“By God, this is the end of diplomacy!” Lord Palmerston exclaimed upon receiving his first diplomatic telegram in the 1860s.[1] He feared that the introduction of instantaneous international communication between heads of state would render ambassadors obsolete. Though this prediction never entirely came to pass, the fear of Palmerston’s prognostication remains alive among oft-marginalized diplomats.
Tag: trust
Roundtable 11-4 on Trusting Enemies
Although every negotiator I have talked to has stressed the importance of the personal relations with his or her opposite numbers, most academic theorizing ignores this dimension entirely. Nicolas Wheeler joins Marcus Holmes, whose Face-to-face Diplomacy will soon be reviewed on ISSF,[1] in arguing that academic research has paid a steep price for neglecting what…
Roundtable 10-6 on The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust, and Fear Between Nations
Cybersecurity is a relatively new foreign policy problem. A decade ago, it received little attention, but since 2013 the Director of National Intelligence has named cybersecurity risks the biggest threat facing the nation. The non-profit Council on Foreign Relations “Cyber Operations Tracker” contains almost 200 state sponsored attacks by 16 countries. The list includes one…
Roundtable 6-4 on Trust in International Cooperation: The Creation of International Security Institutions and the Domestic Politics of American Multilateralism
Brian Rathbun’s Trust in International Cooperation is one of the more important books in recent years written about American foreign policy and multilateral cooperation in world politics. While historians of American foreign policy will find much of interest in the empirical chapters on the origins of the League of Nations and NATO, Rathbun’s primary task…