Any book that starts with a speech by Archidamus and the Peloponnesian War is catnip to a certain type of reader. And A. Wess Mitchell’s Great Power Diplomacy, though it competes in a crowded field, does exactly what it sets out to do: Explain how and why diplomacy has mattered over the last millennium or two—and why it really matters today.
There is a grand tradition of books on diplomacy, some of which I dust but seldom. Obviously Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy is up there. So, too, is Robert Zoellick’s history of U.S. diplomacy. George Herring did a nice two-volume history of U.S. diplomacy that is textbook in its tidiness. Other practitioners, and legends of diplomacy, have also taken up the pen: We have Prince Talleyrand’s belated memoirs (he served four kings, one emperor, and a revolution) and his scurrilous letters. Klemens von Metternich’s memoirs, not to be confused with Kissinger’s thesis, are good. Gustav Stresemann’s papers have been collected, too, lasting longer and with more credit than the Weimar Republic ever did.
The great virtues of Mitchell’s tour through a couple millennia of Western diplomacy are its readability and the author’s grasp of the realities and practicalities of diplomacy as practiced over time. Mitchell, being both a historian and a practicing diplomat (he holds a Ph.D. from the Free University of Berlin and was the European desk chief at the State Department in the first Trump administration) brings both pen and sword to bear in his romp through Western history. And what a romp it is.
What Mitchell has done in this book about diplomacy is what Carl von Clausewitz wishes he could have done with On War. It is a delightful historical survey that serves up great stories but also illustrates genuinely timeless precepts and prescriptions.
Starting with the Byzantines, after dispensing with the Greeks in the introduction to the first chapter, Mitchell catalogues the diplomatic intrigues employed by the Venetians, French, Austrians, Germans, British, and Americans. (The sections on Austria are among the strongest; Mitchell’s previous book, The Grand Strategy of the Habsburg Empire, is seminal.) The book covers 1,500 years in a fifth as many pages, and the footnotes themselves are a delight—not just for the scope of erudition but sometimes the wit.
Machiavelli wrote about diplomacy, too, and with an eye to practicality, but with more malice. Mitchell doesn’t do that. Grand strategy is not something to be decided by warfare, Mitchell insists. Nor by the Kantian hopes of international law, which took some time to get going but really came into its own after World War II, with supranational organizations and treaties and charters and tribunals sprouting like mushrooms.
“The diplomat, this book argues, plays an indispensable role in the life of nations that neither the soldier nor the lawyer can replace,” he writes. Diplomacy, he maintains, is the younger brother of strategy: The grand art of identifying a state’s core interests and then figuring out a way to defend them—or advance them or even just buy time—is what diplomacy is, or was, all about.
The Habsburg Empire, Mitchell’s favorite, is a good example of the returns that clever and focused diplomacy can offer. Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg was in his 30s when he joined Austria’s Privy Conference in the mid-18th century, and before long he would start a four-decade career as the empire’s de facto foreign minister. What he achieved, Mitchell writes, was a brilliant, if ultimately frustrated, bid to use diplomacy to compensate for the sprawling Habsburg Empire’s weaknesses, first and foremost militarily.
Austria had just suffered a painful amputation and near death in a grueling war from 1740 to 1748 with Prussia. To avoid a repeat, Kaunitz determined to reverse centuries of Habsburg policy by embracing France as an insurance policy against the “monster” of Frederick the Great in Berlin. Years of overtures, including when he was ambassador in Paris after that war, didn’t quite deliver the goods. But his idea to secretly approach French King Louis XV through the king’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was both unconventional and effective.
“Approaching Pompadour wasn’t strictly proper; protocol dictated that official communications go through the foreign ministry,” Mitchell writes. “It also risked the good name of the Habsburg empress, a pious ruler who would have blanched at the idea of passing notes to a fellow Catholic monarch in the boudoir of an adulteress.” But the offer of a seismic shift in Europe’s alliance structure worked, and just in time for the next big European war, the Seven Years’ War, Austria had flipped the script on centuries of diplomatic practice and given itself the upper hand in an epic battle for survival.
“The last war had shown the catastrophic consequences of being caught without effective allies against such an opponent,” Mitchell writes. “Austria was not going to recover Silesia and find lasting safety against Prussia on the basis of her military strength alone. She needed new friends, even if they were old enemies, and even if she had to go through unsavory channels to reach them.”
Before Kauntiz’s coup against more than two centuries of Habsburg statecraft, he had already taken steps to modernize a clunky Austrian diplomatic machine to give the empire a better chance at using all the tools at its disposal to fend off eternal threats. He overhauled the formerly one-man, no-records-kept Austrian Court Chancellery, the embryonic foreign ministry, expanded the number of senior officials, stamped out corruption, and instituted regular reporting requirements. Kaunitz’s reforms made it a more effective instrument of state policy than lumbering and poorly led armies would prove to be.
“These changes produced an efficient diplomatic machinery over which Kaunitz exercised as much control as Frederick had over his well-drilled regiments,” Mitchell writes.
Kaunitz matched his charm offensive in Paris with similar overtures toward Russia, and tampered tensions with Austria’s other long-time nemesis, the Ottoman Empire. “The results were astonishing. In the space of a couple of years, Kaunitz was able to rearrange the European gameboard decisively to Austria’s advantage,” Mitchell writes. And he did it all in the service of the House of Habsburg, and specifically the Empress Maria Theresa, who would look back years later and claim credit herself for Kaunitz’s triumphs. “Posterity will hardly believe I succeeded,” she would write, according to Mitchell.
Those lessons—embracing diplomacy to complement or supplant military power, and ensuring that diplomacy is bridled to the interests of the state—were already apparent from even further in the past, and still very valid today. In fact, Kaunitz was, for all his brilliance, in a way cribbing from diplomatic masters that had come before him, including the very France that would be the centerpiece of his own masterstroke.
Just look at what France did after the disaster at Pavia during the Italian War of 1521-26, when the French king was taken captive by Habsburg forces, which were then more powerful. “After Pavia, France was forced to accelerate the development of diplomacy as a tool of strategy in order to escape the noose of Habsburg encirclement,” he writes. Not only did France nearly pioneer modern diplomatic machinations—Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin come to mind—but for centuries, diplomacy was conducted in French. Even Kaunitz’s gambit centuries later was known as the renversement des alliances.
Today, of course, diplomacy is conducted in English. And neither the Americans nor the British lately have quite gotten ahold of the handle—notwithstanding Mitchell’s assessment of Britain’s diplomatic trapeze acts at the turn of the 20th century, before the disaster of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the 1938 Munich Agreement gave appeasement a bad name and cast it all in discredit.
And that downgrading of the importance of diplomacy, Mitchell maintains, is a problem. His prescriptions for culling the U.S. State Department, including staff cuts, square with current Trump administration priorities, but he does bring receipts, some dating from more than 1,000 years ago. His argument is not that the State Department and its bureaus aren’t important; it’s that they are too important to take their eye off the ball, which is the preservation of the strategic space and security for the state they serve. Even Talleyrand, tarred by some as a turncoat for serving successive and wildly opposite regimes, always had a north star, which was France.
“Effective bureaucracies are those that stay laser-focused on diplomacy’s core functions while staying in lockstep with the will of the executive,” Mitchell writes.
Leaving the current executive out of it, this book is a wonderful journey through Western diplomatic history, told with knowledge, insight, humor, rigor, and scholarship. I wish there were more like it.
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