplomacy that is collaboratively transparent and attuned by deep listening to other stakeholders in a conflict or problem, that always communicates respectfully, eschews threats, and keeps punitive diplomacy at minimally sufficient levels. It contains problems cooperatively and eschews containment of states, is committed to healing the hurts of international conflicts, to reconciliation and peacemaking, with apology and forgiveness having a place in journeys of healing. Restorative diplomacy is a form of statecraft that paradoxically decenters states because its normative commitment is to deep listening to all stakeholders in a problem, whether they are states or not. Key stakeholders might be adherents to an Indigenous identity, to a community like ‘the Kurds’, ‘Tamils’, ‘Yighurs’ that can be a nation without a state, or to an identity like ‘women’, when women were voiceless in some diplomatic context.

I have argued that one helpful move can be to shift institutions from what the strategic studies thinkers describe as offensive balance to defensive balance. Consider the question, for example, of whether Australia should develop hypersonic missile capabilities. It is not at all simple to judge whether this is a good idea. Defensive balance might argue that Australia is an island society. Therefore, if Australia deploys medium-range anti-naval hypersonic missiles that can sink ships, but that cannot reach as far as China or India, they will improve Australia’s defense against invaders without threatening nuclear weapon states in a way that could make Australia a nuclear target. While I profess no competence to assess the merits of such matters of Australian defense strategy, the example illustrates the restorative concept of defense spending that manifests defensive balance rather than provoking or threatening a potential enemy by piling in on a cult of the offensive that drives arms races in offensive rather than defensive capabilities.

Contemporary technological developments may place limits on the idea of defensive balance, of building an armed services designed to defend rather than attack. For example, scholars of AI in war may be technologically correct when they say that the only way to defend against a massive swarm of drones that invades your society is with your own swarm of drones to head out to meet them and shoot them down. This is because the drones will always be more flexible in their movements, quicker in their reaction time, than human defenders of the society.2 Sadly, however, if a state owns thousands of defensive drones with the ability to destroy, they can be deployed and programmed for offense. A good counterpoint, yet one that misses the point that the most profound key to defensive balance is defense through preventive institutions like a United Nations that acquires the capability and legitimacy to resolve international conflicts before they become wars. Hence the essence of defensive balance is a shift from technological and military defense to diplomatic defense and defensive institutions of peace. It means a shift from cutting edge to healing edge defense, from national defense to internationally collaborative defense, from states as billiard balls of variable size pushing one another around a table of realist diplomacy to states as participants in security communities of restorative diplomacy.

From 1983, I served for four years as the most insignificant member of a 16-person body called Australia’s Economic Planning Advisory Council. Monthly meetings were always chaired by the Prime Minister, with senior economic ministers and state premiers (governors) attending. There were also CEOs of the largest companies in corporate Australia on the Council. I expected them to be tough, ruthless. In fact, they were consistently constructive, kindly to others, even to little me, who critiqued so much of what they said. They were particularly impressive in the cooperative problem-solving approach they adopted with trade union leaders on the Council. I had a stereotype of business as ruthlessly competitive. What I should have understood was that the most successful business leaders tend to be distinguished because they are gifted at both competing and cooperating with adversaries.

When it comes to finding solutions to cascading crises, humankind wants states, as well as businesses, that are so brilliant at competing with one another that they invent solutions. And we need states and corporations that are adept at helping others to be effective in fixing crises that hurt all businesses and firms. Again, the politicians who rise to the top tend to be mostly good at cooperation, as well as ruthless political competitors. This reality of elite social selection, even applicable to some of the most ruthless players like Stalin and Churchill, who cooperated quite warmly while competing ruthlessly, offers glimmers of hope.

Sometimes competing states do give the world pleasant surprises on their capacity for cooperation. A worry with nuclear weapons command and control is that nuclear powers must not totally centralize control in the president’s office because that would create incentives for decapitation as a war-winning strategy that generates momentary indecisiveness by a decapitated enemy. Centralization of nuclear weapon decision-making creates incentives for decapitation. Hence, a variety of military actors such as submarine commanders and air force generals were empowered to launch without specific authorization of their President in defined circumstances. In the 1950s, worries then grew that one day a mentally ill commander would get control over the power to launch. A catastrophe unintended by leaders might result.

The United States became the leader in designing checks and balances to protect against launch by a single officer with a single key. These safety systems were shared with the Soviets and some other nuclear powers, as were some other technologies that, for example, automatically notified adversaries when a nuclear silo was opened for launch (accidentally or unintentionally, or during maintenance). Broader multi-directional collaboration on the design of better nuclear assurance systems against accidental launch was shared among nuclear weapon states. Sharing of nuclear safety and security was further fostered by mutual inspections of nuclear bases enabled by the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. My take on this accomplishment has been that it flowed from two eras of restorative diplomacy between leaders who had previously been bitter enemies that had terrified each other: first Kennedy and Krushchev, then Reagan and Gorbachev. This collaboration has ebbed in the past decade. Humankind has an interest in restoring its flow.

COVID-19 exposed the possibility of a fertile mix of competition to win the race to develop the best vaccine and collaborative R & D between China and the West. An example of cooperation was the Wuhan-led research that identified and disseminated the genomic sequence of COVID-19. Cooperation to diffuse manufacturing capability worldwide to roll out vaccines quickly and stem the tide of death was appallingly bad, however, as it was on making vaccines affordable to the poor. Only in 2022, after the worst of the pandemic was over, when most of the monopoly profits had been made, did the WHO begin to make serious progress against implacable resistance from Big Pharma to help six African countries establish the kind of vaccine manufacturing plants that could have controlled pandemics like covid with technology transfer assistance from South Korea. Some rich states undermined WHO efforts to transcend vaccine nationalism and foster global collaboration on preventive approaches more broadly. A stronger WHO is a simple idea for increasing institutional capability to scale up global response to complex crises.

Vaccine nationalism was a pathology that was paradoxically against the national interest. It was a signal failure of diplomacy as a profession. It failed as a profession in so many countries to even engage in salvaging the national interest in international cooperation for vaccine cosmopolitanism. The diplomats failed to engage because of the way they define the professional craft of diplomacy. During covid, it was as if the diplomats neglected to defend the UN, WHO specifically, because of an ideology of we don’t do health; health is not our core mission. We diplomats cannot cover everything; so let’s concentrate on doing our core functions well; they are too important for us to be distracted onto policy tangents that are the responsibilities of others. With vaccines, it is America first, Germany, Russia, or China first, and it is the job of other institutions beyond diplomacy to compete to ensure we win the race to invent and manufacture the best vaccine. That core focus of diplomats for most of this century has been national security and Islamist terrorism. This when ethnocentric terror of the right, some of it neo-Nazi, is the larger terror problem in the West, Hindu terrorism the bigger problem in India, Buddhist terrorism the big problem in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, anti-Indigenous right-wing death squads across Latin America. Diplomacy is a transnational practice and to the extent that diplomacy does prioritize terrorism, it should do so defending an international rules-based human rights order aimed at containing the entire galaxy of terrorisms, including the considerable problem that Islamic State terrorism remains in Africa and the Middle East.

When the US state provided arms to Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in Syria because they were fighting President Assad and Islamic State, US diplomacy regrettably supported terrorism. At times when the US state saw Latin American death squads as anti-communist allies, US diplomats funded them, even trained them at the CIA-run School of the Americas, to spread terror. When the US state says Prime Minister Modi of India is not to be thought of as a supporter and fomenter of anti-Muslim terrorism, but as a bulwark against China, US diplomats seek to make him into a gladiatorial rock star. All this diplomatic thinking prevailed when in terms of lost lives, Islamic terrorism is a problem of small scale for major powers compared to epidemics. For the overwhelming majority of countries, probably for all of them during the peak years of covid, global pandemics snatched many times more lives than entanglement in wars and terrorism.

The conclusion to this chapter makes a case for restorative diplomacy that is built on the foundations of bitter lessons from twenty-first-century diplomacy disasters. It conceives diplomats as specialists in fostering international cooperation to secure support for institutions that deliver international society the best possible mix of strong competition and strong cooperation to defeat its most wicked problems. This means healing and preventing ill health, terror, war, economic crises, and environmental crises. The priority of diplomats is not to fix all problems; their priority is to fix those international institutional problems through relational diplomacy. This helps international society to see the virtues of an institution like the WHO as a node of power for transforming cooperation to conquer catastrophes.3

Leaders of China and the United States cared so much about whether their countries appeared to be the best or the worst in their response to covid. For most members of international society those displays of geopolitical competition were rhetorically comical. Trump’s ‘Chi…i..na virus’: a gift to comedians. We listened to the statements of these American and Chinese leaders; we thought these are countries that must not be allowed to dominate international society. We listened to diagnoses of realist international relations theorists about how this is natural, the inevitable way great powers must and should behave. Most of us said no thanks to that kind of covid realism.

Great Power Dialogue

Great power leaders and diplomats must get to like one another, to enjoy learning from one another, to pleasantly imbibe banter around seeing one another’s ‘misguided’ point of view. This is a pathway to them concluding that there are some things they have been in competition over on which they would do better to share what they know, then actively collaborate on crisis prevention. China quickly shared the genomic sequence for the COVID-19 virus after several wasted weeks being secretive. This was an example of such a productive shift. Covert competition conduces to complexity that great powers have a bad track record of managing. Cover-up on matters for which most of international society wants to see openness repeatedly leads to a short-term success that over time unravels into blowback.

Diplomacy is a conservative craft that punishes missteps more than it rewards prevention. Think tanks, philanthropists and universities can compensate for this by bringing world leaders or their advisers into mutual contact with the bridging capital of thinkers with more fluid, transformational, ideas in public conversations, or at more discreet locales. Sometimes, only in secret exchanges can leaders confess to past mistakes from the pursuit of geopolitical coups. These can be mistakes they are unwilling to confess to the domestic audience that empowers them, lest the fallibility they reveal disempowers them at home. After Kennedy confessed it had been a mistake to provoke the Kremlin by installing missiles along the Black Sea in Turkey, and agreed to remove them in return for the removal of Russia’s Cuban missiles, Krushchev allowed Kennedy to keep this a secret from his hawks for decades after his death.

It’s fine if Chinese and US senior diplomats are able to joke with each other about an academic’s radical idea for a bridge of cooperation between them. They jibe that they could not see either of them doing that. Not only is it fine if they laugh together at the idea, but good, even better if they subsequently secretly share what might be a more practical path to cooperation of that kind than the dreamer’s impractical approach. The building of the relational bond is the more fertile output of the conversation because it can have a versatility of application to diverse mutual risks. Sometimes it will lead to the agreement of the great powers to compete to be first to accomplish something in ways that will be good for human development. In other cases, they decide to cooperate in ways that are beneficial. On other occasions still they will settle on counterproductive forms of competition or cooperation that defeat the purposes of both great powers.

Settlements to compete here and cooperate there can be a platform for learning so long as leaders can still smile about their setbacks and continue to sustain open channels, backstage and frontstage, of relational dialogue. This is why I keep returning to Clark’s (2012) point that because World War I was always against the interests of both Germany and Britain, it might have been prevented by the kind of hot line invented during the Cold War.

An Overly Realist Profession

What does it mean to have a diplomacy concerned with maintaining good relationships with all peoples in order to preserve the planet and help earthlings to prosper with security from catastrophes? Diplomats have specialized competence on the needs of their own society. Algerian diplomats have special responsibilities to focus on the security of Algerians from domination. Diplomats from other countries might not bother, or be able to see threats that might dominate only Algerians. This is not conceptually different from medicine and law having special professional obligations to focus on the health and justice needs of their own patients/clients.

Medicine and law have more ethically grounded professional ideologies than diplomacy, however. Diplomacy could learn from other professions as it searches for a less realist, more ethically grounded core to its professionalism. Just as law is professionally moored to the institutions of law, to the rule of law, diplomacy has commitments to institutions of diplomacy. Yet diplomacy’s ethical texture is thin tissue. Lawyers legally defend clients who bend the truth, but lawyers must also comply with many specific rules and broad Constitutional principles as they do this. That is quite a thick texture of ethics that routinely requires them to honor fidelity to the law and the court above fidelity to their client. They cannot be struck off for having a client who bends the truth, but they can be for bending the law or the truth themselves in professionally proscribed ways.

Likewise with accountants as ethical professionals serving corporate power. In searingly central ways, accountants must manifest fidelity to the truth of numbers in the accounts. Sometimes that fidelity should, must, and will put their corporate masters in prison. EY accountants being paid by the military-industrial complex have put top management of the largest defense contracting firm (Lockheed) in prison over false accounts and bribes to foreign leaders. No retired government official working for the military-industrial complex has ever put their benefactor in prison. Nor do diplomats provide testimony that puts political masters in prison.

Diplomats are terminated as diplomats by their political masters, not by professional boards that enforce ethical rules of diplomacy. Diplomats do not get ‘struck off’ as professionally certified diplomats. Historically, such rules that evolved as historically important to diplomacy might be called rules of obeisance to state power. A form of such obeisance was rules of precedence as to who were the most senior functionaries of the most powerful states to sit nearest the heads of tables, and who was representing powerless states that were of little consequence in this order of precedence. Another set of rules that are important to diplomats go to diplomatic immunity. They include both formal and informal rules. Informally, they permit Russian and US diplomats to fund and strategize the assassination of a democratically elected leader like President Allende of Chile in 1972 with total impunity from capital punishment or imprisonment themselves for such a shocking crime against national and international law. Immunity can allow diplomats to drive drunk causing accidents with impunity, something that depletes respect for the ethical code of diplomats when this happens. To the extent that diplomacy has a normative order, it is an unacceptably colonized normative order that does, however, break down in healthy ways at times. Such moments are opportunities for diplomacy to understand why its normal normative order is flawed because it is overly statist and institutionalizes domination.

I will not burden readers with a tour of the influential definitions of diplomacy. They are overwhelmingly descriptive alternatives to my analysis. I simply remark that you will find extant definitions far from totally devoid of elements of the restorative. This is especially so with respect to the importance of relationships and dialogue. Let us seek to widen that chink of light to cast a spotlight on what matters most about diplomacy. Diplomacy has its inspiring moments of hope when it prevents catastrophes. Few things matter more than diplomacy as an ethical craft that can and does accomplish this. In defining statecraft as a slightly wider statist concept than diplomacy, Jochen Prantl and Evelyn Goh (2022) focus on support for ‘national interests in survival and prosperity’. I like the searingly perceptive character of this wording of the core of what diplomats do in contributing to statecraft. It goes to the essence of how most definitions of diplomacy capture the realism of the craft.

The trouble with diplomacy that sees itself as an institution that supports national interests in survival and prosperity is that it neglects global values for benefitting all societies, and more disparate values that include improved health, safer international air travel, or peacekeeping in societies where no specific national interests reside. Hyperconnectivity means, however, that it is harder for diplomats to know when a laser-like focus on specified national interests will neglect global threats that ultimately cascade, blow back to burn, and dominate one’s own nationals. One day an unprevented global risk that is not a national interest might burn their country off the map.

Prantl and Goh are descriptively accurate about the heartland of what diplomats do; they succeed in representing the most widely shared view in both international relations and the practice of diplomacy on what statecraft is about. Yet what if lawyers defined law as a practice that supports rich clients who can pay the highest fees to deliver their interests through the legal system? That is a descriptively accurate characterization of the core of what lawyers do, especially the best lawyers in the largest, most successful firms. One reason it would be anathema for lawyers to define law that way is because a minority of distinctively important lawyers have roles like judges, public defenders, the solicitor-general, the ombudsman. They do not work fee-for-service for wealthy clients. There are welfare rights and Indigenous advocacy lawyers. In that, lawyers are exactly like diplomats, many of whom work for United Nations agencies, the World Trade Organization, ASEAN, disparate kinds of international institutions. The difference is that law does not allow its central, most prestigious, practice—helping the rich to dominate and secure their legal interests – define its professional identity. Rather it defines itself in terms of the ideal of the practice of the rule of law. What that does for the ideology of the profession is allow the profession to view what judges do as more important than the work of more highly paid elite law firm players. Diplomacy and IR that conceive diplomacy as supporting national interests in survival and prosperity are disinclined to view incumbency in a senior WHO position as more important than being a top diplomat of a major power. This is one reason why the professional quiescence of diplomacy was causally implicated in vaccine diplomacy becoming vaccine nationalism, not only during the covid years.

Other professions did fight the good fight, pursue the ethical vocation, on covid. Epidemiology was an important one. Epidemiologists were endlessly vocal on the airwaves, in print, and social media in excoriating vaccine nationalism, supporting WHO, and advancing covid cosmopolitanism every which way. Their professional ideology was explicit and rather consistent in spurning vaccine realism, advocating international institutionalism. Epidemiologists would even say on a regular basis what no foreign minister or senior diplomat would ever say publicly—that national spending priorities had been irrationally skewed to ridiculously lower risk threats than epidemics, such as counter-terrorism. How could our governance and diplomacy be so misdirected as to give higher priority to counter-terrorism over counter-epidemic spending when terrorism deaths have been so small at every stage of human history, and preventable epidemic deaths so high? Epidemiology proved itself in these media debates to be a relentlessly evidence-based profession, something diplomacy proved not to be during the 20 years of a poorly conceived war on terror, and before that a disastrously conceived war on drugs (particularly in Latin America) (Braithwaite 2022). The epidemiologists critiqued each other, hammer and tongs, in the media, challenged colleagues with supporting research when they believed the evidence was valid and reliable. Diplomats hesitate to do this on matters of evidence. Chief health officers of states are bureaucrats who are required to show loyalty to the health minister who hires them, just as are top diplomats. But chief health officers are embedded in a professional culture that eats them for breakfast if they make public statements that fly in the face of the evidence.

Chief health officers could never joke about epidemiology as a profession the state pays to lie. Diplomats do joke this way. ‘An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country’. This is widely attributed to English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton during a 1604 Augsburg mission. Chief health officers read their professional mandate as impartially reporting evidence on the effectiveness of interventions. Ethical excellence is grounded in deep wells of professionalism such as the Hippocratic Oath—attributed to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates—that puts loyalty to humankind above all else, that prioritizes doing no harm. Epidemiology is a profession that walks its talk in the sense that these doctors and nurses traveled from privileged societies in large numbers to Africa when they were needed to help contain epidemics like ebola and HIV within Africa before they become global pandemics (successfully with ebola, unsuccessfully with HIV-AIDS). They did not travel to Africa because the pay and safe working conditions were good toiling in full PPE inside quarantined tropical villages. Some sacrificed their lives. Many exhausted themselves to death in wealthy societies during covid.

The core business of diplomacy is unique, so there are limits to what we can learn from comparative professionalism. While public diplomacy and public discourse generally were distressingly non-evidence-based on so many aspects of the war on terror, there were noble exceptions. One was US Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, who protested vigorously about reckless CIA drone targeting decisions during the Obama Administration. These drone attacks killed many Pakistanis who had not been supporters of terrorism. Munter resigned when his objections were repeatedly ignored (McKelvey 2017).

Munter’s evidence-based exceptionalism sacrificed his diplomatic career ultimately to help persuade President Obama against his former belief that surging drone attacks was a more humane way of achieving counter-terrorism objectives with less collateral damage than bombardment from conventional aircraft or from cross-border artillery. Dissident diplomats and university critics in time did cut through to the Obama Administration with the point that this was a false framing of the choice because the United States had not declared war against Pakistan; sending a wing of bombers to pulverize parts of Pakistan would be an act of war. That was not an option against the needed ally that Pakistan was. Obama was ultimately dissuaded from the fiction that drones killed terrorists with minimal collateral damage to civilians as the evidence grew that the number of terrorists killed was small in comparison to innocent civilians that included huge numbers of children (Braithwaite and D’Costa 2018, Chapter 7). Finally, Obama became persuaded that Taliban recruitment was being assisted by the way the children of the region came to hate America because they loathed recurrent, terrifying sounds from above of American drone warfare. Obama sharply reduced drone attacks on Taliban and other presumed terrorist targets in the final year of his presidency. CIA drone attacks stepped up again after Donald Trump became president. As usual, these war crimes continued to fail as an alternative to adept diplomacy; the United States and NATO lost its war against the Taliban. Fragile democracies in both Pakistan and Afghanistan became progressively more corrupted, the West more intensely despised, during this period of history.

By Trump’s presidency, it was already too late for diplomacy as a profession to redeem itself by publicly defending a fundamental principle of international law—that you do not launch systematic waves of attacks on the territory of another country without declaring war against them. That was part of the crime against international law of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States rightly condemned it and helped enforce that view through the prosecution of Japanese leaders. As late as 2001, senior diplomats and secretaries of state were still condemning extrajudicial assassinations by Israel against non-Israelis on the soil of other countries. Three decades of ethical leadership by US diplomacy on extrajudicial assassinations had profoundly reshaped international norms after the Church Committee of the US Congress exposed and denounced CIA initiative in planning the coup and assassination of President Allende of Chile in 1972. Presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H. Bush, and Clinton all ensured that their administrations sustained this aspect of the international rule of law. Once the George W Bush administration reversed direction again without eliciting howls of protest from international diplomats, who utterly failed to mobilize international society to shame this murderous behavior, world civilization entered another dark downward spiral toward disrespect for international law and barbarism. The neocons had turned another healthy taboo into a corpse.

Good and Evil in the Heart of the Spymaster

Diplomats like Ambassador Munter were not the only noble exceptions who defined diplomacy as a more cosmopolitan craft. Niël Barnard was not the head of the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, but in the event played a more powerful diplomatic role as head of the South African intelligence service during the Apartheid administration in South Africa. Barnard decided long before the De Klerk government released Nelson Mandela from prison that Apartheid was a flagrant breach of international human rights law, and unsustainable. It would ultimately impoverish South Africa by marginalizing South African business in the world economy, through wars with the frontline African states supported by Cuban fighters, and civil war in which South Africans killed one another, thereby further scaring off investment.

I interviewed Niël Barnard and some of his colleagues at length. Barnard concluded that South African mothers were becoming unwilling to send their sons to fight these wars. Barnard (2015) started holding secret peace talks in prison with Mandela. He became the lead negotiator, though not the only negotiator, in those talks with the support of President Botha, then President De Klerk. The intelligence chief may have been the best person to lead this diplomacy as the intelligence chief because peace talks about dismantling Apartheid could disintegrate the political base of these presidents. They were therefore guarded by the tightness of secrecy only intelligence agencies can secure. The talks were far from pure-hearted. Secret tactics attempted to divide the African National Congress by feeding falsehoods about what Mandela had said in prison to ANC successor president Oliver Tambo outside. Tambo’s phone was also tapped. Bits of these Tambo conversations wrenched from their context were played back to Mandela in ways designed to turn these two close friends against each other. Notwithstanding this, I view Barnard as a central unsung secret actor in ending Apartheid. He loved Mandela, or at least felt a depth of respect for the older man that verged on reverence. Barnard and his colleagues secured Mandela’s release, and loved South Africa in all its colors. I also want to emphasize that Barnard’s was a special and genuine (as opposed to purely tactical) relationship with Mandela. I put it in the same category of genuine warmth and affection that was evident between Reagan and Gorbachev. This observation becomes important to my conception of how to salvage a redemptive diplomacy. Barnard was a spymaster who practiced restorative diplomacy.

Perhaps helping to end Apartheid and the civil and international armed conflicts associated with it was not even the most impressive diplomatic contribution of Niël Barnard. More profound in its implications for wider cascades of crisis was the role of his agency, and that of his intelligence service, in South Africa becoming in 1989 the only country that had achieved nuclear weapon capability to voluntarily relinquish it by destroying the nuclear weapons it had built. This laid a steppingstone to Mandela’s supporter and friend, Muammar Gaddafi, to abandon Libya’s nuclear weapons program a decade later. Together, these two momentous steps made the largest continent, Africa, a nuclear-weapons-free continent. Africa is and was then the most war-torn continent and a comparatively violent and extractive continent, so a nuclear-free Africa is no small accomplishment for the systemic security of the planet and its environment. More importantly, while the South African precedent has not been repeated by a state that had already built a stockpile of nuclear weapons, it is still a profoundly important precedent for international diplomacy to build upon in future when it grasps the vision to do so. South African diplomacy was led not only by South African diplomats and presidents, but by Barnard as a spymaster rather than a diplomat. He helped give deeply conservative, racist, Nationalist political leaders a new vision for South Africa as an anti-Apartheid, non-proliferation state. This in turn lent Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo the leverage to transform the African National Congress to again become a nonviolent movement for negotiated constitutional transformation and then a global leader for nuclear non-proliferation. All this in turn took international diplomacy to one of its finest moments. The international diplomacy profession lent profound support to the release of Mandela and then transition through democratic elections won by Mandela. In this moving historical moment, diplomacy proved to be a redemptive profession after all.

Mandela’s freedom was won against opposition from opponents such as Margaret Thatcher, Dick Cheney, and the US neocon establishment. The neocons were sometimes assertive about insisting on Mandela being kept in prison (Wing 2013), more often covert, dissembling. Neocons play their games of convoluted dissembling in preference to the simpler prescriptions of restorative diplomacy. Watergate machinations paled when Colonel Oliver North, inside Ronald Reagan’s White House, came up with a diabolically complex workaround to America’s own rules. The White House funded arms sales to its enemy Iran between 1981 and 1986 (in breach of the US arms embargo against Iran) to create a slush fund to in turn covertly fund the Contras in Nicaragua after a Congressional vote explicitly forbad further insurgency funding for the Contras! Neocon workarounds of international and national law repeatedly entangle America in traps of its own construction.

Consider the principle of habeus corpus, no detention without trial, sacrosanct since Magna Carta. The CIA paid tribal leaders wads of cash to hand over people whom tribal warlords said were Taliban. Often they were not. They were frequently people that tribal leaders viewed as a political adversary they wanted rid of. The United States grabbed these alleged Taliban to be interrogated by the brightest and best US intelligence expertise could offer. They came up with bright ideas like flushing a Holy Koran down a toilet. Taliban grabbing had KPIs like body counts in the Vietnam War, with incentives to inflict innocents as false positives. Arrestees were shipped to Guantanamo Bay, a US enclave remaindered from an illegal US invasion of Cuba during the era of US colonialism. Prisoners were not granted their rights under the Geneva Convention as Prisoners’ of War; they had no right to release even 23 years later after the Taliban won the war and resumed the government of Afghanistan. They are alleged terrorists, but few of them got a right to contest this in court with their own legal counsel. In the minority of cases that did get to court they were required to work with a US military lawyer as their defense attorney. As with Iran-Contra, the duplicitous covert designs of Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition of alleged terrorists to the torture camps of War-on-Terror allies like Libya’s Gaddafi, caught America in one tangled web after another.

All remaining Guantanamo detainees should get a restorative justice conference now that proffers them an apology for not being granted a trial or even the most basic rights of POWs. Where it is clear that they were tortured or suffered abuse of religious rights, they should get an apology for this as well. The restorative prescription invites them to reciprocate by taking this opportunity to renounce their own wrongdoing. Then they should be released and transported back to their homes and families with at least some cash as compensation to help them restart their lives. The prison should then be closed on the basis that a prison of this kind should never again be allowed. One ethical basis for this approach is that by now the worst criminals have had an opportunity to be tried; for the remainder, up to 23 years in solitary confinement is more than enough punishment without trial. Indeed it is enough punishment even if they were guilty of a war crime that was a shocking crime against humanity.

Allies Britain and Australia challenged what the United States was doing at Guantanamo Bay and through extraordinary rendition to criminal states like Gadaffi’s Libya for even more horrific torture. There were campaigns among peoples of these angry allies on behalf of their citizens imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists by the US state. Large swathes of the electorate in these countries believed that specific defendants who were their fellow nationals had been foolish, but not guilty of terrorist crimes. The people of Australia and the United Kingdom still believed in the principle of no detention without trial and believed it disengenuous for the United States to say that Guantanamo Bay was not a US legal jurisdiction. The alliance frayed. Democratic presidential candidates (Obama and Biden) won three election campaigns during which they promised to close Guantanamo Bay. The Democratic Party with support from Republicans who believe in the rule of law have so far failed to deliver these promises.

In the past decade, Australian and British democrats became concerned about the mass detention of Uyghurs in China, only to find that the United States had been detaining Uyghurs who their War-on-Terror ally, China, asked to be endlessly incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay or subjected to extraordinary rendition that disappeared them. These are the tangled webs of duplicitous diplomatic complexity neocons repeatedly weave for America. The next chapter goes on to discuss systematic evidence that duplicitous meddling in other countries’ democracies, most frequently by the United States and Russia, makes America a corrosive force against democracy that rivals Russia and China.

Pakistan with 242 million people is one of the largest democracies, but also one of the most fragile because of recurrent intervention of a Pakistan military in deposing leaders, a military that also routinely meddles in the democratic process. Sadly another aspect of this democratic corrosion is repeated US meddling to persuade the Pakistan military to interfere in democratic politics. Pakistan’s prime minister since his election in 2018 was in 2022 the most democratically popular political leader in Pakistan. He still is at the time of writing. He had taken the Pakistan economy from catastrophic circumstances of IMF default to the best economic growth performance in decades, 6.4 percent in 2021, and improved circumstances for the poor. He was taking decisive steps to green the Pakistan economy and to build bridges of peace to India. In terms of the politics of catastrophe prevention defined as imperative by this book, Prime Minister Imran Khan was a model leader, though an imperfect one, of course. The Economist (2021) rated his government’s performance in managing the covid pandemic and returning its economy to normalcy as third in the World, after Hong Kong and New Zealand.

One plank of Khan’s popularity was that throughout the NATO occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, Khan called for peace talks to secure NATO withdrawal. That was likewise his position on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine; he declined to support war machines on either side. He also denounced US drone attacks on alleged terrorists inside Pakistan as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty. This book argues that through all three positions, Khan was being a good ally to the United States, espousing positions that were in the interests of the United States to change from 2001 onwards. American neocons never saw Khan this way. Nor did the Biden administration. On March 7, 2022, secret cables leaked by The Intercept (Grim and Hussain 2023) and the leading Pakistan Newspaper Dawn revealed that two state department officials had met with Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States with the message that ‘all would be forgiven’ if Khan were removed as Prime Minister. The cable revealed both carrots and sticks the State Department deployed in the cause of removing Khan from power. The Pakistan military responded by lending their backing to opposition parties to overthrow Khan, deployed the military to arrest Khan and senior leaders of his political party who might replace him, and deployed a military-imposed regime of political censorship. According to The Intercept, the cable was leaked by members of the Pakistan military who said they were no friends of Khan or Khan’s party. Perhaps some in the Pakistan military felt it would be prudent for them to share the blame for corrupting Pakistan’s democracy with the Biden administration. The Biden administration denies that it requested that Khan be deposed.

Renewing America’s Ethical Core Diplomatically

This book makes a case for the return of US diplomacy to the simpler principles that began to be followed during the Carter administration. It is a case for restorative diplomacy that eschews the ‘catastrophic successes’ touted by neocons that have relentlessly caused America to disillusion democratic allies (most disastrously of all with former allies like Russia and the initially pro-American Putin). Allies like Pakistan that have become in reality all but former allies are also critical. America repeatedly grants its neocons impunity to entangle the country in illegal wars of invasion, covert proxy wars (as in Nicaragua), wars on terror, wars on drugs, punitive mass incarceration wars on crime domestically and transnationally in which black lives do not matter and Latin American lives too. The next chapter applies the idea of restorative diplomacy to reducing nuclear weapon risks and risks from the high politics of regime change and electoral interference in other societies.

The conclusion of this chapter is that diplomacy has failed the test of demonstrating that it has an ethical core and code that immunizes it against debased professionalism. We perceive the Nazi doctors and the Nazi judges as debasing their professional codes. Nazi diplomats, well they were forgiven as just doing their job. Western diplomacy slides toward being subordinated enablers of neocon duplicity funded by the military-industrial complex that spreads its influence as the authoritarian right rises on its march across Western democracies. Diplomacy cannot credibly appeal to peace-loving, democracy-loving, elements of its societies for bigger diplomacy budgets that way. Enlarged diplomacy budgets are a good idea. Diplomacy would attract less disdain and more support by being less inexorably realist, more tempered, more ethical, prioritizing institution-building in international affairs.

Democratic publics will become more supportive of diplomacy when they see ethical diplomats exposing lies publicly, admissions from top diplomats of their most tragic mistakes, evidence-based contestation of past errors, publication of peer-review accountability reports into diplomatic corps performance. When did we last see one of those? Put another way, more relational and restorative diplomacy, collaborating with diplomats of competing states, might go hand in hand with more relational and restorative engagement with diplomacy’s own democratic publics.

Notes

  1. 1.

    See Abbs (2021). The 64 per cent figure comes from the research of Desiree Nilsson (2012).

  2. 2.

    Schneier (2018) articulates the issues in balancing cyber defense against cyber-attack after dividing the terrain into two sets: security tasks that humans do well and those that computers do well: ‘Computers excel at speed, scale, and scope. They can launch attacks in milliseconds... [after they] scan computer code to look for particular vulnerabilities... Humans, conversely, excel at thinking and reasoning. They can look at the data and distinguish a real attack from a false alarm, understand the attack as it’s happening,... Humans are creative and adaptive and can understand context. Computers—so far, at least—are bad at what humans do well. They’re not creative or adaptive. They don’t understand context... Humans are slow and get bored at big data analysis. They use cognitive shortcuts and can only keep a few data points in their head at a time. They can also behave irrationally because of these things.. defense is currently in a worse position than offence precisely because of the human components. Present-day attacks pit the relative advantages of computers and humans against the relative weaknesses of computers and humans’. Hence, computers that take over traditionally human work might put defense on a par with offense. However, on new cyber realities favoring offence, see Gipper (2020), and on doubting this, see Smythe (2020).

  3. 3.

    In mainstream international relations theory, this is standardly articulated as the liberal institutionalism alternative to realist international relations theory. Most liberal institutionalists, however, are like most realist diplomats in the sense that they are not particularly restorative. They tend to be technocratic in the fashion of the domestic legal profession, artisans of institution building, international lawmaking.