diplomcy 7

 Cardinal Richelieu. Diplomacy adapted from being the handmaiden of politics to its operative, engineer, and moral judge. Perhaps this was the reason that the aforementioned ‘realist’ critics took so violently to Wilson’s self-willed transformation. Diplomacy, they claimed, could not do or be all these things at once. Diplomats are servants, not masters, of the State, let alone of universal morality; they are not equally the enforcers and revelatory agents of just and desirable universal norms. Hence, the principled stand against the subordination of power to justice. For all that the latter may have been (and still may be) a desired end in the world, there are those who claim that pursuing it at all costs goes against human nature. The pursuit of justice first requires peace. Ignoring this particular natural law, realists say, results in the spread of neither peace nor justice. Wilson’s defenders have also claimed that national interests are served better in combination than in competition. He and his ideology were not idealist in the philosophical sense, they wrote, but rather a form of “higher realism” in the political sense. The New Diplomacy, and collective security, especially— described by Wilson as a community of power—are alternative sources of international order that he renewed with a more democratic form of politics for the twentieth century. His critics make a good point in highlighting their shortcomings, but fail to explain how a destroyed world was otherwise meant to rebuild and govern itself when so many traditional structures and ways had gone. It had been Wilson’s view that a New Diplomacy and a new politics would offer a different, better future. It was also his view that the world did not really have a fair choice: it could embrace modernity—including a modern diplomacy—and survive, or it could resist, and die. In the event it embraced the new diplomacy, Wilson probably assumed the modern world would be more peaceful because human institutions had progressed to the point where they were better matched to the democratic will of the people, who, if properly taught, would choose peace and justice over rivalry and oppression. To dwell upon Wilson is not to suggest that he was solely responsible for the transformation of diplomacy at the turn of the previous century, but instead to emphasize the durability of his concept of international relations, in spite of its having been followed by some terrible wars. He typified an understanding of both the theory and the practice of diplomacy which granted it an organic association with the specific nature of the international political system—and with the distinct political systems and forms of government in each nation-state. So a politically attenuated manner of diplomacy could both bring about and sustain such a system. Whether or not this belief represented a lower or a higher form of realism is beside the point. Wilson and his supporters regarded it as a more pragmatic response to the world’s ills tha