Don’t Blame the World: Blame the Lack of Confident Leaders
By Cameron Munter, Skytop Contributor / July 4th, 2022
Cameron Munter served as ambassador to Pakistan at the time of the Bin Laden raid. He was ambassador to Serbia during the Kosovo independence crisis. He served twice in Iraq, in Mosul as Provincial Reconstruction Leader and in Baghdad as Deputy Chief of Mission. In the course of three decades as a career diplomat, he was also NSC Director in the Clinton and Bush White Houses, and served overseas in Warsaw, Prague, and Bonn.
Munter studied at Cornell and earned a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins, and has taught at Pomona College, Columbia University School of Law, and UCLA.
Currently a global consultant living in Prague, Munter was President and CEO of the East West Institute, a nonprofit engaged in global conflict prevention. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Diplomacy and serves on numerous corporate and nonprofit boards.
Surtout, Pas Trop de Zèle (Above All, No Zeal)
I spent three decades in the U.S. Foreign Service and took seriously the quote (perhaps apocryphal) from Talleyrand, the patron saint of diplomats: “surtout, pas trop de zèle” – above all, no zeal. Keep passion out of it. Speak with those with whom you disagree, listen to them even more, and judge ultimately whether there is sufficient common ground to make a deal. Or, as Kennedy once said (not apocryphally), let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.
The Perspective of the Other
When I left the diplomatic service, I worked from 2015 through 2019 as president of a New York-based nonprofit called the EastWest Institute. The Institute, or EWI as it was known, was American, but sought to find common ground globally by fostering dialogue on issues of contention from Beijing to Islamabad to Ankara. We were one of the few American NGOs with an office in Moscow. Yes, of course there was a built-in cultural bias for liberal democracy characteristic of an American institution. But half of the directors on our board were not Americans, and we prided ourselves at our willingness and ability to see things from the perspective of the other. Indeed, that was our job. Hosting Turkish President Erdogan or Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif in New York for roundtable discussions on issues of international importance was not meant to be a gesture of support for any particular country or stance but an honest effort to find out where we could work together.
Cooly, Without Zeal
And we did this (or tried to do this) coolly, without zeal; and we did this (or tried to do this) without fear of repercussions, but assuming good faith on all sides. Our shuttle diplomacy in Lebanon, for instance, brought us to the offices of Christian warlords and Hezbollah chieftains alike. And we tried to find common ground.
But during those last years of that last decade, I noted that these dialogues became more and more difficult. Sure, the problems themselves may have been daunting; the so-called JCPOA (the Iranian nuclear deal) was, after the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw, awfully hard to avoid as a roadblock to better relations between Iran and the west; clearly the trends in Russia after 2014 made dialogue more difficult. We were present in Beijing for the key meeting of the Communist Party of China in 2017 when a new sense of assertiveness became clear in Chinese foreign policy. But that’s precisely why we felt this kind of dialogue was important and necessary: if these problems weren’t difficult, there would be no need for EWI.
Lack of Confidence
The problem that grew during the period 2015-2019 – what we can call the death of discourse – seemed to come from another direction. It was the lack of confidence, as I saw it, in the prospect and potential of liberal democracy that grew during this period in western democracies, most notably in America. When you seek common ground, it’s not enough to identify common ideas and policies. What’s required is a measure of trust in your interlocutor that he can (and one hopes, will) exercise good faith in discussion, and develop the deeper sense of common ground necessary for compromise.
To achieve this, you need confidence in yourself. For a number of reasons, readily identified by keen analysts of American culture (I think first and foremost of George Packer, but there are others) it became consistently and systematically more difficult to find those in the west whose confidence in liberal democracy was matched with their commitment to dialogue.
Add in Some Doubt
It didn’t help that global trends had encouraged the emergence of foreign leaders who can generally be described as strongmen (and those global trends are the stuff of think pieces and COVID-era zoom conferences too numerous to mention). So, I don’t mean to say this death of discourse was simply an internal western phenomenon. But when the west began to doubt itself, to express grievance and complaint rather than the confidence and generosity that is necessary – in my mind – to clarity of thought and problem-solving.
It became much more difficult to succeed.
I left EWI at the end of 2019. To my horror, by mid-2021 it had ceased to exist. Talleyrand’s cooler heads will have to find other ways to craft agreements; but the context for doing so has become fraught, perhaps with too much zeal, perhaps with the fear to negotiate.