Fatima Bashir

There is an enduring myth that some conflicts are too deep, too old, and too ideological to be solved at the negotiating table. In some instances, that war is not only necessary but inevitable. I disapprove of this idea completely. It is my opinion that war is never the first symptom; it is always the last resort.  It is what occurs when diplomacy is discarded, tainted, or never attempted. Although the British politician Tony Benn put it quite plainly: "War is the failure of diplomacy in its ultimate form". 

The question of the day is whether diplomacy fails to prevent war, or whether it is an eyewash or a drama that leaders act out once they have already formed an opinion about fighting. I feel the reality is somewhere between the two extremes and is not so comfortable. Diplomacy, when done with real will, with sincerity and the heart to give in, works. In the event of failure, it is hardly due to an inability to negotiate. It does not work due to ego, bad faith, short-termism, and the risky theatre of those leaders who confuse talking at someone with talking with them.

History is a cemetery of wars which did not need to occur. Take the summer of the year 1914. Europe was not a powder keg about to blow up; it was a room of intelligent, experienced and personally connected leaders who just lost political will at the worst possible time. A historian of the time, AJP Taylor, noted that Kaiser Wilhelm II virtually ceded control of Germany's diplomacy the instant he gave the so-called Blank Cheque to Austria-Hungary, granting it unconditional support in any action it might take against Serbia. That one diplomatic abdication, the substitution of negotiation by a blank permission to make war, set a train of mobilisations in motion which no man could halt. Politics had been removed from the military planning. Foreign policy was now being run by generals. The diplomats, so capable, had nothing to do. The outcome was seventeen million deaths.

The 1914 lesson does not lie in the ineffectiveness of diplomacy. The moral is that diplomacy was abandoned, and in its place, we put military manoeuvres, then the preparation of war timetables, and then war itself.

World War II presents the opposite argument cynics like to use: the eyewash may be diplomacy itself. The Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Britain and France allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland on the promise of peace, is often cited as an example that negotiation can be naïve – even dangerous. On the surface, this sounds convincing. Hitler, as historians have pointed out, saw any concession as a sign of weakness and never abandoned his expansionist plans. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 subsequently paved the way for the invasion of Poland, and the world entered the war.

But Munich was not a failure of diplomacy. It was a lapse in honesty. Chamberlain was not bargaining, but acting. Hitler was not making concessions; he was playing politics. There is no such thing as diplomacy when a party enters negotiations without a mind to honour the result. That is theatre. And theatre, however persuasive, can not maintain the peace.

Also read: The Islamabad Memorandum: Pakistan’s Diplomatic Triumph

The most obvious indication that true diplomacy may draw the world back to the brink of disaster appeared in October 1962. Thirteen days of direct confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union over nuclear missiles in Cuba, with military advisors on both sides urging strikes, brought the world closer to nuclear war than it had ever been. And yet it did not happen. Not because one of the sides gave up. Not due to military superiority. But the two leaders decided to speak.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was not only about how firm Kennedy could be; it was also a demonstration of his empathy. He understood that he had to give Khrushchev room to retreat with his honour intact to talk him into stepping back rather than forcing him into a corner. Meanwhile, backchannel negotiations were quietly underway between Robert Kennedy and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. A private deal was struck: the Soviets would remove their missiles from Cuba; the Americans would quietly remove theirs from Turkey. Both leaders could claim a public victory. Both had made private concessions. The missiles came down. The war never came.

This is the way true diplomacy should appear. Not weakness, not surrender. An ordered, earnest, and even agonising process in which both sides give something up to gain something much more important: survival.

The issue with a lot of what is done today in the name of diplomacy is that it is performative. Leaders make pronouncements to the local audience. Negotiations are declared and stalled. Red lines are drawn and redrawn. The table is set, the chairs are arranged, and no one sits down. This is the eyewash to which critics justly object, but to forsake diplomacy is not the answer. The remedy is to demand that it be real.

A failed Diplomacy does not mean war. In most cases, war is evidence that diplomacy was never genuinely attempted.

In all the wars in history that turned to bloodshed, there were moments, perhaps many moments, when another option could have been taken: a letter answered differently, a compromise offered, a politician ready to put peace first. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that even when the missiles have already been launched, even when the ships have already been deployed, and generals are already at the door, it is not too late to negotiate.

Also read: Target Europe: Strategic Autonomy in an Era of Uncertainty

The next time a world leader claims that war was inevitable, that talks had exhausted, that there was simply nothing left to do, ask yourself: did they talk or did they merely perform? In my reading of history,  the conversations that truly mattered were almost always possible. What was lacking was opportunity, not will. When spoken with boldness and sincerity, words never initiate wars. They end them. It is silence, the silence of abandoned dialogues, of lost negotiation, of arrogant posing, which has ever, and will ever, fuse the gun.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of The Himalayan Research Institute Pakistan (THRIP)

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Fatima Bashir is a student of BS International Relations at the University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. Her work examines climate change and geopolitics.