>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

[ Silence ]
>> Well good afternoon everyone.
I am Carolyn Brown; I direct the Office of Scholarly Programs
and the John W. Kluge Center here at the library.
And it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon
for a conversation on Contemporary Diplomacy,
with a number of distinguished speakers and experts on the subject.
Ambassador Alvaro De Soto, Ambassador Ricardo Luna,
Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Mr. Alexander Evans,
and a moderator Dr. Vanni Pettina.
Before we begin, let me remind you to please turn off any cellphones
or other electronic equipment that can disturb the speakers
or interfere with the recording.
This program is brought to you by the John W. Kluge Center,
which was established in the year 2000 through a very generous grant
by John W. Kluge to create a scholarly venue on Capitol Hill,
where mature scholars might have opportunities
for informal conversation with the national's leaders,
to create a space where the world of affairs and the world
of ideas might come together, where the thinkers
and doers would have opportunities for mutual exchanges.
The Center also invites one
of the world's most promising junior fellows,
and together these 2 groups form a very lively intellectual community.
You can find out more about the programs and the events by going
to the front of the library's homepage www.loc -
for Library of Congress -.gov.
You can sign up for email alerts.
I think it's pretty much of a clich at this point
that the whole is greater than the parts, or the sum of the parts.
Yet at the Kluge Center we really try to see that that is the case.
The scholars come together and talk, all sorts of new ideas
and opportunities can be created by that combination.
In this conversation this afternoon actually is a result of that.
Ambassador Ricardo Luna, Alexander Evans, Cardinal McCarrick,
are all located close to one another in the Kluge Center.
They're all current scholars.
And Vanni Pettina, our moderator today,
is also a fellow at the Center.
I don't quite know what the conversations were where...
that produced this idea, but it grew out of their conversations
and any good idea we've tried to run with if we possibly can.
So that's the background for today's discussion.
It's particularly interesting I think
because international diplomacy is much practiced.
There are embassies with ambassadors and attach and counselors,
and all sorts of people in nations all over the world.
And we're sending diplomats here and there, and meeting one another.
So there's a huge amount of activity.
I don't know that as an activity itself it gets a lot of scrutiny.
So today is an opportunity to think about what is diplomacy
and how does it work, and other interesting questions
that arise from it.
Our moderator, Vanni Pettina, said he's a fellow at the Center.
You'll on your chairs we've given you just brief biographies
of each person so we don't have to repeat a lot of information.
But I did want to mention that Vanni,
although he is primarily a scholar of foreign affairs,
spent himself some time helping the,
as an advisor to the political attach of Italy to Spain.
So he actually also has some upfront diplomatic experience.
So with that introduction I'm going to turn the conversation
over to Vanni, and there you go.

>> Vanni Pettina: Thank you Carolyn, thank everybody for being here.
Thanks to our guests.
I'm quite happy to moderate these conversations.
I'm a historian, in spite of that brief...
as a diplomat.
And as a historian, international relations historian usually deal
with that diplomat.
So for me it's quite the innovation
to moderate the debate with we all diplomats.
I think I would like to start this conversation
on contemporary diplomacy just reading a small fragment.
I won't tell you the author now;
we'll do it immediately after my reading.
I'll let you guess for a couple of seconds or minutes.
This is the quote.
The fragment is about work that somebody took immediately after WWII
in Saint Petersburg in Russia, of course, and it goes like this.
This work brought up countless associations of the past,
of the picture of Pushkin and companion leaning
on the embankment looking at the river.
Of Alexander the First looking
out of the winter palace during the flood of 1883,
of Princess Yuzuha throwing the body of Rasputin into the river;
of the crowd making across the square to where the winter palace,
on the night the palace was stormed.
Of the generation of music teacher and pupils going in
and out of the conservatory.
Of the Italian opera of 100 years ago.
Of the unhealthy days of Leningrad's spring fold, and the little groups
of bleak clad people plodding
through this lash making the heiresses
of Damadi dripping cemeteries.
Of the seller of parliaments of the gout, dark streets full of dampness,
cabbage smell and fats; and of the pale people who manage to live
through the winters in them.
Of the prostitute of the Navisky prospect of that sorriest time,
of the people kepting up fallen horses
in the dark snow blown streets during the time of the siege.
This is to me one of the most poignant communities of the world,
a bleak, sad city where the spark of human genius has always had
to penetrate the darkness, the dampness and the cold
in order to make it's light felt.
And it has acquired for that the reason of strange worth,
a strange intensity, a strange beauty.
I know that in this city
where I have never lived there has nevertheless been deposited a
fruition of my own capacity to feel and to love,
a portion in other words, of my own life.
I know this is something which no American will ever understand,
and nor ration ever believe.

This is quote is neither from [inaudible name]
or from [inaudible name], but it's from George Kennan
who was an American diplomat and quite influential in 1946 and 1950.
And he wrote this during a trip he took immediately after WWII
from Moscow to Helsinki, and I think it's quite good to use this quote
to introduce our conversation because Kennan is the author
of the Long Telegram, is one of...
author we could say of the containment theory.
But also what this shows, it was a human being, diplomat
and a human being able to mix rationality
with feelings, with emotions.
And so I think as much as we have now listened to this voice
from the past, mixing these 2 faces, rationality and emotions
and we are now going to do the same with our guests,
which are diplomats but also human beings.
Diplomacy they do, they make the decision, as much as in the case
of Kennan, the result of this mix.
And actually I would start with the first questions
for all of our guests.
And the question is, what is for you, people whom I see,
from a theoretical point of view, of course and I'm going back to Kennan
from emotional point of view.
I think we are all accused of this, and what drew you into diplomacy,
which kind of patience moved you to become a diplomat;
why you became a diplomat?
So I don't know, who wants to start?
I think probably De Soto, Ambassador De Soto.
>> Alvaro De Soto: Well...

my father was a diplomat before me, and I...
I am in a certain sense a child of exile,
as my father had been very closely associated
with democratically elected president who was overthrown
by a general; one of whose first decisions was to require visas
for Peruvians living abroad to return to their country,
which he was unable to do for several years.
I've since learned that I actually fall into a different pigeon hole,
and the pigeon hole is a 3rd culture kid; the son of the son,
or the daughter of a couple who go to live abroad,
and at home educate their children in their own culture, but who,
that son or the daughter, also grows up in the culture of the country
where they happen to be, and thus develops a 3rd culture
which is a mix of the 2.
What drew me to diplomacy, I think,
is that of course along the way I picked up a couple of languages.
And I found in myself some
of perhaps the empathetic skills that my own father had.
And not being much good at anything else,
I decided to become a diplomat.
>> Vanni Pettina: Very, very, very interesting.
And Cardinal?
>> Cardinal Theodore McCarrick: I'm listening to the Ambassador,
and seeing as how it runs in the family;
it does not run in the family.
My father was a sea captain, and my mother was an artist model.
But I guess they have some connection with diplomacy.
A sea captain tries to keep the boat going steadily
and not rocking too much, and the model tries to give the impression
of beauty, of goodness, and all kinds of things like that.
And that's what a diplomat has to do.
I'm a churchman; I'm a priest,
so that my diplomacy is sort of an accidental one.
In a certain sense, we were talking in our conversations earlier
about the fact of nongovernmental diplomacy, diplomacy from the NGO's,
diplomacy from other facets of our society.
I guess that's where I would be myself.
How I get involved in it?
Well partly because you end up in jobs where you have to do it.
I was president of the University of Latin America when I was very young,
and you had to deal with government down there
and your government back home tried to get money out of you,
the government back home so you could spend it in other places.
Sometimes you were successful, sometimes not.
And that's really the essence I think of diplomacy.
You are seeking to establish certain goals if you are a ambassador
from a totalitarian country, those goals, maybe others,
and ambassador is you happen to be a priest.
It is practicing "diplomacy" just to achieve some limited approach.
I think what happened in my case, to be very brief, is that I probably
as ambassador, because of languages or because of situations
which we find ourselves, we have an opportunity to pursue some good;
whether it's the release of prisoners,
or whether it's an increase in understanding,
or whether it's trying to tie things together,
which could be helpful to people.
Or whether it's basically to try to take care of the poor.
So these are motivations that lead you into activities
which can be considered diplomacy,
and that's where I found myself very often.

>> Thank you.
So some of the background is similar with Ambassador De Soto
because my father also, being a Peruvian intellectual,
could not get a visa back to Peru.
Luckily he had a job at the U.N. so that we could survive.
That led to a certain amount of curiosity on my part
as to what people at the U.N. actually did.
I noticed that they all wore dark suits and had oblique conversations
and I thought that was interesting.
It then turned out as I was finishing my undergraduate studies
and I was doing an internship for the Peruvian mission
through the U.N. that a very brilliant Peruvian international
lawyer took me under his wing, and he essentially asked me to look
up stuff, words in the dictionary in the Dag Hammarskjold Library,
and I thought this is a really good job, I quite like that.
So it turned out to be an honorable vocation,
and a challenging vocation.
Like in any job there are ups and downs, but it's always,
the challenges are always unpredictable
and always interesting.
I think that as in the case of Napoleon's field marshals,
the most important quality for a diplomat is
to have a lot of good luck.
And I hope, I certainly have had it in the past;
hope to have in the future.
[ Laughter ]
>> I think for me as well.
I'm fully more with the Cardinal.
I didn't come from a diplomatic background.
My family had mainly been in the military.
My mother was a school teacher.
I think what attracted me to become a British diplomat,
which I did when I was 29, so I joined the service later
than many people, was the attraction of learning about people
and different cultures, and traveling.
A cynical view might be that because I couldn't fight, I had to commit
to a career of negotiation instead.
But I think that's the appeal of diplomacy.
I think it depends on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist,
about whether you think that diplomacy can be a force for change
in the world, or whether actually diplomacy's equally important
to be a force to prevent bad things happening or to solve bad situations
that have already arisen.
I think some of the drivers for me are more out of that sense
of wishing to prevent bad things from happening,
and wishing to solve problems that already exist; the necessarily
but transformative potential that some people see in diplomacy.
>> Vanni Pettina: Thank you.
After this first part on where we discover what pushed you to work
in diplomacy, but moving to a more operative field terrain
and see how we are, which is your take on some
of the most urgent issues that are affecting the world today.
First of all my question is, in a world where since the end
of the Cold War, the number of wars have probably decreased
but is still a very complicated war market by tensions,
international tensions, intervention of social and domestic problems;
and still war, Iraq, Afghanistan.
As a diplomat who had a role, that can play a role,
what do you think can diplomacy do?
And I'm following what Alex said on this.
What can diplomacy do to tackle, address this problem?
And also there is a priority, what are the most urgent issues
that are marking the present?
And why it would be easy because you are diplomats belonging
to different country with diplomatic tradition I'm sure.
So I'm curious to see which kind of answers do you think we can give
to this problem, if there are differences between you or agreement
on what should be done towards raising these problems.

Also I'm particularly interested from the United Nations point
of view, what is your take on this?

>> Well as long as there are states, and they're likely to be
around for a while yet, you will probably need diplomats in order
to keep some sort of a semblance of relationship amongst them,
and to contribute to harmony.
But you ask me about the United Nations.
I joined the United Nations at a certain point in my career,
and was loaned by my government to the United Nations,
ended up staying there for 25 years.
It was a rather long term loan.
And ended up doing their work of a lot
of conflict resolution type work.
Now that was, in a sense an extension of diplomatic work,
but instead of representing or advocating the interests
of the country that had originally sent me abroad
or on diplomatic missions, what I was trying
to do is using diplomatic techniques bring
about what Alexander was saying earlier,
try to either prevent people who are tempted to come
to blows from coming to blows.
Or if they were already exchanging blows, trying to find ways
out of the problem, trying to find
out why it is that they came to blows.
So as to bills, rules, machinery, institutions, so that in future
when disputes arise they won't have to resort to blows.
Now how one goes about that...
varies from person to person.
I think that there are studies carried
out by the U.S. Institute of Peace.
I was just attending a meeting earlier at the U.S. Institute
of Peace, but that's neither here nor there.
But they studied negotiating behavior of different countries.
The most recent one by the way is the study
of American negotiating behavior, and they had the good sense to bring
in foreigners to ask them how they viewed American negotiating.
I'm not sure whether you can actually categorize them by nation,
but you certainly can categorize them according
to their personality traits.
I come back to what I said earlier, it's the empathetic skills
that you have to exercise; the capacity to listen
and listen while appearing to be totally engrossed,
and extremely interested, and even sympathetic to both sides,
and to try to bring about some sort of understanding between them.
Very hard to describe in words what one does,
I think I've perhaps given you the jest.
>> Vanni Pettina: So it's more emotional side
of the diplomat that seems to...
>> Unquestionably.
Unquestionably.
I was actually quite touched, quite moved by what Kennan wrote.
>> Vanni Pettina: Probably this part of why he was
such a successful diplomat.
>> Yes. One of the problems is being drawn in too much emotionally.
That is a danger.
>> I can build on what the Ambassador said.
I'd like to make the point that to a certain extent we are all diplomats,
because we are all involved in negotiations every day of our lives.
We negotiate with our family;
we negotiate with our bosses, with our chiefs.
We negotiate constantly during our life.
Some do it professionally.
I was listening to the Ambassador and I thought,
you know one of the best diplomats would be a good card player;
would have all those fields and be able to manage one by the other,
looking very dispassionately if he had 5 aces in his hand and...
>> Poker face.
>> Exactly.
That would be 1 opportunity.
But I think what the Ambassador was saying is very true.
We have to be ambassadors, we all have to be diplomats,
but some do it better than others and that's
because of a certain empathetical character that some people have.
I would know many of my own colleagues
who probably would not be good ambassadors because they're so sure
that they know the right way and nobody else does,
and so they're not going to be able to give and take.
I think an ambassador has to be able to at least seem to give and take,
and of course hoping at the final ultimate solution
that there is something which everybody can live with,
and hopefully something which makes everybody better
and moves the envelope of peace, or the envelope of survival.
I think too, to make my last point, the diplomat is motivated
by the problems or by the successes of the world.
I'm talking about what the needs are.
I think for me the great problem in the world today is in the horn
of Africa, where millions of people are in danger of starving today
because they don't have food.
How do we do that?
How do we deal with that?
The diplomat has to try to persuade governments,
and try to persuade people, and try to persuade religious groups all
to get involved in somehow creating a procedure or an opportunity
to cure problems like that throughout the world.
So it's a motivation that we all have to do something
to make the world better.
>> Vanni Pettina: Ambassador Luna.
Just one second, because I'm curious now to see if as a diplomat coming
from Latin American country, do you see the world,
or the work of problems affecting the world now in the same way
as an American or British diplomat see them?
And also the kind of solutions that you think, and tackle that kind
of problems are the same or do you think there is disagreement
differences on that?
>> I think...
to begin with I think that by now, by the early part
of the 21st century, there is an imprint of world diplomacy
which is more or less a consensual approach
by diplomats from all over the world.
It's to a certain extent something that was developed
in the interwar period between the 1st and the 2nd world war.
When you had, as a result of many reasons,
rather weak governments among the powers, conflicting objectives,
and the world depression in the middle;
and that would have been the opportunity for diplomats to,
if you will, to fill in the vacuum,
to try to orient their respective governments towards avoiding war
to begin with and hopefully to advance some of the objectives
that had been agreed on the Versailles Treaty.
But having said that, this style is an Anglo American style
which was pretty much cemented during the Bretton Woods period,
and it's the type of language and priorities and approach
that has characterized the U.N. from the time of [inaudible name]
and Dag Hammarskjold, up until the end of the Cold War.
With the collapse of the Cold War the instrument of navigation
for the international system essentially disappeared then
imploded, and from what had been a talking shop
but with some priorities it became a laundry list, and it really depended
on whether or not you had a certain amount of leadership,
or a certain amount of orientation, certain amount of passion
in what you were doing; whether or not you became a diplomat,
I say diplomat as an international civil servant, would include people
who were troubleshooters or mediators
for the U.N. Having said that,
I don't think that there is a great difference, for example,
from the Latin American point of view and the western European,
U.S. point of view as to the nature of international problems,
because to a great extent even though we don't necessarily agree
ideologically on every issue,
we seem to see the world with the same kind of...
and have studied basically the same text in international law
and national economics, etc. Let me just say that we have here one
of the most authorized people, should be sitting right
in the middle of us is Tom Hughes who is the Assistant Secretary
of State for Intelligence and Research
in the State Department during the Kennedy
and throughout the 60's, and during 20 years...
president of Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
I only mention him not only because he's a friend and great scholar,
but because he would make the point I think that I'm going to make now,
which is that whoever you are, if you're carrying
out a diplomatic task, you have to keep in the back of your minds
that you're really dealing with people, with good
or bad intelligence and good or bad policy.
And so if you lose any 1 of those sort of parameters,
you are likely to get into trouble.
So I don't really think that the difference in styles
of the diplomacy according
to the countries is necessarily still important,
although I have a quote here by Harold Nicolson
about Woodrow Wilson's diplomacy during the Versailles Treaty,
which I would love to read a little later
on because it's quite poignant.
Having said that I think we are now in that type of situation.
We have a transition from something
that is no longer international system,
that has gone through something called globalization,
which seems to be imploding,
in a world which has more non state actors than state actors,
in which the most powerful state actors are probably illegal
and at the same time have a cultivating force which is stronger
than single states - that's drug traffickers among many others.
So that I think that the diplomats are still useful,
but how you pick them, how you use them, when you appeal to them,
and who do they report to is something which is almost
as obscure now as it was in the Middle Ages.
>> And I think picking up on that, if possible the discussion
so far has been one about style, that perhaps there are commonalities
in successful styles of diplomacy; the ability to listen,
the ability to relate to different actors and groups,
even when you fundamentally disagree or indeed find offensive some
of what those people might be saying.
There are clearly differences
in negotiating style country to country.
Some countries prepare a great deal, some countries invest very much
in a small number of people who are politically very connected
with the government of the day,
others have deeply professional foreign services.
One takes, for example, the case of Brazil
where the Brazilian Foreign Service is highly profession,
highly trained, and actually that gives them an asset
in national terms; but perhaps other states don't enjoy
of a similar size to Brazil.
I wanted to talk to you on substance,
because if a question is partly
about can diplomacy make a difference in the case of conflicts?
So much depends on the cards that you're dealt with.
Part of those cards are, does somebody who is a mediator
for the United Nations or a national diplomatic envoy trying
to solve a conflict?
Do they actually have the influence, the understanding,
the ability to cajole and sometimes coerce
to make a real difference, or not?
I mean there's obviously going to be a difference there.
If you're a diplomat from Fiji or a diplomat from the United States,
the kind of national assets that you can bring
to bear are going to be different.
But I think the other thing is actually much more one about luck.
Luck is not something that's necessarily part
of the pantheon of writing on diplomacy.
Are you in the right place at the right time?
Is there actually an opportunity in a conflict
that may have been frozen, that may have accumulated over years
to really move that conflict from a place of either direct conflicts
or frozen conflicts, to some form of transformation and normalization?
I think so much of that is really knocked down, alas to the skills
or otherwise of diplomats.
Obviously there is a difference between having somebody
who knows what they're doing and somebody who doesn't.
But actually so much of that is down to the luck of the day and the luck
of the year, and whether the parties of that conflict
and the leaders involved in that conflict are really willing
to look for a way forward.
>> Vanni Pettina: Thank you.
The lack is absolutely...
it's quite important aspect of diplomatic activity.
Let's stay on this terrain, on the present.
Ambassador Luna was talking about the implosion
of the international system after the end of the Cold War.
Increasing numbers of scholars, of journalists,
see this implosion leading to our western decline.
You can call it USA decline, European decline.
So I'm wondering how do you see, which is your perspective
on these changes that are taking place in the world, and especially
if you really buy the thesis of the western decline in this moment.
So I don't know if you want to?
>> Well my sense is that what you have,
the phenomena that is occurring now is more of the ascendancy
of other world actors, rather than the decline of the west;
though some of the news that come
out of Europe might perhaps should lead me
to hesitate on this last point.
But that is what; matter of fact there is a book out there
by Kishore Mahbubani, the subtitle of which is The Rise of the Rest.
Yes, he's a Singaporean scholar and diplomat.
So it's more about that.
There's been sort of a bit of a organization
of the diplomatic players, especially in fields
such as conflict resolution; in other words going beyond diplomats
as conduits of relations between states.
You have the secretary general of the United Nations,
sometimes the heads of regional organizations can play a role,
and diplomatic business conflict resolutions is moving toward the
regions of late.
Some states play an important role as well.
The United States is still an important player,
but there others as well.
You get players such as Turkey, Qatar.
In Europe perhaps the most significant players today,
it's because they are freer, are Norway and Switzerland;
perhaps more so even in the European union which is diplomacy on behalf
of 27 states, is very difficult to conduct.
And also you have nongovernmental organizations.
There's 1 nongovernmental organization based
in Geneva called The Humanitarian Dialogue,
which at any given moment is handling 10 or 11 cases
that will not be specified because they do this quite secretly,
except when they happen to be revealed by the parties themselves,
such as their involvement in the Basque conflict
which seems to be drawing to an end.
That's how I would qualify this notion of a decline of the west.
>> Well can I comment on that as well?
I'm just reminded, there's a story or there's part of catch 22,
Joseph Heller's novel, which I kind of enjoyed.
The scene is this: it's a very tired elderly Italian talking
to a young American GI.
And the bushy tailed young American GI,
the scene is the end of, the tail end of WWII.
The young GI is talking about how America's really going
to make a difference forever.
The Italian peers at the American,
he says well how long do you think America is going to last?
Forever? And the young GI says, well maybe not forever
but for a very, very long time.
Well how long is long, says the Italian.
I think sometimes the sense of time scale in terms of debates
about decline or a deeper rise of powers becomes compressed.
It's very tempting to be declinists, just as optimism is 1
of the national sports in the United States.
Pessimism is 1 of the national sports of diplomats,
because where people who could tell you why you might want to do
that minister, but that might not be possible and it might not work.
So that's a bureaucratic tendency I think in general.
So towards at least very mind pessimism,
because bureaucrats are people who tell you why you can't do something,
not necessarily the people who tell you why you can.
But there is I think 1 sort of sense
of framing here that's very important, which is that people talk
about the 21st century almost as if it's going to be an Asian century,
or even a Chinese century.
But the continuing predominance of American economic
and military power is still a reality today, and at least judging
by how much we can forecast looking forward is still going
to be a reality in 10 or 20, or even 30 years' time.
So I think some of these concerns
about decline don't necessarily capture the right tone.
What I think is an interesting question is,
within an international system in which the balance
of power is clearly changing and evolving,
how do you actually get things done?
And how do you get things done on a global agenda
like poverty or climate change?
How do you actually get things done in terms of the activities
around resolving particular conflicts?
I think that becomes much more complex and difficult.
>> Yes, picking up on what Alex has said, I think it's absolutely true
that you can't really pinpoint a decline in time or gauge it
against other rising powers, or it doesn't make any sense.
But I think there are telltale signs, not of decline,
but of radical changes in the international architecture;
not in the international system,
which as I say I think doesn't exist.
And that is important to know, it is important for countries
and serious objective non state players as the ones
that Alvaro has mentioned, or organizations who try
to be objective in their call.
I'll just give you an idea, Amnesty International is supposed
to be the more radical human rights groups; to keep in mind
that things are changing very radically
and that they're difficult to gauge.
What am I saying?
At the cusp of the Cold War between '89 and '92 the members
of the security council at the head of state level got together
when then Secretary General, our senior colleague and icon,
Perez de Cuellar said let's prioritize the reduction
of the number of regional crises, which were around 52, 54.
And it got down to about 16.
It was actually done within 3 or 4 years.
That had to do with the fact that the Cold War had ended,
it had to do with the fact that the Non Aligned movement had evolved
from a radical group to a central moderate group,
and that therefore the priorities could be contextually accepted.
Once that was ended, the process of transition to a dispersion
of centers of power is something
which is extremely difficult to gauge.
My impression is that the 21st century will be an American century
in the sense that it'll be Brazil leading in terms
of probably GDP output, but together with a north
and southwestern hemisphere, which if you aggregate
in economic terms today is immensely richer than even China
and Western Europe together right now.
So that decline doubtful, how does this rearrangement
of the topography in the future play out?
It's extremely difficult to say.
What you have is the loss of the ideal of a sort
of transnational government-like rules of the game
in which everybody will agree to a priori.
I think that's the case because there's a great deal
of radicalization in political and religious terms,
and not just in the case of the Muslim world, but in terms of...
even in the United States.
But I think what you will always have a need for is a group of people
who will understand the kind of language
that could attract the consensus given a particular circumstance,
and then build on that if, as you say,
the circumstances provide a lucky outbreak and a lucky break.
I think that that's what one has to hope for.
On the other hand I think what Alvaro was saying at the beginning,
there's a great deal of communicative experience
which is unfortunately not there in the archives.
It's not in the history of diplomacy,
it's in the personal experience, the manner in which you arrive
at agreements that can be transferred from the multilateral;
that is to say, the U.N. collective parliamentary diplomacy field
to the bilateral diplomacy field.
And that can be done because people occasionally have worked
on both sides.
How you do that is really
on a tutorial system, it's a mentoring system.
And that's why it's good to have good,
well organized foreign services.
I think that they're not infallible,
and they may be sometimes silly, but it is a continuum.
A case in point I think Cardinal McCarrick hasn't mentioned is the
extraordinary role of papal diplomacy,
the diplomacy of the Vatican,
which has had historically an immense influence during Elizabethan
times, during the Renaissance, contemporary times.
And I mean, for 150 years it is the source of arbitration or mediation
that the Latin American countries would prefer in case
of boundary issues, for example.
They were extraordinarily instrumental in keeping the League
of Nations alive with the absence of the U.S.
So what we need to do is see, as in Casablanca,
get the usual suspects together and decide where do we go
from there and not tell anybody.
The media will tell everybody,
but they won't understand what we're doing.
So that...
[ Laughter ]
They probably think we're selling Pakistani nuclear secrets
or something, whatever.
I shouldn't say that, sorry.

I'm off the record, so I can...
>> I'm afraid you're not.
[ Laughter ]
>> Previously important person.
>> I think it's...
>> Can you keep that going?
>> Cardinal McCarrick: At this stage
of the conversation I think it's time to bring out the old sword,
the difference between an optimist and a pessimist.
The optimist says, you know this is the best of all possible worlds.
And the pessimist says, you're right.
[ Laughter ]
And I think that's part
of what we're dealing with, the ups and downs of...
>> That's a good diplomat.
[ Laughter ]
>> Cardinal McCarrick: ...
the ups and downs of our worlds of our society.
The comment on the papal of Foreign Services is, I think,
a very valid one because in the church
over the years there have been the Papal Nuncios in many countries,
and involved in not just in the normal precise way of dealing
with problems, but in a very special way.
When there are just the ordinary sense of where a country is
and where it's going, and certainly the ability
that the Holy See has had in finding extremely wonderful diplomats.
[ technical difficulty ]
... at the time of the real difficult of the Cold War,
was able to structure it in a way
that there would be an opening to these.
And that was very important for the church, and ultimately I think
for society because it created more communication,
and when the Soviet Union finally collapsed there were people talking
to each other who would not have been talking to each other before.
So I think it is true in what you're saying, Ambassador [inaudible],
there is a role for the nonprofessional diplomat
and we find it in the church, you find it in...
I've been on the board of Catholic Relief Services for a long time
and interestingly enough now a good deal of the work
that this agency does is in conflict resolution
in different parts of the world.
And so because of that you have to have diplomacy there for...
which brings me back to my original premise that everyone
in a certain sense has to be a diplomat,
or the world doesn't function.
>> Would you allow me if I tried to draw out to the Cardinal that this,
because it's always been my impression that part of the success
of the Holy See in diplomacy is
that it chooses very carefully what it gets involved in.
It's very selective.
It is said, and here is where I want to draw you out,
implied in us your imminence.
It is said that the motto of the curia is,
in Italian it sounds much better.
>> I agree.
>> [Italian words] Here we think in centuries.
Now is this true or not?
>> Well I hope it is.
[ Laughter ]
I said, you hope it is.
I think that the...
the church we believe is going to be here for centuries,
until the end of time, and therefore there is an interest
in the Roman Catholic church to move forward,
hopefully always toward the good, hopefully to taking care
of the poor, hopefully to come to an end of war;
but with the understanding you can't do everything at once.
I think that it is important that we strive little by little
to solve the problems of every generation in terms of war.
The interesting and unfortunate thing is that every generation seems
to develop its own problems, and they are different
as they come along which requires different skills perhaps,
and different abilities of perseverance.
But if you have an institution that at least is going
to last till the end of time, you'll work on these things in the way
that fulfills the old maxim "Rome wasn't built in a day".
>> Vanni Pettina: In centuries actually, yeah.
I think we should leave some time for the debate,
and also because the Cardinal has to leave a little earlier,
he has some important meeting.
So I would like to ask you just...
I'd like 1 question, but I think I already got the answer.
I was going to bring back Kennan and ask, containment
or integration for China?
How we face China, China's rise as a power.
But I think probably is integration the answer
that would come from 1 of our guests.
But I don't know if you want to say something very briefly on that,
and then we get closer to the conclusion.
Is there anything you want to say on containment or?
>> If I may be so bold,
I doubt whether you'll find much disagreement...
around here.
Integration.
>> I think we should...
before going specifically into what the rise or the emergence of China
as a superpower, just quite obvious.
We should make some emphasis here that official
or non-official diplomacy has benefited from unofficial actors
in the conflicts, not only during the Cold War but especially
after the Cold War; not only the groups
that Ambassador De Soto mentioned, but there's a procedure
in which the church for example has had roles to play -
these would be China, these would be Cuba, in which a group
of countries create ad hock alliances
or when you have extraordinary difficult issues.
Peru had 1 with Cuba in the 1980's,
and the only way we could convince the Cuban regime
that our motivations in the conflict were not what they thought they were
was to send a group of diplomats who were counselor
or below counsel level, say midlevel rather than senior diplomats,
and keep them there for 3 or 4 months until they figured
out that what the real objective facts were.
There's that role, and I think that's important.
On the China thing, I think, I agree with Ambassador De Soto.
It's a power which has been a global leader
for 1,800 of the last 2,000 years.
So it's nothing new for them.
The interim of the last 300 years is kind of an anomaly.
But having said that, because they have had
that tradition they are interested in rules bound system,
they're interested in status, they've interested
in the administration of power in tributary means.
They're not necessarily interested in territorial expansion,
and they're completely tied into the global economic system.
I don't see that, that doesn't mean that I approve
of everything China does internationally or internally,
but I think that we're not dealing with the Third Reich.
We're not dealing with Stalin on adrenalin.
I mean this is a...
an interesting and experienced power, which as tends to,
for example, correct itself when it...
they're interested in assured supply of raw materials;
Africa and South America, Latin America.
When they began in Latin America they were terrible polluters,
they were completely like everybody else was in the 19th century,
like Australian miners or the gold rush people in San Francisco.
But since then they've become squeaky clean,
and it's not a question of political correctors.
They realized that in the long run that's what is going
to get them stability.
>> I think that's a big China debate.
Is China going to become more like the west, or is the west
and the international system going to reflect more
of the views of contemporary China?
I think it really does revolve around not just a rules base system,
but around things like nonintervention and a sense of,
are you involved in the export business in foreign policy?
Or is foreign policy much more just about maintaining a status quo?
I think that is going to be a really important debate
in some of the years to come.
I think that applies to not just China but some
of the other emerging powers.
One of the interesting things is that among the emerging powers,
if you look at India, if you look at Brazil;
I think there's a temptation sometimes to distinguish
between democratic and undemocratic states in international affairs.
I think it's also a really important element about which states believe
that they can affect change in the world, and actually that it's part
of their responsibility to affect change in the world,
and which states believe much more in a sovereign status quo?
I think that's really where the debates going to be,
and of course it has enormous implications
for the United Nations as an institution.
It has enormous implications I think for some
of the progressive western values, whether you take something
like religious freedom or human rights, or even collective action
on climate change or global poverty.
>> Vanni Pettina: Anybody else on this?
>> Could I just answer that for a second?
I think what you are alluding
to is this relatively recent post September 11 temptation
for benign intervention, or intervention
for improved regime change or however you want to call it.
I think that's going to be 1 of the victims of the present meltdown,
and I think that's a good thing.
It took Latin America approximately 100 years
between the Panama Congress, that believe I could vote,
to create the 1st hemisphere system
to the Havana 1928 Inter-American law congress
to have the United States accept the principle of nonintervention.
And in the end of course it was extremely beneficial
to U.S. interests, not just to Inter-American interests.
I think that neither the U.S. nor the U.K. nor any other NATO
countries can really sustain defense mechanisms, this is something
to provoke you Alex, that would allow you to intervene on the behalf
of civilization; [inaudible], horrible ayatollahs,
etc. I think that's a good thing in general,
because time is always something which is going to play
into the hands of reasonable generations,
expanding middle classes who are not infallible
but who generally are moderate.
And I think to force down the throats
of developing countries the theory of democracy is the only valuable
and useful form of government, or market economics is the only kind
of development, is not necessary.
Having discovered that by themselves instead of accepted it
as an externally imposed doctrine, is much more stabilizing
and productive than the other way around.
So I think, and this had been the case for example, in Latin America
in the last 20 years, is likely to be the case in Africa and Asia;
perhaps in Africa it'll take longer.
So I think that the temptation to intervene,
or whatever good motivation is objectively more difficult,
will be more difficult because of the economic
and financial situation, and that it's a good thing.
>> Vanni Pettina: Now Alex, do you want to defend yourself like very,
very, very, very briefly?
>> Alexander Evans: Always tempted to play table tennis
with my [inaudible] and faithful proving colleague.
I think the only thing I would say is I think,
if you talk to the people of Kosovo or the people of Libya,
and I think the verdicts
on interventions always come decades later rather
than necessarily an instant history of 24/7 TV news.
But I think in some cases intervention can be justified.
In some cases it can make a real difference.
I think the task of policy makers, political principles,
and I think the task of diplomats is to work out when change is possible,
and when it will work and offer the best possible advice
and support of that.
>> Vanni Pettina: Let me follow up on that and basically conclude.
I will give you the chance to defend yourself and your profession.
So against this backdrop, this sketch we drew,
is there any role would be left for diplomats, for ambassador?
What really can you do as a professional to address all the kind
of problems we have basically talked about today?
I will just conclude, everybody can have a chance
to be his own advocate.
>> Well Alexander has answered that in part.
A diplomat's role sometimes is not Prince Hamlet,
but rather to advice the prince and point him in the right direction.
Or if that diplomat happens to be involved in the godly work of trying
to make peace where there is violence, it's about putting
into words inchoate, emerging areas of understanding so as
to make the intelligible and implementable.
That role there will always be, and I come back to what I said earlier.
As long as you have states you will have diplomats.
>> I think we all probably would be of the same mind.
As long as there's a need to find a common ground,
as long as there's a need to push for a value,
as long as there's a need to care
for someone whose not being cared for, there's always going
to be a desire on the part of some nations, hopefully most nations,
to help; and some nations make sure
that the help doesn't ultimately accrue to their own limitations.
So there's always going to be a back and forth,
as I think I began very unprofessionally in the beginning
by saying that to a certain extent everyone's a diplomat,
because we're always going to have to negotiate with each other.
This is the terrible concomitant of television, because with children
as they grow up, in the old days we didn't have television,
they had to compromise with each other if they didn't get along.
But nowadays if you're stuck
in the television you just push a button, and you're in control.
Life isn't like that.
And diplomacy teaches us that life isn't like that.

>> I agree with what just has been said,
but I think that since you took the initiative of reading something
which I thought was very evocative...
>> At long last you give us the quote.
>> I'm able to say that, even though I think diplomats do have a role
to play and probably in an increasingly more important role,
I think ex diplomats even much more; and this may sound narcissistic.
[ Laughter ]
They have even a bigger role of...
so Harold Nicolson who is a junior diplomat, he's the Secretary
of Delegation to the Paris peace talks at the end
of the first world war, and I think 1 of his contributions was not...
he was extremely useful during the whole time keeping [inaudible]
down and...
everybody around who was unattractive for Lloyd George.
But he was also great observer and one of his observations in his book
on The Evolution of the Diplomatic Method is about President Wilson.
I think you will enjoy what he says.
He said, President Wilson was an idealist
and what was perhaps more dangerous,
a consummate master of English prose.
He shared with Robespierre the hallucinate
that there existed some mystic bond between himself and 'The People' -
by which he meant not only the American people but the British,
French, Italian, Rumanian, Jugo-Slav,
Armenian, and even German peoples.
If only he could penetrate the fog-barrier of governments,
politicians and officials and convey sweetness and light
of his revelation to the ordinary peasant in the Banat,
to the shepherds of Albania, or the dock hands of the Fiume,
then reason, concord and amity would spread
in ever widening circles across the earth.
He possessed the gift of giving to commonplace ideas, the resonance
and authority of biblical sentences;
and like all phraseologists he became mesmerized by the strength
and neatness of the phrases he devised.
During the long months of the Paris Peace Conference I observed him
with interest, admiration, and anxiety.
[ Laugh ]
And became convinced that he regarded himself not
as a world statesman, but as a prophet designated
to bring light to a dark world.
I have no desire at all to denigrate President Wilson,
who was in many ways inspiring and inspired;
yet if we read again the tremendous sermons, excuse me.
[ Laughter ]
That he delivered during 1918, we shall find in them the seeds
of the jungle of chaos that today impedes
and almost obliterates the processes of rational negotiation.
That's an interesting observation, but you can only do...
[ Laughter ]
>> I think, given we've been spending time researching here
and allowed to delve into books, and even more peculiar be able to delve
into the strange discipline of international relations before,
in some cases, returning to practice of international pairs.
That's not very much enjoyed by an academic
who calls diplomats the prophetic heroes of international relations.
And his argument is 2 fold.
He says that basically history happens to diplomats,
diplomats don't make history.
And diplomats can't really make a difference.
So as a result diplomacy is pretty pointless
and ambassadors increasingly irrelevant.
I think it is important to acknowledge
that there are some elements of diplomacy that are a ritual.
There are some elements of diplomacy that are routine.
But occasionally history comes calling,
and there may be an opportunity, and opportunities frequently missed,
to actually make a difference.
I think on that basis ambassadors and diplomacy will continue
to make a difference and be important.
And moreover, we've obviously focused more on the high politics
of diplomacy, but so much of diplomacy nowadays is
about dealing citizens overseas, and [inaudible] that they encounter,
or promoting economic relations between countries,
or negotiating those sort of peculiar dull but important deals
that mean that you can send medical doctors who qualify in 1 country
to go and work in another.
And I think that business, the interconnectivity
of countries is still going to be a major theme
in diplomacy as we move forward.
>> Vanni Pettina: Thank you.
Well Cardinal I promised you to free you at 5:15
so I think I accomplished...
>> Cardinal McCarrick: You're a man of your word.
>> You should ask a question before he leaves.
>> Vanni Pettina: Yeah, help me to thank the Cardinal
for his contribute today.
[ Applause ]
>> Cardinal McCarrick: I'd better leave on that
or I'll never get another end.
>> We should explain that the Cardinal has a very secret mission,
which is going to involve changing the world for the next 200 years.
[ Laughter ]
[ Silence ]
>> It's a shame...
>> OK, yeah.
I think we should probably ask questions.
>> Vanni Pettina: Yeah, let's see if there are any questions from,
I think there are many actually already.
So I don't know if we have any microphones?
Doesn't look like, OK.
So yeah? OK.
[ Inaudible question from audience ]
>> Microphone, microphone.
>> Vanni Pettina: Is there...
yeah, there is a microphone.
[ Silence ]
>> Audience member: Yeah, an undiplomatic question.
Is Hillary Clinton today in the right place at the right time?
>> Vanni Pettina: Is in Burma?
I think, or no.
>> She's in Myanmar isn't she?
>> Yeah, she's in the right place at the right time.
I think she's extremely competent,
but I have no inside information as to what she does.
She seems to be very careful, objective,
and I have not perceived any serious faux pas,
which is already an important positive thing.
>> It was a bold decision to go there on her part,
because while there are encouraging signs coming out of the new state
of affairs in Burma or Myanmar, the jury's still out.
We don't know what direction's going to be, and I think what she wants
to do is to help push it along.
She's taking sort of an optimist view.
There's another reason also, which is that the U.S. by being so tough
with the military junta until recently had somewhat dealt itself
out of the game in Myanmar, and I think what she's making is a bid
for involvement in an area which is of enormous interest.
>> I mean, I'm at a slightly more delicate position in the sense
that I'm sure there's a U.K line on Burma,
and I don't know quite what it is.
Of course I would normally sort of offer you glittering generalities
that don't answer the question, but I draw the try not's
of the question in a meaningful way.
I think the risk of engagement is often worthwhile,
but I think the response you tend to get...
I'm reminded of correspondence that Nixon got after going to China,
and I'll give 2 examples.
He got 1 letter that said, Dear President Nixon,
I understand you've gone to China.
Please stay there.
Which was 1 view of the mission to China, and there was another letter
that was slightly longer and obviously more positive.
Dear President Nixon, it's a wonderful thing that you've gone
to China and are trying to build a relationship with a state
that may not share American values,
but in which an American bilateral relationship
with China could make a difference in the future.
And again I know it sounds like an opt out clause,
but you really often don't know the fruits of diplomacy
until quite a long time afterwards.
Its historians, not generally journalists,
who are going to be the true judges of diplomatic endeavors.

[ Silence ]
>> Audience Member: My name is Emora Dwyer, I'm a Kluge fellow
and a historian of Japanese Empire in the early 20th century.
My question actually is about communication,
and having spent earlier in the afternoon reading all
about the decline of the British Japanese alliance I concluded,
first in 1902 and then abrogated in 1921.
I'm struck by, and actually reinforced
by Alex's comment just now about Nixon's visit to China.
I'm struck by the importance of sort of missed communication,
or lack of communication.
So in the case of Nixon's visit to China, this was a tremendous deal
in Japan because Japan had been given no indication
that there would be a [inaudible] of relations between U.S. and China;
whereas Japan obviously was very strong as a U.S. ally
since the post 1945 period.
So it came as a big shock to them.
But back to what I was reading this afternoon and the idea of the,
in the case, the abrogation of a treaty and the sort of history
of missed communication or misunderstanding,
and even to someone interested in just the popular history of Japan,
that's never been more famously described than in the sort
of missed communication of the telegram of whether
or not there would be an attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
So my question is this.
What I sort of...
bringing us to the early 21st century and the idea
of incredible increases in communication and sort
of digitalization of every other sphere, I'm curious to how
that relates to the diplomatic field.
Do we still have sort of missed communications as such,
or has there been something that's really changed
in this last decade even?
And just a very quick follow up to that, if there's time,
I'm just curious how much of you all do keep track of history
or are active students of history, as active practicing diplomats?
Thank you.

>> Well, there's a general proposition.
Diplomats are there precisely in order to sort out problems
of communication that sometimes arise between political leaders.
This is particularly so in an era where there is
so much personal diplomacy conducted by sometimes unschooled,
unschooled in the field of diplomacy, heads of government
or even foreign ministers.

>> I think...
the missed opportunities are conversations that cross purposes,
are innumerable in that there are 100's of 1,000's of them
that have led, or have been identified as elements
that might have led to major conflict;
1st world war, 2nd world war.
One in particular I remember from case studies reading
in graduate school, which Tom will remember, is the decision by China
to send troops across the Allo during the Korean War.
They sent all the correct standard [inaudible] guide
to diplomatic practice signals to Washington that something
like this was going to happen.
They used the high commissioner from India in Washington D.C. who asked
to see the state department at midnight
to give the solemnity of the issue.
And the reaction at the time was,
I don't really think they're going to do it.
Not surprising, because even though John Foster Dulles was a brilliant
man, and I'm sorry to say a Princetonian, he was capable
of that kind of decision.
Shortly afterwards he fired George Kennan,
which led to an unintended consequence in sending him
to Latin America so that for all history the concept that he has
of Latin America is in his memoirs, and he's probably spot on
but it's not particularly nice...
the view from Latin America.
But this is an indirect way of saying
that sometimes the signals are there,
that the people are not willing to listen or to see them.
>> Connects the dots.
>> And I guess just thinking about all the kind of pictures,
it's funny because a lot of people until Pat [inaudible],
a lot of people didn't really understand what diplomats did
for a living.
I remember one of the jokes about diplomats is diplomats do nothing
in particular, but they do it extraordinarily well.
But I think there is a balance between what effective diplomacy,
it seems to me, often isn't very clear in public some of the time.
So the practice of diplomatic speeches for example,
often does consist of a lot of generalities.
But the practice of internal political reporting,
the kind of communication that takes place between embassies
and capitals benefits from enormous clarity, and enormous precision,
because unless you're very, very clear about the messages
that you're receiving from a given country and you're very clear
about the messages that you're giving back
in the bilateral meetings that you have with officials
from that country, the scope
for miscommunication is even greater than it already is.
>> Vanni Pettina: OK thank you.
One last question.
>> So thanks.
I'm [inaudible name] also a Kluge fellow.
I was struck by the image of a card player compared to a diplomat,
that was the idea, and it struck me that actually
that means we're supposed not to tell what you really know.
I'd like you to comment a little more on this idea
that as a diplomat you get information by the capital,
which is of course not what you communicate to people like diplomats
from other countries, and so how would you describe that discrepancy
between a government instruction to a diplomat
and what you communicate and the way you do that?
So it's also, I mean there's a lot of contradictions
between short term pressures by lobbyists and whatever,
is interesting too about the men, and all those long term values
that you tend to communicate in diplomacy.
So just everyday practice information
about how those discrepancies would be handled with.
>> Vanni Pettina: Does anybody want to?
>> I think, on the question of instructions...
It really is a matter of how serious your government thinks you are
as a professional representative, number 1.
Secondly it's important that the representative, or the ambassador
or the diplomat, understand where the foreign minister is kind
of a knee jerk thinker and reactor, or a reflective careful guy.
Those are the general guidelines.
But in order to avoid what Alex mentioned last time is a CEI,
a career ending incident.
I think one tries to do is to fashion one's own instructions.
That's what I've done for 40 years.
Sometimes they've caught me at it, most of the time they haven't.
So I send suggestions not as if they were questions,
but as they were answers to questions
which they had not asked me.
And it's very difficult then for the person to say,
but that's not really what I...
It's a question of style and confidence.
If the country to which you are credited considers you a person
of certain integrity, that is to say A that you do not lie,
B that if you don't know you say you don't know but you will find out,
you are 99 percent home free.
That 1 percent is what kind of a dialogue you have
with your own government.
And I often found it, in my career, extremely difficult to prove
to the people and the government that I was representing,
that I knew slightly better than they would some of the nuances
and the circumstances under which I was working than they would.
So that's, it's more the negotiating that scenario
than the actual specific instructions.
>> Steve Jobs will of diplomacy.
[ Laughter ]
>> I think we've all been talking about instructions,
I just talk about information.
I think there is the benefit of a good diplomatic service is
that it really knows as much about what is going on as possible.
That's particularly true about countries
where there isn't that much in the press.
If you weren't really know what's going on in Equatorial Guinea
or Madagascar, your ability to influence and do good
in those environments; and also your ability
to protect your own national interests in the case
of a national diplomatic service like mine, increases.
So I do think information's important.
The counter to that is of course that most
of what diplomats read you can generally read nowadays
in the New York Times approximately 48 hours later.

>> I think at this point we probably should stop our formal discussion.
Thank members of the panel, and thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.