I’m not usually given to listening to Marxists, let alone quoting them, but I shall make an exception for Leon Trotsky. His phrase “you may not be interested in war; but war is interested in you” is known the world over. It has been adapted a thousand different ways. At its core, though, is the understanding that one cannot bury one’s head in the sand when it comes to world affairs. Trotsky’s own end proved as much.
Despite thousands of years of international relations theory and practice, though, and despite how interconnected our world now is, it has felt to me that the field has been poorly served by political leaders in recent decades. The end of the Cold War, in particular, led some analysts to become untethered from the timeless lessons of Thucydides.
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, specifically through the Melian Dialogue between the powerful Athenians and the weak city of Melos, he describes how the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. That states might follow their own interests in this way has been considered perfectly normal until very recently.
In much of the West, however, there have been sincere (though, in my view, naive) attempts to replace this analysis with an alternative global system of participation in multilateral, and even supranational bodies.
From these organisations have flowed ideas that sound very appealing at Georgetown cocktail parties, Brussels plenaries and university lecture halls. These ideas look like so-called “binding” agreements on climate action, empty calls for “engagement” and a stultifying spread of corporate or DEI language in place of proper diplomacy. This approach reached a nadir under former US president Joe Biden, where Hamas, Iran and Russia felt emboldened by the weakness of this world order to strike out, seizing territory or committing atrocities.
But things are changing. Fast. US President Donald Trump’s second term has been building on the fantastic foreign policy success of the first term’s Abraham Accords, to enormous effect in the Middle East and beyond. They are using what the historian Niall Ferguson has called “real estate-ism” (a pun on the international relations school of “realism” as advocated most famously by the man whose biography Prof Ferguson is writing, Henry Kissinger).
Alongside his fellow New York property moguls, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (the latter being his own son-in-law, of course), Mr Trump has turned statecraft on its head. By combining diplomacy with economics, peace in Gaza is closer than ever, and there is every chance that many more nations join the UAE in the Abraham Accords with Israel. There is still a long way to go, but the fact that this approach is already bearing fruit should cause much soul-searching in the corridors of power and ivory towers of the world.
As a former education secretary in Britain, I think about this a lot. I was recently appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, for which I am both honoured and excited. This fantastic centre is not just a training school for the UAE’s diplomats and civil servants. It is also a research institute for the study of foreign affairs, based in the most dynamic and exciting country in the region, if not the world. The task of helping the Academy to grow even further in stature and scope has gotten me thinking about what awaits the next generation of diplomats, public servants and international relations theorists.
In light of the growing prominence of “real estate-ism”, we might consider that the opportunity of 21st-century diplomacy, then, may well be to use economics and finance in achieving the aims of foreign policy. This is not a new idea, but because it is one that is coming back into vogue, it must be studied carefully, balancing the risks with the rewards.
The latest edition of the esteemed Foreign Affairs magazine discusses the dangers of what it calls “the economics of weaponised interdependence”. This, too, is an important risk, with the rise of western sanctions against Russia, trade wars and tech embargoes by the US on China and the criticisms of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative in what was once called the developing world, the weaponisation of the global economy is happening already. The risks and opportunities must be studied closely.
The already-dizzying pace of change will be further altered irrevocably by the rise of artificial intelligence. The national security implications, the impact on energy consumption and even the speed with which we can now communicate across language barriers will be enormous disruptors. In my own career in politics and business, I have looked to the UAE’s leadership on these AI issues to see where these trends may go.
The world is at an important crossroads, and the UAE itself is a crossroads of sorts within it, perfectly situated at the juncture of continents and ideas. It is an exciting place to watch whatever happens next unfold, and to learn from it.
