Long time no blog. Too much work that (unlike writing here) pays something, including mulling over my first book on the general theme of diplomatic speechwriting. Then there’s been the World Cup.

I currently am busy preparing for several masterclasses in Poland later this month, on Diplomatic Drafting and (now) a new one on Managing Difficult Situations in Diplomatic Work. So many startling examples to choose from. Plus I am now booked to go to Kazakhstan in October to amaze officials there on the subject of Speechwriting. And so on.

Meanwhile there’s been lots of talk about why the First World War started and what if anything we can learn from that disaster today. Try this one from Anatole Kaletsky:

The real “Great Illusion,” of course, turned out to be the idea that economic self-interest made wars obsolete. Yet a variant of this naïve materialism has returned. It underlies, for example, the Western foreign policy that presents economic sanctions on Russia or Iran as a substitute for political compromise or military intervention.

The truth, as the world discovered in 1914 and is re-discovering today in Ukraine, the Middle East and the China seas, is that economic interests are swept aside once the genie of nationalist or religious militarism is released…

Rising and declining powers naturally tend to unite against the status quo leaders. In 1914, for example, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire did this against France, Britain and Russia; today it is logical for China and Russia to collaborate against the United States, the European Union and Japan.

This logic has been reinforced recently by the Obama administration’s odd decision to re-emphasize its support for Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam in their territorial disputes with China, at the same time as it confronts Russia in Ukraine.

Which brings me to the clearest lesson from 1914: the pernicious nexus of treaties and alliances that commit great powers to fight on behalf of other countries. This turned localized conflicts into regional or global wars — and did so with terrifying speed and unpredictability…

Hmm. It strikes me that a case can be made for exactly the opposite view: that ‘treaties and alliances’ are the only bulwark we have against pell-mell collapse.

Why?

Because the key feature of the global scene now is the decline and fall of authority. The Obama administration has done a stunning job in making the United States look like an inept ditherer. Vladimir Putin, ISIS and all sorts of unpredictable phenomena are moving to assert themselves. For most of our lifetimes the default position has been to respect certain basic global rules: the benefits of grabbing something have looked a lot less than the risks associated with the consequences of doing so.

That abruptly has been turned on its head. The default position for Putin and ISIS instead is: “Look what we are doing! Breaking your rules, right under your noses! So … what precisely are you going to do about THAT?“

It is staggering to see the loss of ‘Western’ nerve in the face of Islamist the-worse-the-better insanity. These ISIS people not only commit war crimes. They race to post them on YouTube, gloating and sniggering at the world’s indecision. While they are doing that they threaten to collapse sundry key borders across the Middle East. What does it take for the UN Security Council to call emergency meetings and name specific ISIS leaders as leading global wanted war crimes suspects representing a clear immediate threat to international peace and security, ‘framing’ the issues in a way that pushes back against the confident ISIS/AQ message of Islamist extremist inevitability?

It has been depressing to see the Foreign Office doing so much to champion the issue of Sexual Violence in Conflict, while being meticulous in its language of avoiding getting dragged in to the carnage in Iraq. It’s not so much the actual policy – it is hard to know what to do for the best against these lunatics. But whereas sexual violence against women in conflict is a theme that now prompts a torrent if not a tsunami of FCO moral urgency, YouTube videos of men being murdered in cold blood is all just a bit too … complicated. Why should our UN diplomats take a firm leadership position on anything as morbid as that, when it’s so much more FUN to have a Gay Pride bus-ride in New York?

In other words, at least our feeble leaders do (for now) have to pay some attention to the international treaties they have signed. And in the case of NATO, the fact that NATO exists does give V Putin pause for thought when he mulls over options for stirring up the Russian-speaking communities in Estonia and Latvia as part of his schemes to redefine the post-Cold War deal in ways more favourable to an overtly nationalistic, greedy Russia.

In any case, I was talking about the risks of World War Three well before the anniversary of the outbreak of World War One. Try this for size:

Maybe it all gets just too complicated. Too many things go wrong at the same time.

The capacity of the world’s leaders and institutions to respond in a coherent and authoritative way on several huge problems at the same time ebbs away. This opens the way for calculated lunges by different regional powers, aiming quickly to establish some new facts on the ground while attentions are distracted elsewhere.

Imagine some sort of geopolitical storm featuring, among others:

  • escalating tensions between Turkey and Israel, with Arab countries and Iran weighing in opportunistically to arm Hamas and drive up a sense of inevitable confrontation. Israel’s very existence is openly challenged in numerous capitals
  • South and North Korea relations decline amidst mutual recriminations over various off-shore naval incidents
  • the European Union’s legal authority is hammered by rulings in the German courts declaring unconstitutional the various attempts by Brussels to underpin the Eurozone by side-stepping existing EU treaties
  • the Eurozone crisis quickly enters a new phase, with civil unrest breaking out in Greece and financial markets seizing up in other European capitals. Cash machines across much of Europe run dry; just-in-time supplies of food to Europe’s supermarkets falter
  • ethnic clashes break out in several southern European countries, including some within the European Union (Slovakia, Hungary, Romania) and in Serbia/Kosovo and Bosnia
  • Europe’s leaders run out of intelligent joint responses to these simultaneous crises – the European Union itself looks vulnerable to abrupt disintegration, as France and Germany bluntly disagree over what needs to be done merely to keep the show on the road…

The examples were perhaps wrong, or at least not right yet (the Eurozone wobbles onwards in surprisingly cheerful shape). And France/Germany today are poised to slug it out on the football field in Brazil, not in Brussels. But the sense of fast-accumulating hyper-complexity overwhelming the system’s ability to cope looks – alas – spot-on.