Diplomacy and international relations are weird.
There was a moment in European history with the rise of absolutist monarchies where the state was served by thousands of officials but also was imagined as contained within the royal body of one ruler. The contemporary nation-state is far more elaborate, working through bigger and more complex bureaucracies, buoyed up by numerous theories and ideas about interstate relations and diplomacy, shaped by histories of total war and of multi-state alliances and global-scale institutions. But there’s a core idea in there of “the nation is a person and many people all at once, speaking and thinking with one will and acting with many hands”. It’s not true, of course, but it’s a powerful idea nevertheless.
The weirdness is present in what is actually said within interstate relationships and what is said about what is not being said. Leaders, officials and diplomats talk about needing to maintain prestige, showing consistency and continuity, demonstrating resolve or making good on threats, communicating goodwill and flexibility, deterring challengers and proving capacity.
Showing is a key conceptual underpinning, that states and interstate institutions must act to match what was said in diplomatic or official speech. Even if in some sense the actions either really don’t match or are about three or four magnitudes off what was promised in speech.
Sometimes that difference in magnitude is lesser, sometimes far greater. What seems like a minor threat to a nation’s prestige can be said to justify an expensive and destructive military response in order to banish any doubts. What seems like an extraordinary effusive and unlimited assurance of close ties can turn into a little wet squib of actively granted support. The relationship between what was said and what is done is never a cleanly empirical one; it is always a matter of theoretically elaborate and often peculiar interpretative work. (Get rid of the humanities, eh? You’ll be sorry.)
When you add the secondary layer provided in public commentary, reportage and expert after-action analysis, things get especially head-spinning. Governments start telling publics about what they meant to have said as if those not-said statements have the same reality as what they actually said. Hypotheticals and counterfactuals nest inside one another, all of them amplifying and directing what states actually do and what they imaginarily claim to have done. States act sometimes in order to foreclose one perfectly possible interpretation of a previous statement or commitment, or act against what people might be thinking. Officials explain that they did what they did because of something they might have been thinking but can’t acknowledge having actually thought. If we do not do this thing now, then something we don’t want to happen might happen, but we’re not acknowledging that we think what might happen could have happened because in acknowledging it we might cause it to happen.
There’s an Alan Dean Foster adaptation of one of the episodes of the animated Star Trek (the original one) that involves the recreational planet where the computer can read your mind and make your scenario come to life with quick-fab robots, and the Enterprise crew has to find a way not to think the things that might kill them because the computer has become malevolent. And yet as Foster tells us what they’re thinking, he has to tell the reader enough about the thoughts the characters are trying not to think that we get a clear sense of why it would be bad for them to think them.
That’s how we all talk about how states talk to each other and talk about the talking they’re not doing as well.
This is all very abstract. Let me concretize it.
The United States says it wants Israel to avoid occupying Gaza indefinitely and that the United States instead advocates the Palestinian Authority having administrative power over both the West Bank and Gaza. But if you’re an observer of the situation, you know that this either means the United States, despite its formidable intelligence capabilities and large diplomatic corps, doesn’t understand something that is as basic as breathing air about the whole situation, which is that the Palestinian Authority has zero legitimacy with people in the West Bank or Gaza and also in practical terms has no administrative capacity to speak of, or it means that the United States does understand that and is therefore calling for something that they know has no hope of working in order to have legitimacy in the eyes of some yet-to-be-named actors for the sake of some yet-to-be-solution. “Legitimacy” is one of those weird words—it’s about beliefs, thoughts, inchoate possibilities. Lunchtime is an illusion, legitimacy doubly so.
Israel says it might stay in Gaza but it’s not saying “occupation” exactly. What does ‘staying’ mean? Well, not occupation. Because that has a sort-of-specific legal meaning that creates perceived liabilities—despite the fact that Israel, like most states, ignores international law as a bunch of piffles whenever those piffles are inconvenient—but more because Israel’s government wants to make clear that it doesn’t want anybody to get the wrong idea that it intends to be responsible for Gaza later on. Only it doesn’t want to say that it won’t be, because “getting rid of Hamas” might require not allowing anyone else to assume administrative responsibility. Only, well, even then, Israel won’t have that kind of responsibility, where you might have to provide water and schools and electricity and hospitals and policemen and a connection between the rulers and the ruled. Some kind of responsibility-not-responsibility. Let’s not talk about it. But also let’s say it because everybody wants to know “what do you mean by ‘getting rid of Hamas’”?
Hamas says—or some of Hamas says to the international press— “Well, our cause was dying, so we had to get it back on the international agenda”. You mean, by getting most of your people dead because you killed so many Israelis? No, no, not really that way. Well, sort of. Why wasn’t the Palestinian cause on the agenda any longer? Well, you know, the Arab states don’t think that way as much now except after the attack they do once again. Mission accomplished! Wait, what are we talking about here? States as persons again? Which persons? Do we think that the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf states, are now saying “Oh dear yes, the Palestinians, put them back on the to-do list!” Oh, Hamas is thinking that it’s the publics of Arab states that are remembering the Palestinians and forcing their governments to remember along with them? Wait, we’re saying that the publics of Arab states are what we’re talking about? In those countries which have recently stuffed their publics and their opinions down some kind of murder hole? How are these publics mattering when they didn’t matter when they wanted a different government in their own nations? What are we even talking about here in terms of imaginary entities that imaginarily matter?
The diplomatic conversations are about what Iran might think or say or be telling its proxies to do, even though the attack by Hamas on Israel now seems widely conceded to have only worked because a small coterie of military leaders of Hamas kept tight informational security and didn’t even tell their own ostensible political commanders.
The discussions are about Israel’s leaders acting towards Gaza based on a belief that Hamas had become committed to administrative sovereignty over Gaza and therefore uninterested in antagonism to Israel even though that view by Israeli leaders was also almost gloatingly proud about having trapped Hamas in responsibility towards Gaza that they could never fulfill due to Israeli restrictions rather than excitement about the possibility of having a reliable negotiating partner. And all of this opens up new questions: wait, did our false perception of your thinking that was concealing our real but very obvious intent in our thinking about that false perception actually cause you to do something that we in fact really did not want you to do? Did the non-causal non-involvement of Iran now force it to pretend to be involved and in control of events and therefore to order other attacks it didn’t previously contemplate because it needs to maintain the fiction of control that is then an important premise of other performances of influence by its adversaries?
A long time ago on the Internet, I came across an exuberant advocate of “info war” who professed to have a connection to the American government. I’ve never forgotten a few brief sparrings with this person inside a close community. They may have been entirely fake, or exaggerating, or completely real. But I can’t help but think that the noise of this kind of style of speaking in the public sphere and the ways in which it is both imagined to inform action and plainly does inform action is a kind of own goal for every state in the world. You have to wonder what a world where the Israeli government said plainly to Hamas in 2016 or so, “We think you are preoccupied with governing Gaza and not interested in attacking us, are we right?” where that question was asked honestly and where Hamas said, “Nope, we reserve the right to attack you any time, in part because we couldn’t possibly administer Gaza under present conditions anyway” might turn out to be like.
Informational asymmetry and covert action are a religious faith in the modern interstate system: there is a belief that properly pursued, they will be a superpower that lets one state do all the things that it doesn’t want to pay for, doesn’t have the political resolve to accomplish or acknowledge otherwise. It’s the magnification of the disease of game theory in the form Nash originally set out: that the only winner is the solitary actor who holds all the information, has all the clarity of actual intent, and acts alone with relentless rationality to satisfy their plainly envisioned utility. The only plain thing is that this state of affairs is neither an achievable objective nor is it any way for human beings to actually live with intention and desire in the world.
All this belief does is puff up a strange, weird space of imaginarily masterful informational ratfuckery and misdirection to surreal dimensions, which in its ballooning form ends up seemingly compelling states and institutions to make people suffer and to regard that outcome as necessary because of what was said, thought and unsaid at some past moment. Everybody who wants a better world needs to say to all of it, “You are all a pack of cards!” and hope it collapses into an impotent wind of unrooted semantics and esoteric nonsense immediately afterwards.
‘Normal’ people---I don’t want to put any weight on *our* being ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’---see that the ratfuckers have gotten their respective nations in a jam. *This* war between Israel and Palestine ‘feels’ more violent, gruesome, and intractable than previous conflicts I recall---proving I’m one of the impressionable *normals*, not one of the rationally discerning, well-informed policy analysts, sociologists, and historians who see how things stand but are powerless to influence national actors’ real politik. Among the obstacles to peace is the reluctance of heads of state to defer to international diplomacy, especially through the UN. Rather, our ‘princes’ seem content to let Israel’s demolition of Palestine proceed until it reaches a threshold of ‘intolerable human catastrophe’. *Normal* me’s not confident that all state actors will agree when enough-is-enough. I doubt that regular ‘citizens’ can call the bluff on leaders who claim they’re doing the nation’s will, especially when they provoke their supporters to refuse evidence to the contrary.
That it’s still easy for us to personify whole nations as single-minded actors---as princes vying for advantage---fascinates me. Hobbes made it a staple of political economy. In the Treatise, David Hume tries to tell a ‘naturalized’ story of historical social conventions---except when the risk of offending readers makes him fudge. He agrees with “Political writers [who] tell us, that in every kind of intercourse, a body politic is to be consider’d as one person.” Hume allows that personal moral standards also apply to state actions. However, “there is a system of morals calculated for princes, much more free than that which ought to govern private persons.” He rationalizes this is because moral judgments that touch on interstate relationships “[have] not the same force as [feelings towards] private persons and may lawfully be transgress’d from a more trivial motive.” So Hume prevaricates: princes don’t feel strong moral obligations to other nations because they’re collectives---not people. He glosses over princes’ conviction of their prerogatives, and the fact that *normal* folks accept them too. [Selby-Bigge, ed., Treatise, bk. 3, prt. 2, sect. 11: 567-9]