It has taken six whole months and tragically thousands of Ukrainian lives, but PLOT TWIST! Donald Trump might have finally figured out the shocking revelation that Vladimir Putin is, in fact, not a cuddly teddy bear seeking world peace through interpretive dance.
As Trump dramatically waves his tiny fists threatening new sanctions and boldly declares Putin “totally bonkers” (our technical diplomatic term), the orange-haired president is slowly connecting the dots that Russia’s leader might – JUST MIGHT – be slightly obsessed with conquering Ukraine and rebuilding an empire, even if it means turning the whole thing into a real-life Game of Thrones minus the dragons.
But hold your horses! Trump isn’t the only one who needs remedial “How Not To Be Fooled By Obviously Evil Dictators 101” classes – our beloved Foreign Office could use a refresher course too, bless their diplomatic hearts.
Ever since Putin launched his “Special Military Operation That’s Definitely Not An Invasion We Promise” extravaganza in February 2022, our pin-striped diplomats have been frantically waving their umbrellas in support of Ukraine while simultaneously trying to squeeze Russia harder than a British person trying to board the last tube train home.
They saw this theatrical disaster coming from miles away (probably while sipping Earl Grey and tutting disapprovingly), and their response has earned Britain more brownie points with Ukraine than a particularly generous grandmother at Christmas.
On Friday, in a move that would make James Bond weep with pride, the Foreign Office dramatically unveiled and sanctioned 18 Russian spies who were apparently playing real-life Call of Duty with covert bombings and sabotage acts in Britain and elsewhere, all designed to ruin the “Support Ukraine” party that everyone cool was attending.
But here’s the tea (and it’s piping hot): before 2022, British diplomacy wasn’t always this sharp when it came to dealing with Putin’s aggressive tendencies. Sometimes they were about as perceptive as a mole wearing sunglasses in a coal mine.
Now that we’re awkwardly sliding into China’s DMs again – by far our most intimidating pen pal – it’s never been more crucial to understand the fine art of not getting absolutely played by hostile states who smile while sharpening their knives.
My Ringside Seat to Diplomatic Shenanigans
I spent nearly eight glorious years in the Foreign Office and Downing Street crafting speeches for three foreign secretaries and one prime minister, essentially being a professional word-wizard. Most of that time, my desk was strategically positioned in the Private Office, right outside the massive oak door of the foreign secretary’s ridiculously fancy gold-plated room that overlooks St James’s Park like some sort of diplomatic Death Star.
This was the sacred chamber where all the important papers materialized, where high-ranking officials gathered like extremely well-dressed penguins, and where everything “the boss” needed to see or do was filtered and prepared with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker on espresso.
Anyone who survives the controlled chaos of this extraordinary room gets a VIP backstage pass to witness the beautiful madness that is British diplomacy in action.
Here’s what I discovered: our diplomats are absolutely, positively, 100% convinced that “engagement” is the magical cure-all for literally every international hiccup, like diplomatic snake oil that supposedly fixes everything from nuclear proliferation to bad weather.
Engagement is their bread and butter, their favorite hobby, their solution to world peace – they’re convinced it serves our national interest and transforms the world into a better place, probably with more rainbows and fewer explosions.
For countries that are reasonably friendly (thankfully the vast majority, because imagine the paperwork otherwise), our diplomats are absolutely spot-on, like GPS navigation that actually works.
But what about those delightfully hostile states that spend their free time plotting our downfall and refuse to abandon their threatening hobbies like collecting other people’s territories? As a humble cog in the magnificent machine of British diplomacy, I witnessed firsthand how dealing with them involves more moral gymnastics than an Olympic athlete, plus a healthy dose of risk and compromise.
The Diplomatic Dance of Danger
And here’s the kicker that would make even the most seasoned comedian weep: some of our diplomats, especially the big shots at the top, have an almost supernatural ability to underestimate or completely ignore the astronomical price of cozying up to hostile powers. This might, quite accidentally, make the world more dangerous than a toddler with fireworks.
What exactly are these hazards, you ask? Well, buckle up buttercup, because dealing with hostile states can be more demeaning than wearing socks with sandals, can twist your analysis more than a pretzel factory, and can lead you to tie your own hands behind your back like some sort of diplomatic contortionist. At worst, you might end up giving the bad guys so much confidence that they decide to cause even more mayhem than they originally planned, like accidentally encouraging a food fight in a school cafeteria.
The Art of Diplomatic Self-Censorship (AKA How to Lose Your Backbone)
The easiest and perhaps most cringe-worthy compromise is the ancient art of self-censorship, performed in the noble cause of “keeping the conversation going” – even when that conversation is about as productive as arguing with a brick wall.
Picture this: one evening in late 2016, as darkness settled over the trees of St James’s Park like a dramatic movie scene outside my Private Office window, I finished crafting a newspaper opinion piece about Russia for the foreign secretary, one Boris Johnson (yes, that Boris Johnson with the legendary hair).
Before presenting my literary masterpiece to him, I had to send it for approval by some of our most distinguished diplomats, like submitting homework to the world’s most particular teachers.
Back came their response, delivered with the casual brutality of a British weather forecast: all perfectly fine, just one tiny little thing – please delete the phrase “Russian aggression” like it was some sort of diplomatic profanity.
I asked why, with the innocent confusion of someone who just discovered that water is wet. Putin had literally grabbed Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine two years earlier with all the subtlety of a elephant in a china shop; he was, at that very moment, waging a war on Ukrainian soil that had already claimed 8,000 lives and sent two million people packing their bags faster than tourists fleeing a hurricane.
For good measure, his air force was enthusiastically carpet-bombing Aleppo in Syria like they were playing the world’s most destructive video game.
Surely all of that justified calling it “Russian aggression”? Of course it did, I was told with the patience of saints. But our boss had a lovely chat with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, in New York a few months ago, and we’re desperately hoping for more engagement opportunities, like teenagers trying to get invited to the cool kids’ party.
So it’s probably best not to use that phrase, you understand.
Just the mere possibility of future small talk with Lavrov – apparently treated as a diplomatic holy grail – was enough to produce this minor but soul-crushing act of self-censorship.
The Lavrov Experience: A Masterclass in Diplomatic Theater
As it happens, I had actually been in that New York meeting, and Lavrov’s bristling dishonesty was so spectacular it was almost performance art. The man could have taught masterclasses in creative truth-bending. Given that trusting anything he said would be like believing a used car salesman’s promises, it wasn’t entirely clear to me why Lavrov was worth the foreign secretary’s precious time at all, let alone why we should pay any moral price for the privilege.
How could experienced diplomats, who were surely not naive simpletons fresh off the diplomatic turnip truck, see Lavrov so differently?
The answer is beautifully circular: if you start with an unshakeable faith in the mystical power of engagement, then you pretty much have to regard the person you’re engaging with as a worthy conversation partner, even when that person is Lavrov, who treats honesty like it’s an optional extra.
When Reality Meets Wishful Thinking
This same impulse can cause diplomats to take their rose-colored glasses and put on entire rose-colored hazmat suits, misreading not just individuals but entire regimes with the enthusiasm of someone interpreting abstract art.
The Foreign Office’s Russia department was generally staffed by people with a refreshingly grim and realistic view of Putin – most had fewer illusions than a professional skeptic. Sometimes I thought we’d all be better off if they were running the show, like letting the fire department handle fire safety instead of asking the arsonist for advice.
But as late as 2019, I distinctly remember one of our leading Russia experts describing Putin’s annexation of Crimea not as an “imperialist” project but as a “defensive” one, with the same conviction that someone might describe a shark attack as “aggressive marine life networking.”
The delicious irony was that Putin himself would have laughed at this interpretation. He was crystal clear about his motives for dismembering Ukraine, like a villain explaining his master plan in a Bond movie. He enthusiastically told anyone with functioning ears that he grabbed Crimea for the obviously imperial reason of restoring the territory that Catherine the Great had annexed in the 18th century to the Russian motherland, like some sort of historical collecting hobby.
Putin’s Victory Lap of Imperial Nostalgia
Soon after achieving this territorial acquisition in 2014, Putin embarked on a triumphal tour through his shiny new province, celebrating the “return” of Crimea to the “native land” with more fanfare than a royal wedding. He described this as a touching tribute to “historical truth and the memory of our ancestors,” completely ignoring the minor detail that those ancestors had been dead for centuries.
He didn’t even bother to pretend his motives were defensive – about as defensive as a burglar explaining that he was just protecting the jewelry from getting lonely.
How could a Civil Service expert, trained in the fine art of reading situations, suggest otherwise? The only reasonable explanation is that this person genuinely, passionately believed in the absolute necessity of engaging with Russia, like a diplomatic true believer.
If Putin’s motives really were implacably imperialist and expansionist, then there would be absolutely nothing to discuss, no meetings to arrange, no engagement to pursue. Therefore, logically, those simply could not be his motives. Problem solved through the magic of wishful thinking!
The Circular Logic Trap of Eternal Optimism
If your starting point is that engagement is always the answer to every problem (like a diplomatic Swiss Army knife), then it becomes irresistibly tempting to massage the problem until it fits your preferred solution, rather than the other way around.
The danger is that you trap yourself in a giant circular argument with more loops than a roller coaster, featuring the following stages of diplomatic denial:
1. Engagement is always the answer (it’s practically a religious belief at this point)
2. But wait – the leader of the hostile state just announced his determination to rebuild his empire, invade his neighbors, and flip the entire global security order upside down like a particularly destructive toddler
3. Yes, it’s deeply concerning, but he probably doesn’t really mean it (fingers crossed!), and even if he does, we can surely talk him out of it with the power of polite conversation
4. How and why can we change his mind? With engagement, obviously, because that is always, eternally, forever and ever the answer
Diplomats caught in this delightful mental pretzel may be the absolute last people on Earth to realize the truth about a hostile dictator, even if he’s broadcasting his evil intentions with the subtlety of a neon sign in Times Square.
They will desperately want to believe that his future path is still undecided, like a choose-your-own-adventure book where engagement might yet divert him from the highway to bloodshed and international mayhem.
They will struggle mightily to recognize when the dictator has made up his mind and all that remains is to oppose him with everything we’ve got and ensure he fails spectacularly.
The West’s Collective Superpower (When Used Correctly)
The West has more than enough collective power to stop any expansionist regime dead in its tracks, provided we actually use our leverage hard and early, rather than treating it like fine china that’s too precious to actually use.
But some of our diplomats will always prefer to advise against getting tough, like concerned parents worried about upsetting the school bully.
They will issue grave warnings that if we do get serious, the hostile state will dramatically cancel our precious engagement opportunities, which we must preserve at all costs like endangered diplomatic pandas.
They will fret about “jeopardizing the next meeting” (because apparently scheduling is more important than sovereignty) and “empowering the hardliners while marginalizing the moderates” – an argument so formulaic and unfalsifiable it could be generated by a particularly pessimistic AI.
They will insist that the regime is not a monolith (shocking revelation!), that not everyone around the dictator agrees with him (who would have thought?), that somehow the moderates could still prevail if we just believe hard enough, and that we should look for cracks in their unity rather than give them something to unite against.
This might sound like sophisticated analysis worthy of a think tank, but the problem is that our adversaries know exactly how our diplomats think because this approach has been more predictable than British weather complaints for decades.
The Enemy’s Playbook: Engagement as Entanglement
So hostile states play along with theatrical enthusiasm, creating the impression that they want nothing more than serious, meaningful engagement, probably while practicing their sincerity faces in the mirror.
They will agree to endless dialogue sessions and say all the right conciliatory words, like actors reading from a script, simply to tie us down and lead us to constrain our own options. They’re essentially running down the clock, delaying that awkward moment when we finally realize we’re being played and decide to actually use our leverage.
For hostile states, the real purpose of engagement is seldom to reach any actual agreement, but rather to stop us from doing anything meaningful that might interfere with their plans. It’s like agreeing to negotiate while secretly moving all your chess pieces when the other player isn’t looking.
That’s exactly how Putin has been handling Donald Trump for the past six months – like a master puppeteer working with particularly colorful marionette. Iran has been perfecting this strategy for years with the dedication of Olympic athletes, often succeeding spectacularly until their recent 12-day military adventure.
The Salisbury Incident: When Spy Fiction Became Reality
Some of our diplomats remain vulnerable to these tactics because their belief in “keeping channels open” can lead them to recommend staying our hand and limiting our options with the enthusiasm of people tying their own shoelaces together.
In March 2018, Russian intelligence decided to play a real-life game of international assassination by trying to murder former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia at their adopted home in Salisbury. They used novichok nerve agent – because apparently regular poison wasn’t dramatic enough – which later tragically killed an innocent British mother, Dawn Sturgess, who had nothing to do with international espionage whatsoever.
The Foreign Office revealed on Friday that two Russian spies had been enthusiastically hacking Yulia Skripal’s mobile phone as early as 2013, like digital stalkers with government credentials.
Warning Signs: The Language Police Are Watching
But I can already spot warning signs flashing like a malfunctioning traffic light. Turn to page 28 of this year’s Defence Review and you’ll witness Russia described as an “immediate and pressing threat” (fair enough), while China gets the considerably gentler label of “sophisticated and persistent challenge.”
The same passage describes Chinese technology as a “leading challenge for the UK,” which sounds about as threatening as a particularly difficult crossword puzzle.
Why “challenge”? Back in my Private Office days, I would desperately try to banish that word from the foreign secretary’s speeches for the simple reason that “challenge” is usually a diplomatic euphemism for either “problem” or “threat” – like calling a hurricane “aggressive weather patterns.”
Like other hostile states with excellent PR departments, China is remarkably anxious to police the language in which they are described, like grammar nazis with geopolitical ambitions.
Have Xi’s officials privately warned our diplomats against describing China as a “threat,” perhaps while serving excellent tea and making subtle but unmistakable implications? Have they suggested that doing so would risk precious engagement opportunities and make it considerably harder to improve bilateral relations, like threatening to cancel a playdate?
I don’t know the answer to these questions, but it would be entirely in character for Chinese diplomats to politely threaten us about the dire consequences of calling them what they actually are.
China’s Role in Russia’s Ukrainian Adventure
If such warnings have been issued, we should respond that they have absolutely no right to try to dictate what we say in public, particularly since China self-evidently does pose a threat bigger than a particularly aggressive honey badger.
Every Russian drone and ballistic missile that smashes into Kyiv is practically overflowing with Chinese systems and components, revealing how Putin’s campaign to destroy Ukraine has always been underwritten by China like a particularly sinister business partnership.
Those killer drones all sport Chinese-made engines, purring along as they deliver their deadly cargo with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine of destruction.
In fact, just about every advanced conventional weapon in Putin’s impressive arsenal depends at some level on Chinese technology and industrial prowess, like a deadly international collaboration project. Russia’s war machine is, in substantial measure, a proud creation of China – “Made in China” has never been so ominous.
The Logic of Threat Recognition
If Russia poses a threat to Britain (and it absolutely does), then China must too, through simple logical deduction that even a particularly slow computer could manage.
Our ministers and officials should absolutely not allow their burning desire to engage to inhibit them from stating the blindingly obvious, like refusing to call fire “hot” because it might hurt the fire’s feelings.
In fairness to David Lammy, our current Foreign Secretary, he did describe China as a “sophisticated and persistent threat” in the Commons in June, showing admirable backbone. But why did the Defence Review mysteriously settle for the wimpy euphemism “challenge” instead?
The Path Forward: Engagement Without Naivety
None of this rules out engagement with hostile states entirely – we’re not suggesting diplomatic hermit status. If there’s a clear objective, backed by collective leverage that actually means something, then we should absolutely proceed with negotiations.
But we must do it without repeating the same old mistakes that have gotten us into trouble before, like diplomatic Groundhog Day.
And self-censorship is where the error begins – the first domino in a long line of diplomatic dominoes that leads straight to international embarrassment.
The moral of this story? Sometimes the bad guys really are just bad guys, engagement isn’t always the answer, and calling a threat a “challenge” doesn’t make it any less threatening – it just makes us look like we’re afraid of our own shadows.
Time to wake up, smell the diplomatic coffee, and start calling spades exactly what they are: spades. Preferably before they’re used to dig our own graves.
Written by someone who spent way too much time watching this circus from the inside
Author: AI
Published: 19 July 2025