The Sins of the New Diplomacy

...Diplomacy by conference, collective security, balance of power?these are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but modes of approach which complement each other in a complex world...

...We would have real cause for dismay if the weaker states, by their cabals and combines, committed serious harm where good might otherwise be done...

...Indeed, Sir Harold may well be tilting at windmills...

...As the Nazi shadow loomed, Sir Harold may have regretted his share in furthering the campaign against the 1919 settlement...

...It is an "American method," one bequeathed by Woodrow Wilson...

...Woodrow Wilson's chief disservice, as Sir Harold Nicolson knows perfectly well, lay in his own self-righteous behavior rather than in the institution which he helped establish: his insistence that he could speak for America when Americans wanted to have no voice...

...Error and misjudgment in foreign policy are, of course, the main source of trouble...

...Yet, the best of cases should not be overstated, and the twentieth century, to whose confusion Wood-row Wilson contributed, was not invented by Wilson...

...Furthermore, diplomacy by conference was, during the years of American isolation, more a European than an American phenomenon...

...Though he never forgave Woodrow Wilson, he did not go along with those who played into Hitler's hands by attributing to Versailles the new German menace...

...Amenities between governments are a gauge of civilization...

...open diplomacy, which the Asian and Latin American countries admittedly abuse sometimes at the United Nations, does provide them with a forum...

...But after 1919, says Sir Harold, matters were made worse by the way in which policy was framed and executed...

...But would those regimes have been any more benevolent in its absence, or the world any better off...

...The totalitarian regimes, right and left, have, to be sure, disfigured open diplomacy more than Sir Harold could have foreseen when he first indicted it in Peacemaking 1919...

...the League Covenant for which their President fought was Anglo-French rather than American in origin...

...Closed diplomacy was the product of a vanished social order...

...How, then, shall we decide between Old Diplomacy and New...

...the way he extorted vital concessions from France without being able to deliver promised compensatory guarantees...

...There is much truth in this, of course...

...in fact, the decisions of power still rest elsewhere...

...Wilson, when he deceived himself, misled others...

...The American people were not the only ones to demand open diplomacy...

...Open diplomacy has been our undoing—the attempt to apply to external affairs the ideas which characterize liberal democracy on the domestic scene...

...Yet, they might still, but for a collective death-wish of their own, have preserved the peace without her...

...not for Nicolson was that philosophy of the Cliveden Set for which Arnold Toynbee became a mouthpiece, the appeasement doctrine to which E. H. Carr lent himself and of which John Foster Dulles was an American exponent...

...But even the techniques of diplomacy which he espoused might have had a better chance if the American system at home had been capable of providing leadership...

...Reviewed by Lionel Gelber Author, "Peace by Power,'' "Reprieve from War," "The American Anarchy" Within the limited scope of these Oxford lectures, the eminent historian Sir Harold Nicolson reflects upon the virtues of the Old Diplomacy and the sins of the New with authority, eloquence and humor...

...There is room for both...

...The task of her partners, when the United States let them down, was a hard one...

...He provides a graceful account of how rulers and governments have, since the rise of the Greek city-states, developed an orderly means of negotiating agreements and maintaining relations with one another...

...in an age of totalitarian states, when no rooted value is safe, every form of interchange is bound to suffer...