by Parag Khanna
Because there is no more deafeningly empty phrase than “political will,” the desire for global consensus should never take precedence over local action: human will. Political will makes the perfect the enemy of the good, while human will is a bottom-up force. Rather than allowing “justice” to be defined by a distant bureaucracy, human will means taking matters into your own hands. Confidence in top-down approaches is declining, but faith in bottom-up solutions is growing. There will be inconsistencies in the forms of human will—but that’s the point. One-size-fits-all solutions frequently fail, while the “right” approach to countering terrorism, achieving fiscal stability, or reducing poverty is different across continents and cultures. The devil is in the details: If you’re not on the ground, chances are you don’t know the details.
In basketball there is no more efficient and dazzling act of teamwork than an alley-oop: passing the ball right into the hands of a leaping player already within inches of the net. This is the best metaphor for the most important principle for redesigning global order: Political will must support human will. If global resources are not supporting local solutions, then what are they doing? After decades of “analysis paralysis,” there is nothing left to do but to do.
Cosmopolitan—or cause-mopolitan—“citizens of the world” aspire toward a global consciousness, a superego for humanity. How do we do it? British scientific journalist Matt Ridley put it best: “For St. Augustine the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Rousseau it lay in solitude. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present. We must build our institutions in such a way that they draw out those instincts.”2 Pushing resources from the global to the local level is the surest step to getting there.
Generation Y Geopolitics
When thirty-four-year-old Andry Rajoelina seized power in Madagascar after a military coup in early 2009, he had food on his mind. Most of the large Indian Ocean island’s population lives at the poverty line, a fact that didn’t stop his predecessor, Marc Ravalomanana, from cutting a deal with South Korean corporation Daewoo to lease more than one million hectares of farmland to grow food crops for itself. Within days of the coup, Rajoelina axed the deal. A former disc jockey whose work ethic earned him the nickname “TGV” after the high-speed French train, Rajoeline remains widely popular with the country’s majority under-eighteen population who don’t care that he is well below the constitutionally required age of forty to serve as president. Nothing says “To hell with the old order” like an underage coup d’état.
People under thirty, who are now most of the world’s population, never experienced life before globalization. 9/11 is their defining moment—and interdependence is their lesson from it. Thanks to technology, generational identity—more than geography—shapes their worldview. Years before Henry Kissinger began his diplomatic career, he wrote, “Each generation is permitted only one effort of abstraction; it can attempt only one interpretation and a single experiment, for it is its own subject.” Machiavelli argued that change has no constituency. Today it does. For Generation Y, impatience is a virtue. This millennial generation, who voted overwhelmingly Democrat in the 2008 U.S. election, is getting in the driver’s seat faster than ever, and its ability to quickly mobilize using smartphones and Facebook makes autocrats as nervous as sanctions do. It intuitively supports greater trade, faster communication, more migration, and multiple identities, and it subscribes to postmaterial values such as equality and ecology.
Idealism has become practical again. Twenty years ago, only 18 percent of American college graduates said they wanted to “go out and change the world.” Today that number is 40 percent. Whereas the postwar generation found public service noble, and baby boomers were convinced by Reagan that government is the source of problems, Generation Y’s leaders will likely have five or six jobs across public, private, and nonprofit sectors over the course of their careers, and thus be pragmatic rather than ideological about the role of the state. They see problems functionally, not nationally, and see diplomacy not as vertical and hierarchical, but rather as a distributed network: All are connected, and there is no center. They take for granted that working for corporations such as Google, or NGOs such as Oxfam and the Gates Foundation, means participating in political agendas that operate without official approval, yet the work is as diplomatic as that of a foreign ministry. They are the ones who will reshape governments, corporations, and other pillars of the establishment from the inside out. Generation Y will own mega-diplomacy.
But can this global generation create a fair world? Unfortunately, Generation Y is divided as well. From Darfur’s refugee camps to Pakistan’s madrassas, many youth have learned to take a hard line against the existing order: revolution, not reform. Somalia’s militant al-Qaeda affiliate calls itself al-Shabaab—meaning “youth.” Are we in for generations of cosmic struggle? The answer depends on who runs this place. You do. Everyone has a role in running the world.
*Comedian Stephen Colbert joked that the 2008 U.S. presidential debates reminded him of a “world in which cause and effect were divorced, when we could respond to events completely randomly—like the thirteenth century.”
Chapter Two
The New Diplomats
Diplomacy will always have ambassadors and ministers; the question is whether it will have diplomats.
—JULES CAMBON (1925)
Changes are now under way which make it extremely difficult to predict the future of diplomacy or prescribe its conduct.
—GEORGE KENNAN (2005)
If you think you are far removed from the back rooms and smoky chambers of diplomacy, think again. Globalization and the end of the Cold War have empowered ambitious entrepreneurs, academics, activists, and celebrities to deploy their own strategies on the world stage. Many of them are today’s most visible avatars of mega-diplomacy. Excluding them guarantees diplomacy’s failure. They change the way issues make it onto the global agenda, how and what policies are formulated, and how they are implemented. They put their money where their mouths are, and use prestige and shame to provoke the complacent establishment. Without these new diplomats we still wouldn’t have a land mine ban, debt relief, or an International Criminal Court. Most of all, the new diplomats inspire millions of people around the world to join their causes. You can be like them.
Who are these mega-diplomats who cross in and out of the public and private worlds? What makes some more successful than others? America is home to the greatest number of the new diplomats, yet its foreign policy will continue to stumble until it learns to leverage them into a seamless diplomatic-industrial complex. The new diplomats already have a big edge over the U.S. State Department and traditional international organizations when it comes to fusing public and private power into a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Rather than just the White House and Whitehall, the World Economic Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative are the new go-to venues for new diplomats as well as the most promising examples of mega-diplomacy in action. Their fastest-growing following is among students and young people, meaning they represent just the beginning when it comes to redesigning how the world is run.
From Model United Nations to Model Medievalism
On a small college campus in Virginia, far from the limelight of the White House or the United Nations, a diplomatic experiment is under way. Each summer, the fledgling organization Americans for Informed Democracy (AID) gathers several hundred high school students for a unique simulation. Rather than at the Model United Nations, with which many young internationalists are familiar and where all that matters is if your country is big or small, these students don’t just role-play presidents. Instead, each delegate is just as likely to represent the OPEC oil cartel, Gazprom, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Bono, Bill Gates, the New York Time
s columnist Nicholas Kristof, the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Al Gore, or the CEO of Citigroup.
The exercise is realistic not only for the players at the table, but the issues on the table. They negotiate sovereign debt, gas pipelines, and agricultural subsidies. In the 2008 simulation, these next-gen diplomats negotiated an oil price cut for China through Russian energy giant Rosneft in exchange for China’s curbing its rapid construction of heavily polluting coal-fired power plants. Russia would then levy an export tax that it would use to enhance Eurasian oil and gas pipelines and power grids. China’s payback of the fuel subsidy would be directed toward investments in alternative energy technologies. UN veterans should be jealous.
Students at the AID simulation are learning a far more accurate picture of the twenty-first-century landscape of power and influence than many diplomatic trainees today. Their role-playing exercise wasn’t the “real” world, and yet it was: Energy security and climate change are two sides of the same coin, not parallel conversations in bureaucratic silos. Seth Green, one of AID’s founders, realized early on that young change makers are inspired by alternatives to the UN system: “By playing not just Gordon Brown but also Bill Gates, students take on roles that allow them to navigate a much more complex world.” The bottom line, says Kate Willard, another AID leader, is that “there are far more players working on far more levels of global policy than any single organization can reflect.” Thanks to AID, these students are prepared for the open yet sometimes opaque world of neo-medieval diplomacy in which individuals can play multiple roles and juggle multiple issues at the same time.
There is no better example of this than Zalmay Khalilzad. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the ouster of the Taliban, Khalilzad—an Afghan American working for the RAND Corporation—was appointed special envoy and then ambassador to the country. Armed with knowledge of Dari and Pashto and billions of U.S. dollars, and eventually backed by tens of thousands of American troops, he set about nation building and playing warlord politics. For three years he was constantly whispering in Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s ear, and allegedly also in the ears of his opponents, earning him the label “viceroy.” Later on as U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, “Zal” (as he is known to insiders) broke with protocol and negotiated directly with Sunni insurgents in Iraq to get them to participate in elections. In his next stint as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he again called his own shots, secretly advising Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, on his election strategy. Even as a private citizen, he turned up in Kurdistan during the region’s elections—to do what, no one seemed quite sure. Such boldness, while admirable, points to the fraying of modern diplomacy: Ambassadors can be more than just messengers of others’ policy. Indeed, many still wonder whether Khalilzad represents American interests or his own—or sometimes the former but always the latter. Could his next step be to run for the Afghan presidency? Perhaps Khalilzad plays multiple agendas simultaneously simply because he can. As he himself put it, “Who is the ambassador in the age of BlackBerry?”
During the Cold War, diplomacy was intentionally ambiguous as the superpowers sought to fake each other out and call each other’s bluffs. But ever since, diplomacy has become unintentionally ambiguous as technology and power allow anyone to penetrate borders and pursue their own agendas. The early 1990s was a thriving period for such shadow elites crossing public, private, and international networks. Privatization con artists flourished, such as Viktor Kozeny, a Czech émigré who fleeced thousands of his native citizens of their stock vouchers promising 1,000 percent returns, only to hide the money in offshore tax havens. Around the same time, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) effectively outsourced its Russia policy to the Harvard Institute of International Development, which brokered loans as if it were a U.S. government agency.
From Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed Martin vice president who as head of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO seemed to make official security guarantees to countries such as Georgia (which learned the hard way in the summer of 2008 that it has no protection from Russian intrusions), to Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress who teamed with U.S. neoconservative Richard Perle to make the case for a falsely premised Iraq war in 2003, the line between diplomacy and lobbying has blurred to the point where foreign governments now use lobbyists as much as their own embassies to influence American policy toward Turkey, India, Taiwan, and many other places, especially targeting congressmen whose districts may benefit from business deals with their nations. Diplomacy has become “Diplomacy, Inc.”1
Good diplomacy is making connections any way one can. To be relevant, twenty-first-century diplomats need to be adventurous and multilingual. As a Swiss ambassador in Washington once put it, “My job isn’t well-defined, but that’s better than writing cables to Berne after every conversation. Instead, I build relationships that can be useful whenever we might need them.” Today there are “digital” diplomats who are plugged in and “analog” ones who hide behind pointless paperwork.
Scurrying around the corridors of the WTO in Geneva is Falou Samb, a member of Senegal’s lean mission to the powerful body’s headquarters. Samb is tasked not only with promoting Senegal’s access to markets as a small exporter, but also with lobbying for greater technical assistance for all West African nations. There are few tougher jobs than being an African diplomat, yet they best represent what diplomacy is becoming. Using just Gmail accounts and cell phones, young Africans serving in Europe and Asia today go door-to-door at ministries and corporate offices lobbying for the easing of trade restrictions and for greater investment. Their countries’ survival depends on their persuasiveness and thorough understanding of how to set up a corporate visit, arrange project financing through an export-import bank, ensure sound legal contracts, and provide security for a factory once it’s set up. This is the diplomat as he was in ancient times: a do-it-all factotum.
Whether you want to run the world or save it, the only question to ask is “What kind of diplomat do you want to be?” In the cubicles of Manhattan today there are thousands of management consultants, investment bankers, and lawyers who embody an odd mix of dejection and passion. Unfulfilled by the monotony of Wall Street capitalism, they use their spare time to make business plans for start-up companies on the other side of the world, set up clean technology funds, and travel abroad to learn foreign cultures. Armed with a smartphone and some savings, each is crafting his or her own project to attack a problem somewhere and make his or her mark. How to use music to promote women’s rights? How to get cheap water pumps to the most arid parts of Africa? They are the answer to Khalilzad’s question: Everyone who has a BlackBerry—or iPhone or Nexus One—can be their own ambassador.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Diplomats
Some of the most famous diplomatic treatises put the weight of the world on the shoulders of negotiators. In 1716, King Louis XIV’s faithful minister François de Callières penned On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes to provide guidance in selecting and deploying the rare breed of skilled special envoys. A diplomat was expected to be quick, resourceful, agreeable, courageous, patient, and knowledgeable. But, of course, “he should also entertain handsomely. A good cook is often an excellent conciliator.” Almost three centuries later, the book caught on again when it was republished with a fresh introduction by business guru Charles Handy. As ambassadors and executives blend ever more into a single leadership caste, Handy sensed that management, diplomacy, and negotiation were becoming synonymous.
So what does it take to be a good diplomat in the neo-medieval twenty-first century? Cardinal Richelieu famously stated that “secrecy is the first essential in affairs of the state,” but does diplomacy still work best in secret, even though secrecy is now considered a sign of nefarious intentions? What about other traditional virtues, including finesse, wit, patience, and self-control? Today these seem more like excuses and delay tactics. Indeed, wh
at if the opposite traits are more effective: bluntness, impatience, stubbornness? These were certainly part of U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s repertoire during his Balkan forays, when he was known as “The Bulldozer,” but he successfully brought Serbs to the table for the 1995 Dayton Accords. At the same time, as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke didn’t set deadlines or preach American interests. He did more listening than talking, meeting with locals in tribal regions, including the Taliban. Real diplomats don’t use vague concepts such as “smart,” “soft,” or “network power.” They calculate which mixture of ends and means will get the job done.
Stephen Covey, the world’s bestselling leadership expert, unwittingly provided sage advice for today’s diplomats in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If each of his seven virtues were imported into the diplomatic circuit, the world might become a better-run place.
