Artículo International Institute for Strategic Studies, 08.10.2025 Nigel Gould-Davies, exembajador británico, profesor (Oxford) e investigador (IISS)
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While orthodox strategic arguments hover in the background, Trump himself speaks of international relations in visceral, tactile, intimate terms rather than bloodless abstractions of interest and values.
I
What does it mean to know a subject? Some you can read about – and in Britain to ‘read’ a subject means to study it at university. Mathematics, philosophy, the natural sciences can be mastered with the help of books. But you don’t become a cook, carpenter, gardener, athlete or musician this way. You don’t learn a language with a dictionary. You wouldn’t trust a surgeon who had never wielded a scalpel. Studying helps with all these endeavours, of course, and for some is indispensable. But it is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. Such activities require practice, and lots of it. Knowing comes from doing.
What about international relations? It is a popular university subject and becoming more so. But how far can you know it without doing it? Is it like chemistry or like carpentry? Like maths or like medicine? Having both earned a political-science doctorate and served as ambassador of a major country, I have long reflected on the relationship between theory and practice in this field. As I progressed through my degree, my university grew increasingly committed to analysing politics in ways that mimicked the methods and language of the natural sciences: constructing models, specifying and coding variables, testing causal hypotheses (ideally with large numerical datasets) and reporting results. Area studies – deep immersion in a country’s history, culture and language to understand its politics – declined in the face of demands for a certain kind of rigour. Only the political philosophers, hugging Plato and Leo Strauss tightly, were exempt. But even they had to take the introductory statistics course – symbolically named ‘Government 1000’ – that, by teaching us to interpret the models and their results, helpfully revealed how weedy many of them were.
It was hard not to respond to these career incentives, or the unearned thrill of partaking in the abstruse. As a callow graduate student sent to rural Russia for an election project, I once asked a crowd of Russian peasants: ‘How did you form your electoral preferences?’ They gawped at me in silence, as well they might. I soon concluded that knowing political science and understanding politics were very different things. With erudite exceptions, the profession seemed a game that chased its own tail, rewarding technical proficiency over intellectual creativity, rigour as rigor mortis. I absorbed the best conceptual works – Thomas C. Schelling is indispensable – and kept the company of the more historically minded professors.
I returned to Oxford to teach the subject. Intellectual traditions there, nourished by philosophy and history, are more supple and less brittle than the aggressive physics envy I had left behind. Yet it is ‘scientific’ in an older and deeper sense, since it shares a commitment to systematic knowledge – that is, it seeks explanations that make comparison and generalisation possible. And it does so by transposing specific human choices into wider abstract terms. A state’s behaviour, and the relations of states with one another, are explained by ‘interests’ that are common to, or at least similar across, all states. Classical security perspectives emphasise how relations of power shape state behaviour. They may go further and show how the distribution of power across states – whether held by one, two or many – shapes the dynamics of the international system. They may explore how far power is fungible – that is, whether strength in one domain (say, economic) can be used in another (say, military). They may emphasise the forms and degrees of economic interdependence in structuring incentives. And they may explain state behaviour by the type of governing regime – whether democracy, autocracy or something else.
Such abstraction from the experience of decision-makers has long been a feature of international thought. Early accounts of the balance of power drew comparisons with the movement of planets governed by mechanical laws of nature. The very first study of war in the Western world attributed its outbreak to the shifting balance of power: ‘What made war inevitable was the rise of Athens and the fear this caused in Sparta.’ Thucydides presented a fateful human decision as the inescapable consequence of an abstraction. The consistent tendency is to efface human agency. Individual choices are portrayed as consequences of impersonal forces or facts rather than causes in their own right. They are never their own thing. As choice is subsumed by circumstance, so contingency – a sense that things could easily have turned out differently, perhaps significantly so – melts away. And without choice or contingency, there is no room for diplomacy – for how individuals representing different countries may influence one another’s decisions in ways that could make the difference.
II
After teaching I joined the Foreign Office. It was an abrupt and drastic shift of intellectual gears. The diplomatic world is drenched in subjectivity. There is an acute focus on immediacy and detail: on the specific, not the general, and on the human, not the abstract. For the specific and the human is all that literally is. Personalities, choices and relationships are the constituent atoms of the social universe. Anything beyond these is mere abstraction.
This first-person perspective of the doer inverts the third-person one of the observer. Individuals are not mere ciphers of larger forces, but are central to events. Their decisions channel the potentialities of a situation into one future rather than another. This recovers the sense of contingency, always felt so keenly by diplomats yet largely absent from the study of international relations. Diplomacy at the strategic level is, above all, about shaping choices that could be different. When we say states ‘interact’, we always mean that humans are communicating. They do so not as mere conduits or technical functionaries of systemic processes – balances, equilibria, pivots, orbits and the like – but as flesh-and-blood embodiments of their countries who engage, influence and persuade one another.
This world is warm and animate, not cold and mechanical. Its human textures may be ambiguous, contradictory, changeable – and thus susceptible to influence. Diplomacy hones this human material to shape perceptions and meanings – the wellsprings of intention and action – in myriad ways: through words, gestures, clothing, hospitality, gift-giving. This is craft, not science – like cooking, not chemistry; gardening, not geology. Like any craft, it draws on time-tested principles but demands experience, a deep understanding of tools and materials, sensitivity to the unique, and acute attention to detail.
The old term ‘statecraft’, now enjoying a revival, captures this. And like any craft, it cannot be practised at a distance. It is a paradox worth pondering that, while technology now makes communicating over vast distances easier than ever, leaders meet face to face more often than ever. They deem all this gruelling travel necessary, sensing that there is no substitute for the hairless apes to gather in the same room, sniff each other, break bread together. Such immersion in doing – not the brittle fabulations of a regression model, or the vaulting grandeur of theory – is what it means to know international relations.
The craft of diplomacy is not merely the practical application of concepts, in the way that engineering is applied physics, medicine is applied biology and cooking is applied chemistry. It is different in kind. The science of international relations may even be a distraction. Consider two of the most robust empirical findings of the field: that democracies have never, with some doubtful or marginal exceptions, gone to war with each other; and that nuclear states have never done so. Yet when the Kargil crisis between India and Pakistan erupted in 1999, no diplomat said: ‘Relax: these are both nuclear states and democratic regimes. The probability of them going to war is statistically vanishingly small.’ On the contrary, there was a sustained, intense diplomatic effort to de-escalate the conflict by engaging senior figures on both sides. The R-squared of the democratic peace and of the nuclear peace offered no room for complacency.
At the same time, perceptions are never formed, or decisions made, in a vacuum. Choice implies constraints. Concepts like ‘balance of power’, interdependence or ‘regime type’ may be abstractions, but they are not phantoms. They impose structure and limits on the potentialities available to decision-makers, and sometimes consequences not foreseen or welcomed by them. And every decision entails a theory of how the world works, of how actions will produce intended effects. It is always better for these assumptions to be clarified and scrutinised than to leave them implicit and unexamined.
I sometimes wished my diplomatic colleagues would look up from the ground a little more often at the larger picture and longer view – at the logic and direction of events, at how the power and intentions of other states were shifting, and what this portended for us. In 2005, while posted to Moscow, I raised concerns that Russia was weaning Europe onto its gas supply in order to cultivate long-term dependence – ‘energy Finlandisation’, I called it. A very senior diplomat retorted: ‘If I use a Walkman, am I more likely to take a Japanese view of things?’ My last Foreign Office role, in policy planning, was tasked with taking the long view. But planners across many foreign ministries consistently report their struggles to influence the busy departments that lead on day-to-day diplomacy.
Diplomacy is drenched in subjectivity, but its subjects are trapped in objective circumstances not of their choosing. The most incisive and rewarding thinkers hold these two perspectives in creative tension, mapping the tactical and tactile onto the strategic and conceptual without subsuming either into the other. The exemplar is Henry Kissinger, who married a formidable intellect to what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, the finger-feel of practice. Among others, Michael Howard and Harry Hinsley, who served in the military and intelligence services respectively, made enduring contributions to international thought. Richard Holbrooke’s account of the diplomacy that ended the war in Yugoslavia blends a clear-eyed strategic sense with tiny, atmospheric details of handling difficult humans in a complex negotiation. Just as diplomats should think more systematically, so scholars should take a closer interest in the conduct of diplomacy and lived experience of diplomats. The embodied knowledge and practice of the doers can discipline and enrich the detached observer’s understanding. And the importance of doing so has taken on a fresh urgency. For recent events have exposed, with bracing clarity, the centrality, contingency and drama of diplomacy.
While human choices and impersonal forces refract one another in international life, their relative significance will vary. In normal times, the contours of power are clear and intentions stable. While the possibility of surprise, breakthrough or crisis is never absent, the scope for diplomacy – for influencing others’ actions in new ways – is limited. There will be change and innovation, but these will rarely be radical.
In extraordinary moments, though, power shifts abruptly, structures crumble and choices dominate. Individuals enjoy a rare freedom to shape a molten future. And since individuals are suddenly decisive, their relationships, meetings, conversations and other forms of influence can prove fateful. Diplomacy comes fully into its own. This most often happens at the end of a major war. The old world has collapsed, and victors are faced with building a new one on its ruins. In different ways and to differing degrees, the Congress system after 1815, the vastly bolder League of Nations in 1919, and the United Nations system and Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘four policemen’ in 1945 were responses to such moments. The end of the Cold War may have offered the greatest potential for diplomatic transformation. A single country bestrode the world, its power and ideas largely unchallenged. President George H.W. Bush’s ‘new world order’ speeches at the height of this unipolar moment expressed by turns a grand and almost insouciant reach of ambition. Constraints were few and choices many: ‘The future lies undefined before us … We can choose the kind of world we want.’
But very rarely, a new diplomacy emerges that is not a consequence of shifts in power but a cause of them. One example was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ‘new political thinking’. When he became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, the Soviet Union was beset by a stagnant economy and resurgent West. His rivals for the leadership, Grigory Romanov and Vadim Grishin, would have changed little. His three immediate predecessors – Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko – had intensified repression, tightened labour discipline and raised defence spending. Instead, Gorbachev ended four decades of ideological confrontation, voluntarily withdrew from strategic commitments and allowed the transformation of his regime and break-up of his country. His response to imperial overstretch was, in historical perspective, extraordinarily improbable.
One feature of this novel diplomacy was that summit meetings, normally so carefully planned and choreographed, became dramatic and unpredictable. At Reykjavik in 1986, Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan discussed the prospect of complete nuclear disarmament, to the consternation of their colleagues. More remarkable still was Gorbachev’s shift in the middle of talks on German reunification on 31 May 1990. Having ruled out German membership of NATO at the start of the meeting, he was won round by Bush’s skilful questioning and masterly reframing of the issue. Gorbachev’s apparently improvised, unforced yet fundamental concession horrified the Soviet delegation. Bush noted later that ‘it was an unbelievable scene, the likes of which none of us had ever seen before’. As the most detailed account of this episode observes, it is ‘very rare in diplomacy to change one’s mind right at the table’. But it can happen when a leader’s volition is unmoored from traditional constraints and assumptions of power.
III
Four decades on, a second such moment has begun. It is much faster and more chaotic, and appears to draw on instincts and reflexes rather than consistent principles. Since US President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, American policy towards Europe, and especially Ukraine, resembles a dizzying kaleidoscope, each turn producing a new picture from the jangling pieces. Trump has, by turns, demanded a ceasefire in Ukraine and then withdrawn this; threatened new sanctions on Russia and then rewarded Russian President Vladimir Putin with a summit; told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy he had ‘no cards’ and then spoken warmly to him; suspended and then restored intelligence cooperation with Ukraine; begun talks with Russia and agreed a minerals deal with Ukraine; railed against Europe’s unwillingness to spend more on defence and spoken admiringly of European resolve. A measure of the speed of change is that it took Gorbachev four years to give up the core Soviet interest in controlling Eastern Europe, and Trump four weeks to call into question America’s core interest in protecting Europe – only to play a full and cooperative part in NATO’s annual summit.
This fluidity is something new. No state, certainly no major power, has ever behaved this way. To see this clearly, compare it to more familiar policies that it might superficially seem to resemble.
This is not shuttle diplomacy, the energetic iterative mediation between antagonists made famous by Kissinger’s Middle Eastern diplomacy. Shuttle diplomacy is conducted privately, not in the glare of television. It nudges the sides towards a compromise whose outlines are already clear; it does not swing wildly between them with alternating, empty threats. It is precise, patient and disciplined – adjectives rarely used for this White House.
Nor does this diplomatic blizzard mark a decisive shift in American alignments. This would at least be familiar and comprehensible, if dreaded by Europe. There are many precedents: Mao Zedong’s break with Nikita Khrushchev, Richard Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao, Anwar Sadat’s with Israel. In all such cases a national leader took a calculated position rooted in a worked-out sense of security interests. But this does not capture the havering inconsistency of American policy. There is not, or at least not yet, a clean break with Europe and Ukraine, or a clear new direction of travel.
Perhaps the policy is not a new alignment, but no alignment, with America returning to a pre-1914 era of pragmatic great-power relations, when fluid geopolitics was the norm? Only in the last years before the First World War did rival alliance systems really click into place after decades of ambiguity and crises between future allies. Seen in these terms, perhaps Trump is simply disrupting the historical anomaly of America’s eight-decade commitment to European security. To adapt Lord Palmerston’s famous maxim, America has no eternal allies or permanent enemies, only deals to make. This comes closer to the truth. But it does not – at least not yet – capture what is happening. Despite harsh words for Europe from the White House, Trump has reaffirmed America’s commitment to the continent and even offered – at least for now – logistical help for a putative European reassurance force in Ukraine.
No familiar interpretive frame really works. This is what makes the present moment so strange. It is defined instead by intense, personal, often short-notice diplomacy at the highest levels. Summits are no longer the careful curation of speeches and ceremony resting on a ballast of staff work – events that declare rather than decide. Instead, they are laden with uncertainty and high stakes, and range across the widest spectrum of strategic possibilities. At one end lies America’s potential disengagement from Ukraine, even Europe, and its normalisation of relations with Russia; at the other, renewed support for the continent and more severe sanctions on Russia. These fundamental security issues are the subject of a bidding war between Europe and Russia for Trump’s favour, each vying to coax the imperial thumb to turn in its favour.
Orthodox strategic arguments – diversion of resources to the pacing threat of China; burden-sharing on European defence – hover in the background and are pressed by those around Trump. Yet to an unusual degree, the president himself speaks of international relations in visceral, tactile, intimate terms rather than bloodless abstractions of interest and values. He describes being led by ‘my touch, my feel. That’s what I do.’ The Alaska summit was a ‘feel-out’ meeting; Putin may be ‘tapping me along’; Gulf Arabic leaders are ‘tall, handsome guys … starving for love’; Trump and Kim Jong-un ‘fell in love’.
If there is a deeper calculus, it remains hidden. Sceptics will note that, as of this writing, America’s deeds rather than words since January 2025 amount to a series of unilateral concessions to Russia. But as long as Europe believes Trump can be won over, its leaders will continue to invest massively in personal persuasion: playing golf, entreating, never disagreeing, always showing up. This is diplomacy of the purest kind at the highest levels: individual relations swaying the fates of nations through master-crafting the textures of a single mind. Never in modern times has the personal been so geopolitical.
