The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age. Tom Fletcher
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Many of us have an inner Trump somewhere. The bit of us that is too prone to boastfulness, to anger, that seeks constant competition and that hits out at those we think are weaker than ourselves.
But the difference is that, for most of us, this is not something we’re proud of. And it is something we spend our lives finding ways to contain and restrain. Most people manage to do that at some point between the ages of three and five. But we work at it, and almost all of us get there – we contain our inner Trump. We evolve.
I worked in Downing Street during previous transitions of power – going from the Gordon Brown to the David Cameron era was like trying to master dressage after rodeo. But I also observed close-up four transitions of the crucial and often misunderstood relationship between US president and UK prime minister: Blair/Bush to Bush/Brown to Brown/Obama to Obama/Cameron. They are moments of opportunity and excitement. But they also require great sensitivity and care. Leaders have a sixth sense about political capital, and who has it or doesn’t have it.
When Senator Obama visited Downing Street some months before the 2008 election, he had it in buckets. He was keen to give a suitably presidential statement outside the famous black door. One of my jobs was to keep him in No. 10 as long as possible, so that everyone would see how good the personal rapport was with Prime Minister Brown. So I took him to Margaret Thatcher’s old study to look at the particles of moon rock that President Richard Nixon had gifted Prime Minister Harold Wilson in January 1970. As I showed him these extraordinary and inspiring souvenirs of a more ambitious age, I hoped for a moment of reflection, maybe even an unforgettable piece of Obama rhetoric on America’s future. Instead, the senator recoiled. All day I wondered why – was it mention of Nixon? Was he overwhelmed by the moment? Only later did I realise that my tie had taken some friendly fire while I was changing my son’s nappy that morning. The future leader of the free world had not had the ideal introduction to British hygiene. I hope the special relationship did not suffer too much as a result.2
I think President Obama is a humble man with much to be arrogant about. We will find out whether President Trump is the opposite. Whether he can learn to restrain his inner Trump. And whether we really are set for a period in which the most powerful nation in the world is led by a blond Berlusconi.3 Ironically, we are left hoping that he is a politician who doesn’t follow through on his election promises.
More importantly, we will learn fast whether society has evolved, has learnt from history how to contain its own inner Trump. Humankind’s story is one of the gradual – albeit with bad years, and sometimes bad decades – evolution of reason over craziness, expertise over instinct, community over tyranny, and honesty over lies. Painstakingly and with great sacrifices, we built political systems to restrain the dangerous individual who believes that only he – and almost always he – has the answers. As a species, our strength is that we know we are a work in progress.
So we need to remind ourselves how to restrain tyrants. Basic dictatorship is not complicated. It tends to follow very similar patterns: an economic crash, blamed by the aspiring tyrant on elites, minorities and his opponents; the promise of greatness, of bread and circuses (or cookouts and reality TV in the modern version); the gradual undermining of institutions; intimidation of the independent media; the reward (not confined to dictatorships, of course) of loyalty over competence; holding enemies close; the building of a personality cult; and the systematic removal of checks and balances.
At each of those moments, the dictator hopes that we stay silent, argue among ourselves, or become distracted. In the period ahead, we are going to find out if the checks and balances created over centuries to constrain our inner Trumps are being simply tested, or tested to destruction. The painful lessons of the twenty-first century stand before the firing squad, wondering if they will hear the first shot.
And what about Brexit – depending on where you stand, either Independence Day, a ‘quiet revolution’, or a suicide note.
The UK’s role in the twenty-first century will not be defined by the EU referendum itself, but how the British respond to it. The period ahead will require a sense of collective purpose that we have not had since the Second World War.
I spent much of 2016 in places that have entered an uncertain time because of the referendum: Dublin, Belfast, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Berlin, London, Cyprus. The decision of the UK people to leave the EU may have been based largely on local factors, but it is the best example of how decisions in one country now affect everyone. Ironically, our localism made the case for internationalism, because it has placed us in the position of needing to work harder on our international partnerships. It is also part of an even greater irony – a worldwide campaign against globalisation.
These are moments of peril for Europe more widely. For the first time since the Second World War, people are leaving the European centre at an alarming rate, and parties that have dominated are not just losing but being wiped out. W. B. Yeats saw it well at a time of similar upheaval in 1919:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.4
That passionate intensity is at the heart of the third symptom of twenty-first-century change, and a theme of much of this book – the polarisation of debate and the consequent rise of extremism.
As later chapters describe, I was ambassador in Beirut when the Syria conflict began, and lived through the four years in which it developed into the worst war of the twenty-first century. Let’s remember that the Assad killing machine has no pause button. Industrial terror is its factory setting, and it survives only through brutality. I will spend much of my life trying to explain how and why we let it happen on our watch. And much of my time now is spent trying to ensure that Syrian children denied education do not pay the price. They deserve better than the choice between a barrel-bombing tyrant, the box-office barbarity of ISIL, and the perils of a Mediterranean raft. They deserve more than the suicide vest or life jacket. The closing chapters of this book argue for a return to our humanitarian responsibilities.
But we cannot understand the wider challenges facing the world without looking at Syria. There is such a strong connection between breakdown in the Middle East and the polarisation of debate in our own societies. And Syria is the grimmest example of what happens when the international order fails – you get carnage, great power conflicts, and a Petri dish for extremism.
And that extremism will continue to have consequences for all of us. I describe in this book how the three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life – Paris, Beirut and Nairobi – have been victims of terror. The sociopaths with smartphones have reawakened our own versions of extremism. It is a vicious cycle in which those who want to radicalise communities in the West and the Middle East feed off each other’s messages.
So, the scaffolding put up around the twentieth century’s global order is fragile. We are still building the driverless car but seem to have achieved a driverless world. An age of austerity has combined with an age of migration and an age of massive technological change. This brings the mix of immigration, insecurity and inequality that fuels nationalism and extremism.
As a result, I believe we will see new battles in the twenty-first century. Not, like the twentieth century, between East and West, North and South, men and women, black and white, or Islam and Christianity.
Instead we will see four new dividing lines.
Firstly, between coexisters (like the caveman in my first chapter) and wall builders. The target of Islamist extremists is often the ‘greyzone’ – places where people interact across communities and races. This places them on the same side