School of War - Ep 234: A. Wess Mitchell on Diplomacy

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

A. Wess Mitchell, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, historian, and author of Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger, joins the show to discuss just what diplomacy is. ▪️ Times     •      01:37 Introduction     •      02:08 Bad reutation      •      04:37 Misconceptions              •      09:35 A part of grand strategy      •      13:11 Not trickery              •      18:05 Attila the Hun               •      24:17 Appeasement           •      35:00 Other options              •      39:33 The State Department      •      44:22 Molding diplomats           •      47:31 Ukraine             •      52:47 Major risks Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Diplomats can get a bad rap. They have a habit of speaking with their country's adversaries and a reputation for wanting to strike deals or even engage in appeasement universally acknowledged as a very naughty thing. My guest today, former senior State Department official and a brilliant historian of strategy, Wes Mitchell, takes us through a more nuanced understanding of what diplomacy is and ought to be. Let's get into it. 19, which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in Iran. We'll fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets.

We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLan. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to this show today, Wes Mitchell. He served as the United States Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. During the first Trump administration, he's the author of the Grand Strategy of the Hapsburg Empire, co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a number of other accomplishments, academic qualifications. And he is the author, most importantly and most recently of great power diplomacy, the skill of statecraft from Attila to Kissinger. Wes, thank you so much for joining the show. Aaron, thank you so much for having me. I was excited when I saw notice of your book because it goes right to the heart of some of

the issues that School of War is really devoted to understanding. And I want to open us with a very broad question, which is, you know, your book is kind of an apology for diplomacy. It's an extended, spirited defense of the thing and of diplomacy properly understood. And I wanted to ask you why you think this defense is needed. Why is diplomacy getting such a bad rap? Well, I think the book is needed because we're entering a period of history that looks a lot less like the world we're accustomed to since the end of the Cold War, where there are

great powers who are competing over the things that great powers have always competed over resources and influence and prestige. And in this environment, you know, unlike in the early days after the Cold War, the United States can't just rely on military power and sanctions, which have really become the go-to instruments of our foreign policy. And so I think, you know, diplomacy became something of a lost art in U.S. foreign policy over the last several years because America was so powerful militarily after the Cold War, we basically came to believe that we could remake the world in our image. And I think, you know, U.S. leaders embraced the, the neolese.

liberal idea, the idea of Emmanuel Kant, that the world is progressing toward a golden age where war will no longer exist and the nation state will be replaced by these kind of supernational global bodies. And so in that scheme, the job of U.S. diplomacy was very marginal. I mean, it was basically to build up and operate this nebulous thing called order. But that's not what diplomacy has looked like across the ages for most of history. You know, diplomacy has been a tool of grand strategy that great powers used to survive and gain an advantage in competition. So, you know, the argument of my book is, look, Kant was wrong. There won't be a golden age. Conflict is a permanent part of the human condition. Diplomacy is not a thing above or apart

from conflict competition. It's an integral component of it. So, you know, the job of U.S. diplomacy is not to tend to order as an abstraction, but to fight for concrete advantages in benefits for the U.S. national interest. So I wrote the book because I think this kind of diplomacy, classical diplomacy, will be crucial for America in an era of great power competition where we have multiple big rivals, different points on the compass, but a military that's not set up to fight them all simultaneously. You talk about in the introduction to the book, these other schools of thought, which you also just alluded to in this first comment, the soldiers and the lawyers, what are their misconceptions about diplomacy? Who are these groups and what do they get wrong?

Yeah. So if you know, you go back to the earliest days of writing and thinking about war and statecraft, and you see a couple of consistent critiques of diplomacy and they run all the way back to, you know, like Thucydides, right? And the most prominent, I think, is embodied by a character in Thucydides' Peloponnesian wars, Cynelatus, who's kind of the leader of the faction of Hawks in Sparta. And when they're on the cusp of war with Athens, he basically stands up and says, let's just go right at it, boys.

Let's go to war and let's put the Athenians in their place. I'm tired of hearing about talking. Let's, you know, the only honorable and safe thing to do here is kind of, you know, reach for what we do best, which is a sword. So that's the critique of, in my book, I just said, that's the critique of the soldier, right? That diplomacy is slow, it's, depicted as slightly maybe effeminate or, you know, even dishonorable. And I think that that critique is alive and well today that, you know, in the United States, particularly in neo-conservative circles, and in the eyes of a lot of really sort of arch hawks,

anytime somebody talks about diplomacy, there is a default sort of suspicion that this is going to end up like Chamberlain at Munich. So in other words, you can't entrust the nation to diplomacy. And by the way, it's also dishonorable or shameful in a way. The other critique that's just as old in the book, I describe it as kind of the critique of the lawyer, but tracing back the lineage of Western law, it's also really the critique, it's a religious

critique as well, it's a moral critique, which says it shares the soldiers disdain for diplomacy, but on grounds that it is immoral, that diplomats are these wily sort of diabolical creatures who get together behind closed doors, and they make these packs, and without any regard to law, So this idea that international law will eventually create a space above the conflict of nations to adjudicate the things between the disagreements between states the same way that disagreements are adjudicated in a domestic court of law. And that's very old. It goes way back in the annals of Western law. And then before that, you know, Western religious traditions. But you see it, you know, in our time, I mean, it takes the form of basically the Wilsonian strand of thought.

in American foreign policy, which sees the United States as taking these venerable aspects of domestic politics and law in the United States and applying them to the international scene to kind of create a tribunal of sorts, you know, the League of Nations, later the United Nations. And in our own time, I think that's the basic neoliberal line of thinking about foreign policy, that we're tending over time towards this, like I said, you know, Emmanuel Kant, right? the idea that the nations of the world will eventually form a federation that'll work out their disputes, markets, and global institutions will kind of like draw the toxins out of geopolitics and eventually kind of replace the nation state. So those are the two basic critiques of diplomacy.

They go way back in the human story. And I think their natural, you know, kind of logical outworkings of these two alternatives to diplomacy that recur across the age. And the case of both schools of critics is really based on the history of the 20th century. You have a really interesting and sort of nuanced assessment of Chamberlain in the book that I want to get to. But I suppose the lawyers, as you put it, or the neoliberals or whatever you want to call them, it's really the failure of World War I that is their principal evidentiary plank on which to stand. and for the hawks or whatever the soldiers, as you call them, it is the failures leading up to World War II.

You know, in the case of World War I, it's a cynical, secret, complicated, overly complicated dealing that ultimately explodes in everyone's face and this horrible accidental affair. I'm just reciting the conventional accounts here. And obviously World War II, the failure of Munich. But your essential argument, I take it, is something like actually, none of this, to whatever extent there's merit in these critiques,

and maybe there's some and maybe it's complicated. Diplomacy properly understood is actually not truly the bad. Actually, could you finish the sentence? I guess that's how I'll ask the question. Could you finish that sentence? Diplomacy is somehow not at fault or, you know, it was bad diplomacy, but there's good diplomacy. Like, help me, help me think that through. Yeah.

So I think it's this, that diplomacy properly understood is not what either of these two camps that we're describing make of it. It's not, you know, what the jurist or the priest or lawyer would say, that you use diplomacy to kind of escape geopolitics and transcend it. And it's like a bridge to these things that will take us to international law in this bright future. So it's very instrumental, right? Or really the soldier's view of diplomacy, which is, okay, we get it. You need to talk to people sometimes.

But you're best used as kind of a genitorial service to the military. You're going to clean up after the wars. At some point, something will need to be negotiated at, you know, talked about after we've reduced our enemies to rubble kind of thing. And so my argument is both of these critiques get something essential wrong. The first one, first camp wants to see diplomacy is basically transcending geopolitics and, you know, arriving at an escape hatch above the nation state. The other one sees it as entirely secondary to the necessary things we do for the state to survive and succeed.

And my argument is no, from the beginning, diplomacy properly understood is a part of strategy. It's an instrument of grand strategy that states use not to escape from geopolitics, but to compete more effectively. and that states reach for diplomacy when they arrive at a moment, an impasse where they face, you know, the means at their disposal in the form of national power, whether it's economic or military or whatever, where there's a gap between that and the ends to which they would apply those things. So thinking of strategy as the matching of national means to ends or threats in the external environment, the diplomacy is a bridge. between those two things, that it's not a bridge in its own right, because it's not a form of power, but it's a political expedient that states use to close that gap between the means and ends. And so it does that by, for example, adding more available means to the state's disposal externally through alliances or reducing the number of threats against which the state is expected to use its military force at any point by negotiating with enemies.

but in both cases, diplomacy is directly relevant to the art of strategy, which is about managing and narrowing those tradeoffs and gaps between national means and external ends. And the way that you characterize it, you know, is a sort of an art that tends naturally in the direction of small sea conservatism. It has a kind of defensive quality, as you put it, or a affinity for moments where defensive thinking is necessary. It follows from that that the kind of international relations as conducted by, say, the Nazis in the late 30s, or I guess the Soviets at various points in their history, which is to say that the diplomacy of lying through one's teeth as you're getting ready to invade, that that in your conception is actually not diplomacy,

which I think it graded on me slightly as I, as I, I read it, but I couldn't quite articulate my objection. That it's a kind of diplomacy, but not diplomacy properly understood or diplomacy as we would want it to be. Yeah. So look, diplomacy in the Western tradition is not trickery. So if you go back to antiquity and you look at how the kingdoms of the ancient Near East practice diplomacy, and this carried over later to the Greeks and to the Byzantines, it's kind of a kissing, the diplomat is a kissing cut.

of the spy. So you're taking messages back and forth, you're dissembling, there's nothing dishonorable about, you know, lying to someone to buy time or, you know, kind of, you know, trying to use a ruse to gear to throw off your opponent. And in the modern era, you see an outworking of that idea, as you said, in the big, you know, revisionist political movements of the 20th century. I mean, Ribbentrop was technically, he was a diplomat. He was a credential diplomat. But what he was engaging in, properly speaking, was not diplomacy. It was deception. And it was really conducting warfare by other means. And you see this also in the other totalitarian regimes. I mean, look at the Bolsheviks and the Soviets, very openly talked about diplomacy as kind of

a megaphone for spreading the propaganda and subversive tactics of communism. I think you see it in our own time. I mean, you know, what Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin think of as diplomacy, probably in some ways is closer to what, you know, this ancient and mainly Eastern idea of diplomacy as deception. But in the Western tradition from, you know, basically the Renaissance onward, you see this realization that states need to have this ability. this special category to talk to one another about urgent matters of war and peace,

and that that's so important that you really can't afford for it to become a form of espionage or propaganda, not because you believe in kind of like sunshine and light, but because the state derives certain advantages from having this category of behavior, including in wartime, where you need to be able to talk to your opponent. And to do that, you have to have a class of individuals of a category of communication that is privileged and set apart. So like the idea, for example, of diplomatic community, the idea that diplomats even in wartime have safe passage. That is directly linked to the fact that diplomacy is a, it's set apart as a special category of communication and behavior between states that's not just rank espionage or subversion. If it were, then you would have no basis reasonably to allow foreign states to maintain this presence on your soil, to be able to talk.

You wouldn't have all of these conventions and special status that's developed around diplomacy over the ages. But my argument is the reason we view diplomacy in this light is not because it's inherently, you know, moral and good and right in every occasion, but because states have a critical need to have long time horizons of talking. to one another, and the minute you start using diplomacy as a form of deception and trickery, you might get away with that a couple of times, but other states in the international system, whether your friends at a given moment or your adversaries, will not implicitly, there will be the lack of trust necessary, the minimum level of trust necessary, to be able to communicate and know that what you're hearing is something other than

subversion and spying. The book that you've got coming out is really this series of, historical vignettes, which illustrate the more general principles that we're talking about right now. It's really, really good, by the way. I recommend it to listeners. I've learned a lot. I'm interested in these things, too. I learned a lot from reading it, and you are a serious Europeanist. I mean, we are in the details of episodes of European history that I think are not well known to Americans or even to people interested in these subjects. And you could say that, I mean, the comment you just made, you could infer from it that for diplomacy to function, you need to have, you know,

I don't know if the word state is the word I'm looking for here, but you need entities on both sides of the table that are capable of diplomacy. But the first episode in your book, which takes us all the way back to the Eastern Roman Empire and the troubles they had with the Huns, you have an established, longstanding state of a sort dealing with the challenge of step peoples of sort of semi-wild step tribes. And yet in your account, it's a success of diplomacy. Talk to us a bit about Attila the Huns threat to the Eastern Roman Empire and how it actually shows a case of diplomacy triumphing. Yeah, I think it was a, it's a great place, in my opinion, to start a story about diplomacy as a tool of strategy because you almost couldn't devise a better,

you know, almost like a laboratory conditions for seeing it in its essence what it's about. Along the lines I was just talking about, you know, narrowing gaps between means and ends at a state's disposal. So the Byzantine Empire in about the 5th century AD becomes aware that they have a gigantic problem, you know, out on the frontiers of the empire on the Danube River, this new tribe shows up from somewhere kind of in the dark inner reaches of the Eurasian steppe. And they're so ferocious that the other tribes of similar nomads and barbarians that the Byzantines had dealt with in the past, Romans had dealt with in the past, are horrified of them. In fact, the first reports we have of the Hans come from these kind of panicked Byzantine and Roman military commanders out on the, you know, on these rickety palisades of the Danube.

they start sending reports back to the imperial capital saying all of these fierce tribes that we're kind of afraid of are running from something trying to get inside our border for protection from it. And it quickly becomes apparent what it is. It's a tribe that the Romans began to call the scourge of God. It's the Huns. And they're far more numerous, far more effective militarily. They've mastered the art of the resin, basically a compound bow is what we would call it nowadays, or to have the effectiveness of a compound bow.

And one winter, the Danube freezes over, and the Huns come across, and they just devastate everything in their path. So it's a good starting point from my story, because the Eastern Romans are accustomed to being able to deal pretty handily with anything they meet in their environment using military force. And it quickly becomes apparent that that's not the case with the Hans. The Hans defeat every army that the Emperor Theodosius, the second throws at them.

And the court in Constantinople has to debate, like, what do we do about this? And you have the Hawks, these Gothic generals and the service of the emperor who are saying, we're going to kind of, you know, we're going to cauterize this threat like all the others. We're going to send military force out and deal with it. And then you have a handful of basically palace eunuchs around this man named Chrysafias who are arguing that the emperor should use diplomacy. And there was an established Roman tradition of, using diplomacy of this kind, but this on an altogether greater scale in the Byzantine case,

where they, over a period of a handful of years, essentially use a combination of emissaries and bribery and protracted negotiations to delay the raids of the Huns, first of all, and, you know, in order to build up their own military presence on the Empire's frontiers to deal with this, But over time, over a period of many years, they developed this policy of sending gold shipments to the Huns, which, of course, this policy is denounced by the Hawks at court as kind of appeasement. But really what the Byzantines are doing is addicting the Huns to Roman civilization and the Roman economy. They're introducing concepts of Roman law. They're using emoluments and titles to kind of, you know, draw the Huns more deeply into the, to enmesh them in Roman civilization. And ultimately at the end of this chapter, what becomes clear is that the Byzantine method has worked. They basically deflected the Huns to other targets. The Huns move on and famously make their way into the Western Roman Empire, and the Western Roman Empire doesn't do as well. But the big takeaway, you know, is that you see in the Byzantine case really an early

example of strategic diplomacy that has its desired effect. It was a very successful policy. they went on to use it against other step tribes in the future to good effect. Ironically, the man, the architect of these policies, the court eunuch, Chrysafius, it's not like he's thanked for it. You know, when a new emperor comes along, he listens to the hawks and Chrysafias gets executed. So it kind of encapsulates both the promise and the peril of diplomacy that it has a clear role to play in strategy. And the Byzantines really brought it to a high art form.

About a year ago now, I think we had Thomas. Barfield on the show. He wrote this really excellent book. And there's thematic overlap, by the way, between your book and his book called, I think it's Shadow Empires, in which he talks about step tribes, both in the Western context, but he spends a lot of time, which I think goes back to early in his career and his original specialty, but with step tribes and their threats to the Chinese empire. And in the book, he sort of makes the case for, I don't remember these are his exact terms, but the case for appeasement as a time-honored strategy of empires dealing with step tribes. And the reason why it's time-honored is that it often works because the tribes are appeasable.

That is to say that at various points, the Chinese or the Eastern Romans in your case, they have an analysis of the entity on the other side of the problem from them. And they think that actually paying them can be part of a broader approach, as you put it, that works, that this, in some ways, these political entities are there to get paid. And this seems to be an important part of your argument that you have to know the party on the other side of the table. Your strategy has to be calibrated to what they are and who they are. Though you kind of reject the term, in this chapter, at least, you reject the term appeasement

for this. I think a couple times. This is not rank appeasement or base appeasement. It's something better. I wanted to push back on that a little bit. I kind of think appeasement precisely because of its spectacular failure in the 30s gets a bad name. Like the word literally has a pejorative sense that maybe it doesn't deserve. There are times when it might just be rational to appease.

But your case is slightly different, that actually this just is not strictly speaking, appeasement. Well, let's be clear what appeasement is. Appeasement, as I understand it, is giving an adversary the thing he wants in hopes that, that that will satiate him, that it'll fulfill his desire and his aggression will cease. What the Eastern Romans were doing with gold shipments to Attila the Han, in my opinion, very much was not appeasement. It was the use of money to, number one, by time, for the empire to bring armies from other frontiers to the appropriate place in the northern frontier vis-vis be the Huns, and also the use of that money to enmesh an opponent in the system of the empire.

And you mentioned the Chinese empires use this in a similar way of sort of addicting barbarians to the imperial largesse. And I think that's how the Byzantines at the time thought about the gold weapon, let's call it that, because as you've said correctly, they understood their opponent. Here you have a pastoral culture that is illiterate. It does not have metallurgy or, you know, it doesn't have the ability to produce gold or silver coin. And when the Byzantines would provide these gold shipments, number one, the Huns used it primarily

to buy goods from the Byzantines, which were a much more sophisticated economy. And so a lot of that money quickly found its way back into the Byzantine economy. But also, they were using this to manipulate the Hunnic power structures. You had a confederation of tribes, and they would basically choose or elect a leader, so say like Attila, the way he became leader of this huge sprawling confederation of wild men was that he delivered loot. His raids and plundering succeeded. So as long as they're feeding the beast, Attila's power structure becomes dependent on them. And the way that the Byzantines would use this goal shows that they understood this intuitively. because if they then drew back or canceled gold payments, the first target among the tribes would be Attila, the leader.

So the Eastern Romans were using gold as a weapon of geopolitics intertwined with their diplomatic missions to deflect an opponent. And the key point that that suggests to me, and it's a theme in the book, is that classical diplomacy is an art of applying constraints to an opponent. I think there's a modern misconception that diplomacy is about clearing up misunderstandings. And it's a modern and very liberal, modern 20th century view. But classically, that's not what diplomacy has been about. I think appeasement as practiced by Neville Chamberlain, even though he was technically a conservative, where he was a member of the conservative party, it was inherently a liberal set of assumptions that there's a misunderstanding at the root of this problem with Hitler.

reasonable men can get in the room and clear it up. And Chamberlain did not understand himself to be placing constraints on Otto Hitler. He understood himself to be making the misunderstanding go away by giving this presumably rational man the thing that he wanted. So that's the distinction that I would draw between appeasement as practiced by, say, Neville Chamberlain, and what the Romans were doing with the Huns, which was much more about a place. constraints on their behavior. Well, since you take us to Chamberlain, let's stay there for a little while, because I thought your account, well, of British strategy broadly, the 19th into the 20th century, but then Chamberlain

particularly was really, really interesting. Say a bit about the strategic picture that confronts Chamberlain in the 30s, the way in which the prevention of hegemony in Europe, longstanding goal of British statecraft, is in real tension with imperial interests elsewhere, especially the Pacific, where you have a rising Japan. And just, you know, it is such a sort of a shop-worn historical example. Everyone thinks they understand it. And in a way, I mean, I would make the case, the sort of the superficial understanding is still pretty close to the true understanding, but it misses a lot.

Put some nuance on the picture. And why does Chamberlain embark on this strategy that he, this diplomatic approach that he does with the Nazi. Yeah, the British in the 1930s really faced a vexing strategic dilemma. They were increasingly at the end of their rope as a great power in military and naval terms. So the British had cut successively in the years since World War I and really paired to the bone across the services. They had, you know, this empire to hold together, empire and by that point, Commonwealth, that stretched all over the planet. And they've got a troika of enemies that are getting more powerful by the day.

So the Germans clearly mean business. They're building up in Europe. You know, Mussolini is already kind of on the rampage in North Africa and is building up his fleet in the Mediterranean. And then, of course, the Japanese have broken out of the interwar naval treaties and are building up a massive fleet, and they threatened British possessions in the Far East. And no one understood this dilemma better than Neville Chamberlain,

who had previously served as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was a very serious man. He was a very confident man. I think that's often overlooked, including in recent treatments of Chamberlain by Netflix and others. He was supremely confident in his own ability. He was a very rational man. He was a member of the Conservative Party,

but had the contemporary 20th century liberal outlook on a lot of things. But he knows, from his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer, that Britain doesn't have the money to build up the armies and fleets that it needs to deal with these three problems. He also knows that Britain historically has operated a very successful policy of operating a balance of power in Europe to prevent any one power from dominating the European continent over a successive centuries. and he, I think, intuitively understood that something would have to be done to buy time for the British Empire to arm. But what he really wanted, and I think this is often overlooked, is he wanted a new general settlement with Adolf Hitler. He saw Hitler as a reasonable man.

He assumed that Hitler would conduct statecraft in the traditional manner of the German state of the German Empire of the 19th century, and that what Hitler was after was border strips, you know, little pieces of territory to pick up, add to the German nation state. Remember, Hitler was speaking in the language of Wilson. He was speaking in the language of the, of the Versailles settlement in talking about national determination, this great principle that Woodrow Wilson had made such a big deal out of. And so I think what, I think the organizing problem for Chamberlain was was virtually unfixable, and that was this massive gap between the military means at Britain's disposal and the number of commitments it had. I think he correctly

saw that diplomacy had a role to play in alleviating that predicament. I mean, his basic starting point wasn't different from the British of the Edwardian period when they made peace with Japan and Russia and France to focus on Germany. And as you've said, there was a long tradition in British statecraft of appeasement properly understood. But, but, where he really just went off the reservation and took an approach that proved disastrous, is in seeing this as basically that there was, you know, he thought there was a misunderstanding at the heart of the matter. Yes, he, to a point he wanted to buy time for the British, but as his, but as his diplomacy proceeded with Hitler, I think the, he, he believed, and if you look

at his diary entries, he, he articulates this very clearly that when he reached agreement with Hitler over the Sudeten land, he saw himself as having removed the reason for rearmament. He thought he had fixed the problem. And I think it was, you know, the catastrophe that resulted was rooted in his hubris. But if you wanted to apply it, you know, you want to say what went wrong here with diplomacy? It's that Chamberlain departed from the traditional understanding of diplomacy classically, I mean, age-old understanding about using it to apply constraints on an opponent. And there were, I mean, as bad as Britain's position was, there were remedies at hand, there were

constraints at hand that could have been applied to Hitler, starting with the balance of power in Europe that Chamberlain flat refused to utilize because he believed that he could get together with Hitler one on one and he could come up with a template that solved the immediate problem and maybe even sweet talked Hitler into a new general settlement for you. Europe to replace the one that Britain herself had devised in 1919. And of course, the results of all of this were, as we know, were disastrous. What kind of constraints would British politics have supported in the 30s? I mean, I've had Andrew Roberts, you know, make a kind of qualified defense of Chamberlain, which seems like a strange sentence to say, but it's very much in sympathy

with your account, which is that for those, I guess these would be people in the soldiers group who would point out that, you know, in the early mid-30s, as the Rhineland is being re-militarized and Hitler is clearly misbehaving, Anglo-French intervention at that point could have nipped the problem in the bud in ways that would have been much more dangerous to Germany than obviously is the case a decade later when Germany is much more militarily powerful. Roberts' response to that, I think sort of unrejectably, undeniably, is that British politics simply just can't support that in the early to mid-30s. The shadow of the First World War and its tragedy just looms over everything.

The notion that anyone would support preemptive military action in the mid-30s over this or that piece of driven misbehavior is simply historical anachronism and fantasy in the real world in which people were living in 1935, 1936. It just wasn't in the cards. What was in the cards? Can you spell out what the actually historically possible alternative courses of action were? Well, I think there were options at Chamberlain's disposal. I mean, look, the British position was bad, but that doesn't mean that the course that Chamberlain took was inevitable or correct. I think the constraints that were most readily available to Chamberlain were obviously

the constraints of the balance of power, that there were other nations in Europe who felt threatened by the rise of Germany and by Hitler's stated ambitions to include most of Britain's traditional continental allies in previous and older struggles on the mainland, France, which had the largest artillery force in Europe and had an army that was considered the best in in the world at that time. Obviously, the Czechs, the Poles, the Romanians, the Greeks, the Austrians, you know, Austrians meaning in the period before the Anschluss, I think most of the small nations of Europe shared this fear about the reawakening of German ambitions. And what we can debate whether or not, if Chamberlain had gone down the path of trying to use countervailing coalitions,

whether this would have worked, but he didn't try it. And it's important to grasp that. The reason Chamberlain didn't try this approach, the reason he didn't, for example, was put it in concrete terms, the reason that he did not coordinate closely with his French and Czech counterparts. Setting aside the Soviets or the Poles or these more complex combinations is because he was convinced, again, going back to this very rationalist, modern mid-20th century kind of liberal outlook on the world, he was convinced that these combinations and even the effort to awaken

these combinations would push Hitler towards war. And you know, you had people at the time in Britain, including, of course, Winston Churchill and some of his circle, who were arguing utilize the Grand Alliance, reawaken the coalitions, do what we've always done, fall back on the traditional conservative British foreign policy. And Chamberlain flat refused to go down that path. His own foreign office, by the way, the professional diplomats in Britain at that time, there are abundant memoranda to show that the professional diplomats in Britain at that time, this was their natural recourse. This is what they were prevailing upon Chamberlain to do. He rejected this. He thought it would push Hitler over the ledge. I think he was also,

leery of any sort of coordination with the Soviets, who, by the way, were very open to coordinating with the British and the Czechs at that point, even though we, of course, know there were limits to out for the British could trust them. They had shared interests. And then I would also just mention, you know, there were other constraints that are at the time that are less obvious. But some of those were in, you know, domestic opposition to Hitler inside Germany was pretty well understood in Britain. And so a case, can be made a counterfactual case that utilizing the balance of power would have given those the checks on Hitler's ambition inside the German system, including the aristocracy, the army,

you know, the social democrats, the old-fashioned conservatives, dealing him an international setback could have helped awaken greater domestic constraints. But we'll never know, but I think a very sensible counterfactual can be made along those lines. A lot of your book is, devoted to the praise of the professional diplomat and diplomacy as a profession, going all the way back to something that if I had ever known about it, I had forgotten about, but the Bureau of the Barbarians with the Byzantines, which is a great sort of historical institution to reflect upon. You, of course, served at a very senior level in the State Department. The issues you were dealing with when you were Assistant Secretary of State are still

very much with us here in 2025. So I want to start bringing us up to the present day here. Well, tell us a bit about your view of the State Department. Department as a home of professional diplomats in the 21st century here in the United States. Does it live up to the standard that you are praising and defending in the book of what diplomats truly ought to be? Well, I think the State Department in its current form, and we'll see how far Secretary Rubio's, in my view, very necessary reforms take things. But the State Department in the form that it's developed into since the end of the Cold War, I think is a victim of mission creep.

In my book, I talk about, you know, the central purpose of bureaucracy and diplomacy. Like, why do great powers have an apparatus around diplomacy? And it's very clearly to nurture certain core competencies that are necessary to wield in order to wield diplomacy with excellence as an instrument of competition. And, you know, at the top of the list would be the cultivation of deep regional knowledge about other places and people. You mentioned the Bureau of Barbarians. I mean, this is really where diplomatic bureaucracy begins. As a Byzantine saying, gee, we've got all of these enemies that live in all directions around us.

We can't overpower them all. Let's start by knowing as much about these tribes and entities as possible, know what makes them tick, what their leaders think, what their geography is, how they're institutions and geography shape their outlook. So, you know, number one role of a diplomatic bureaucracy is to maintain a really deep reservoir of knowledge about, you know, what it is that you mean to manage externally. And secondly, and maybe this should actually be first, skill in negotiations, which is the central aptitude or skill set required of diplomacy. You know, it's an art form. It can be studied. It can be, you know, certain insights about negotiation can be passed from generation to one generation to the next. And then, of course, you could add a third,

which comes across in all the chapters of the book, that these, the bureaucracies of diplomacy historically have also existed to provide a, you know, the conceptual glue, like how the day-to-day negotiations and use of diplomacy relate back to the objectives of the state in its interests. And I think in all three of those categories, the State Department in our time has really strayed or atrophied and needs to be brought back to its core missions, skill in negotiations, regional expertise, promotion of the national interest. And I think one reason for this problem in the State Department is organizational in nature. It's so big.

There are so many added functional offices in bureaus over time that have accumulated the number of signoffs and approvals and direct reports, special envoys, et cetera. I think there's a mission problem as well. it's probably the least aligned with the national security strategy process of any of the major national security institutions. And I can elaborate on that if you wish, but the State Department basically has a process vis-à-vis Congress that allows it, you know, the joint regional strategy process that allows it to allocate resources to its objectives without a lot of coordination with the strategies that are coming out of the executive branch. I think unions are a big part of the problem. It's hard to make changes. And then finally, I think in the U.S. case today, there's an added political dimension, you know, the politicization of State Department bureaucracy. When I was at state, I was shocked by how progressive and even woke the place has become. I mean, the promotions are not based on merit primarily. We have a public diplomacy whose default is to proclaim radical causes, progressive causes. This was detailed in a congressional report last year. You know, you have human rights reports that come out of the State Department that are more

eager to criticize, I don't know, Poland for contraception used as a Catholic country than it is to criticize real human rights abusers in China or Cuba. So look, I think there are very good, there are still very good people at the State Department, but a large swath of the building, you know, are many of them are social activists at heart. I don't think all of them wake up every morning and ask how do I promote the U.S. interest. So I think Rubio has taken the right approach, which is focus on the mission, realign the structure, and bring diplomacy back to these things that allow it to be a useful

tool of national security, and that is inherent to the mission and running of the operation. I'm kind of the view that culture is downstream of education, or that they're almost the same thing. How do we educate our diplomats? You know, when you're when you are becoming a foreign service officer or anyone with responsibility for foreign affairs. Are you engaged, for example, in looking at the kind of case studies that you are talking about in your book? Are you taking classes in the art of negotiation? How does it actually work? So in my view, the way it should work is that foreign service officers should have a much clearer prioritization of training in the core things that matter in diplomacy, beginning with negotiations. So the Foreign Service Institute,

for example, the coursework that it offers currently does definitely does not elevate what I would call the core themes of diplomacy as, you know, the core skill set or training for diplomats. I think that's something that works to the disadvantage of incoming foreign service officers. I think also the Foreign Service system of rotations militates against deep regional expertise as well as negotiations. You go back to this in the 1960s, the change was made to disallow foreign service officers from remaining in a particular country or even region for very long. And the worry was like, you know, foreign service officers will sort of go native and they'll become too attached to the country of choice. I think that that problem is much less pronounced in the current technological age, but is also just a much lesser worried to me than having these deep skill sets atrophy.

And you go back to the turn of the 20th century and you look at the British Foreign Service. And you could find individuals who fluently spoke the dialect of every hill tribe of Burma. I mean, you had true regional expertise that was, part of the substrate of Britain's successful strategy at that time. And I think, you know, our own diplomatic core, as I've said, there's some very good people in it. But I think it's just become a lot of these skills have atrophied in this period of very permissive history that we've lived in since the end of the Cold War. I think that will change over time. I think Rubio's reforms are headed in the right direction. I thought Secretary Pompeo's reform attempted changes were

we're headed in the right direction. But eventually, you know, in history, you see that geopolitical events have a way of pulling states back, I mean, you know, to reform their institutions so that they can be good at the things they need to be good at in great power competition. And I think that's what's happening. So to zoom out from the State Department to international politics more broadly, I mean, we are in a period where the United States seems to have embraced this notion of great power competition as a strategic concept, has for some time now. now certainly a focus of the Trump administration in both its iterations. And we're recording this here on August the 26th.

We're in the midst of a period of pretty frenetic diplomacy, well, on a number of fronts, but involving the president personally with regard to the war in Ukraine and attempts to resolve it. You know, give us your assessment of the possibilities of diplomacy as you understand it and as you passionately argue for it in your book with regard to the war in Ukraine. I mean, what is the role for diplomacy here? Is the Trump administration getting it right? What's your take on all of this?

Yeah, I think, you know, we're watching under the second Trump administration, really a reinvigoration of diplomacy as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy in a way that I couldn't have foreseen when I was, you know, writing the book, which wrapped up last year. You have more, you know, big and now mostly successful diplomatic initiatives underway. in the past six months, then probably in the past, I don't know, 20 years. So significant efforts are underway by the Trump administration on Ukraine, Gaza, with China. The Trump team has diffused a number of crises that I think the president played a personal role in, you know, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Rwanda, DRC, and they're building on the successful legacy of the first term in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. So I think we are seeing a return of strategic diplomacy of the kind that I write about in the book, you know, wielding diplomacy as an

instrument of strategy. And I think the, you know, the driver to this is partly the strategic predicament that the United States is in, the simultaneousity problem, as you've mentioned. And that's why you see major efforts underway in both Europe and Middle East, the secondary and tertiary theater would free up resources for the contest with China. But I think the driver is also partly Trump's personality and his desire to find peace in itself to stop the fighting. And he is well positioned to do this because of his background in the private sector as a negotiator. And I think he is a good negotiator.

So when I then look at the situation in Ukraine and Russia, you know, the first thing I notice is that the context of Trump's overall approach, we were talking about constraints a moment ago, kind of the sine qua non of strategic diplomacy. And I see that mentality in Trump's approach on on Russia, that the meeting at Anchorage was preceded by successful moves by the Trump administration to tighten constraints on Russia. So the diplomacy with Arab states to get the oil prices down, the diplomacy with Europeans to get defense spending up, the diplomacy with Armenia and Azerbaijan to increase the pressure on Russia and Central Asia, diplomacy with China to threaten, you know, Russia's line of supply to its main sponsor.

So by the time Trump even set down with Putin, he had already begun, he'd already created the contours for Putin of, you know, why Putin will need a deal with time. And it's because of the overall constraints that are, that the administration is placing on him. I think Trump was right to talk to Putin. The establishment, foreign policy criticism out there, you know, this idea that like a meeting with an adversary is somehow a reward is insane. I think Trump is slowly boxing in Putin by vectoring him towards something he doesn't want to do, which is deal with Zelensky. And in parallel, he's keeping the Europeans on side, which is an accomplishment. In terms of where this lands, I think, you know, eventually we'll see something that looks like a combination of the end game

in Korea and Finland. Perhaps we'll see an armistice rather than a ceasefire. a DMZ of some kind. Inevitably, there'll be a territorial dimension, and the contours of that are not yet clear. But, you know, Secretary Rubio said recently, it's not fair and it's not easy, but it's what it takes. And I think that's right. So, you know, we're unlikely to ever see the Ukraine situation fully solved, but I think that's not the job of diplomacy. If the net effect is that in a few months' time, we've been able to park this crisis,

to a degree that we can buy time for the Europeans to rearm, the Ukrainians to recoup and rebuild, and the U.S. to replenish our defense industrial base and focus more on China. That's time well spent, and I think that's the strategic purpose of diplomacy. To what extent, I mean, there's a couple risks here. I'm curious your view towards them. One is the risk that the overtures are simply early, that Putin is not feeling vulnerable enough or weak enough to come to some sort of accommodation that clearly he's resisting at the moment. That's one risk. The other risk, I mean, to go back to our conversation about,

you know, strategies of conciliation one way or the other is he has no, Putin may have no interest in the kind of the broader strategic logic of any kind of settlement that might be discussed. I mean, one gets that impression from the president that he's looking for a settlement with Russia that is going, whether or not things in Ukraine ever really stick, that there's some broader settlement or understanding between the United States and Russia and a mutual understanding of the world that's going to stick.

And it may be the case that Putin has no such interest that his vision of the world and the future of Europe is just always going to be in tension with the American interest or certainly what the Europeans would want, not necessarily the same thing, but I think overlapping to a greater degree than Putin's vision and the European vision overlap. How do you assess those?

two risks or do you think, do you think they're not major risks? Well, you know, on the first one, I think, well, let me put this way, I assume that Putin's thinking is influenced in large measure by the time of year. It's summertime. We're in the heart of the offensive season in Eastern European wars. And if you look at the last few years of the Ukraine war, typically the most territory is taken by the Russians in the summer months, and then the fall rains come in late September. And so I think when Trump brought pressure to bear on Putin, he flushed him out and got him to come to the table before Putin is ready to actually make peace. And the reason is he wants to see how much territory he can gain over the course of the summer. I think last year and the year before,

well over half of the square miles that Russia took in Ukraine in each of those years was taken between the months of June and late September. So I keep that in mind that Putin is, as Medernick would say, advancing while negotiating. But I think that this doesn't mean that necessarily the Russians won't be interested in the right kind of negotiations in the months ahead. I think for now they are trying to see how much they can take on the battlefield and then sort of reassess. But what stands out to me is that Trump's diplomacy seems to be forcing all of the parties in the Ukraine quagmire to reexamine their hand of cards and kind of rethink these previously sort of pat positions that they've taken.

I mean, you know, Trump set a ticking clock and I think that flush Putin out of his preferred mode of stonewalling. It basically forced Putin to either ignore the U.S. face consequences, or engage and risk, you know, sort of running afoul of the old adage that he who speaks first in negotiations loses. I think Trump's sterner approach with Ukraine has flushed that country out of its preferred mode of refusing to talk while assuming kind of an open-ended line of support from the West. I mean, basically forcing Ukraine's leaders to seriously contemplate what they're willing to sacrifice on the altar of necessity. And then, you know, Trump's demands to the

Europeans have flushed out, you know, NATO's leaders out of their preferred mode of kind of talking big while relying on the U.S. to bail them out. So I think really what Trump has done is set in motion a series of rethinks in these other positions that could lead to a convergence in the months ahead, especially as the other constraints that I talked about, Trump's administration is applying to the Russians are felt. You know, to your second question, is this about a settlement with Russia? Is that what this is about? I don't get that impression. I mean, my assumption is that the Russians went to Anchorage wanting to talk about kind of a renegotiation of the post-Cold war settlement, right? That in their maximum scheme of things, the U.S. and Russia would set

down right now, and we'd go back to kind of the major points, immediate post-cold war, you know, whether the U.S. can keep forces in NATO that are east of Germany, you know, kind of this grand settlement, I don't think that that's what Trump is driving at. I mean, the message that I see from the administration is that resolving the situation in Ukraine is kind of the doorway through which the rest of the U.S.-Russia relationship will be assessed. There probably are some strategic opportunities in the U.S. Russia relationship, including triangulation vis-à-vis China. But I think the administration is correctly signaling that the war in Ukraine first has to stop in order to unlock those wider conversations, including arms control,

for example. So I think that's the right approach. I think it was correct to get Putin talking and get the Ukrainians thinking and establish a peace process where the United States is pressuring the parties to move things forward, while the president still retains the potential of increasing pressure through, you know, very levers, sanctions, and others if we come to that. Wes Mitchell, author of Great Power, Diplomacy, The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Kissinger.

Really interesting conversation and really, really interesting book. I learned a lot reading it. It was thought-provoking. It was challenging. And it is a spirited defense of this art or craft or profession or whatever we want to call it of diplomacy. So thank you, Wes, for coming on the show. Aaron, thank you so much for having me.

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