The leopard and the mouse

Watching Lavrov and Rubio in Riyadh

Among the many striking features of Trump’s appalling betrayal of Ukraine has been the gaucheness and utter naivéte of the Trump ‘team’s’ diplomacy. Perhaps Trump thinks it’s clever to break basic rules of effective negotiation, who knows. Watching the new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in Saudi Arabia was like watching a leopard encounter a mouse. Lavrov has a lifetime’s experience of vicious diplomacy, for the last decade or so defending the ghastly and lawless Putin. Rubio’s experience of diplomacy is, well, zero. My guess is that Lavrov couldn’t believe his luck. The talks resulted in concessions that all favoured Russia, so the results speak for themselves, above all the restoration of full diplomatic relations after Russia’s isolation which followed its invasion of Ukraine. It’s usual in negotiations to get something when you give something. What did the Americans get in return? Well, nothing, though perhaps Trump will be rewarded with some real estate deal for a tacky skyscraper in Moscow - or occupied Crimea.

Lavrov was the Russian ambassador at the UN Security Council for all the years I served there for the Brits, from 1998 to 2002. He was by some measure the best ambassador on the Council, by which of course I don’t mean good. He was playing a very weak hand in representing a Russia that was scarcely more isolated than it is today (but for the Americans). But he made sure that Russia was at the centre of diplomatic discussion of all the important issues and indeed that seemed to be the consistent point of his approach - that Russia be taken seriously as a world power. He reacted most angrily when Russia was patronised or left out of discussion. He hated the then head of the Iraq weapons inspection body, an Australian called Richard Butler (one of the world’s worst diplomats), for telling him in words and actions that his true masters was not the Security Council but the Americans (though at least he told the truth).

Lavrov was the superior of any diplomat on the Council partly because Russia was weak. American diplomats don’t - or didn’t in those days - have to be particularly skilled because the US was top dog and could afford to be rude and insensitive while telling everyone what to do. I watched several US ambassadors fumble the ball in the Council, including the highly-lauded Richard Holbrooke, the man who claimed to end the Bosnia war (in fact it was NATO bombs that did it). Once, after several hours of tense debate on Israel’s latest outrage in the West Bank, Holbrooke marched in, pushed his deputy out of the way to sit down, then announced that because he had just spoken to Washington, everything his deputy had been saying for the last few hours should be ignored, thereby humiliating his colleague and insulting the collected diplomats on the Council all in one sentence. He also organised the most embarrassing occasion I have witnessed at the Security Council, when he invited the awful Republican senator, Jesse Helms, to lecture the UN about how useless it was and how ludicrous it was for the US to have equal status to, for example, Bangladesh (he actually said this in front of the Bangladeshis - the US had strong-armed all the UN member states to attend this dismal occasion). The point, apparently, was that Helms, having been given his say, would then unblock American funding to the UN. As ever, the rest of the world was supposed to tolerate the US using the UN to play out its own domestic politics, to which we all had to attend closely, just like now. (And I’m not anti-American being married to an American wife and with American children, just anti-American diplomacy.)

Meanwhile, British ambassadors rested on their post-imperial laurels, believing that because they spoke with a toffee accent everyone should take them seriously. Other diplomats naturally didn’t see it the same way, instead viewing us as self-regarding parrots of the American line. Some British diplomats nevertheless were pretty good, mastering the complex detail and fluid emotional and geopolitical dynamics of UN diplomacy. The French were similar, though for most of my time ‘on the Council’ they were represented by a verbose man called Déjammet, whom we nicknamed ‘Déja-dit’ because he spoke at such repetitious length. His major contribution to the UN was to pen a book about the best places in the UN complex to take a nap. I often pitied the people of the Western Sahara, East Timor or Palestine who might cling to the illusion that the Council was a place of high diplomacy and intelligent debate. It was sometimes, but it was often a place of stultifying boredom and, most troublingly, indifference to the suffering of others (‘once we’re done with Rwanda, let’s get lunch’). The only time I remember Council diplomats ever getting upset was, perhaps unsurprisingly, 12 September 2001, when, deeply shaken, we stood to adopt the resolution condemning the attacks of the day before (the only time, I think, that this has happened). I remember being able to smell smoke in the Council chamber that had drifted from downtown, though maybe my memory has made this up. On other occasions, reports of mass death or war crimes were often met with bored gazes as the diplomats occasionally looked up from their notebooks. Needless to say, the actual people from the place we were discussing were never present (and that’s why I founded Independent Diplomat, which I’m glad to say is still going strong 20 years later).

Lavrov is of course multilingual. His English is better than most English people’s. When he spoke at the Council, which he would do in Russian, one of the official languages of the UN, he would listen to the interpretation of his words into English as he spoke. Now and again, he would pause his intervention, put down his earpiece, lean into the microphone, and say - this time in English - something like, ‘I’m sorry but the interpretation of what I’ve just said is incorrect, in fact I said ‘the discovery of the residues of VX chemical weapons in the Iraqi desert is not in fact proof that VX stocks still exist’’. When he was listening to the other ambassadors droning on inconsequentially, he could be seen sketching intricate and baroque patterns onto the blotter that lay on the desk in front of him. He would sometimes leave these behind, where young diplomats would collect them as souvenirs (I didn’t).

Please take this solely as professional admiration: the man himself is hateful. He gladly represents a country whose leader invades other countries illegally, whose troops conduct widespread, systematic and savage torture and who murders his political opponents. It’s a loss to those who care about justice and international law that Lavrov is Putin’s man, not ours.

In the sort of detailed negotiations with which the Americans must now contend as they sell Ukraine down the river, Lavrov is formidable. He is the master of the intricacy and wordplay of UN resolutions and indeed diplomatic agreements in general. I spent a year of my life negotiating what was then, and I think still is, the longest resolution in UN history, SCR (Security Council resolution) 1284 which was about weapons inspections and sanctions in Iraq. The then US national security adviser called its text ‘Talmudic’ in its complexity. France, China and Russia refused to agree it for many months. We and the US only got the resolution through after a month of private negotiations at ambassadorial level in the dismal (now rebuilt) US mission building across First Avenue from the UN (the coffee was terrible too). It was basically a US-Russia negotiation, because the Brits and the French weren’t relevant as they would vote with, respectively, the Americans or the Russians (I don’t remember the Chinese even being there, as they would agree anything the Russians could accept). After Lavrov had run rings around the hapless American UN diplomats, Washington eventually sent one of their heavyweights, Tom Pickering. He was the only diplomat I’ve seen who matched Lavrov’s skill, although he was lucky enough to practice it in his own language, for in private negotiations there were no interpreters and Lavrov was obliged to speak in English. Pickering took on Lavrov point by point, argument by argument, for day after day, for hours every day. It was a masterclass in diplomatic negotiation and, for once, I saw Lavrov bested (once retired, Tom was later to join the advisory board of Independent Diplomat).

Unfortunately for the Americans, and sadly the Ukrainians too, Rubio is clearly no Tom Pickering. I watched Lavrov eyeing him over the grandiose table in Riyadh as an easy snack. It didn’t help that the fool in Washington had already sold the farm to Russia by making basic negotiating errors - above all, giving away your concessions at the start by saying that a) it was time to make peace (when continued war does not serve Russia when it is losing vast quantities of men and equipment); b) that in any peace deal Ukraine would have to give up territory (when the American and Ukrainian previous position was that Russia should leave all of Ukraine’s territory including Crimea) - according to the Trump twits, this concession is only being ‘realistic’; c) that the US would not come to Ukraine’s military aid (the threat of which has always been a restraint on Russia, for instance the explicit threat of massive US conventional retaliation if the Russians ever used tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine); d) not maintaining a consistent line (according to the New York Times, Rubio has been saying to European allies that in fact Trump doesn’t mean what he’s said about Ukraine - as if the Russians don’t read the New York Times; e) undermining your own side by appearing to sideline the US envoy on Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, including by excluding him from the actual talks about the war, thus reducing your - much needed - ability to talk to multiple countries simultaneously, because now no one can trust what Kellogg (or indeed Rubio) says while America’s partners are forced to play the ludicrous game of working out what Trump really means; f) excluding those countries on your side from the talks so that Russia only has to worry about one - rather idiotic - interlocutor (and of course it’s now clear that Trump’s regime and Europe are not in fact on the same side). The Americans have also just given Russia a free cookie by refusing to include the word ‘aggression’ in a G7 statement about Ukraine, when that word has since the invasion been used by the G7 to describe Russia’s conduct. Hey, let’s just be nice (while we work to undermine our allies’ position)! It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

Then there’s the whole business of ‘security guarantees’. Zelensky has understandably said that Ukraine will require such guarantees before it will agree any deal i.e. that credible other military powers will come to Ukraine’s aid if there is renewed Russian aggression. It’s pretty clear that Zelensky realises he’s going to have to give up much of eastern Ukraine and Crimea in any deal (note that he does not stress this aspect). But it’s entirely right for him to demand security guarantees. The only problem is that clearly any guarantee the US might now offer is utterly worthless - would you trust your security to Trump? Lavrov, meanwhile, as ever several steps ahead of everyone else, particularly Washington, has said that NATO members cannot station any forces in a post-ceasefire Ukraine. This means that Russia would refuse to agree any UK and French troops on the ground to ‘monitor’ or uphold any ceasefire. The UK and France are apparently discussing such a joint operation but they in no way match the military credibility of a US guarantee, for their forces are much weaker, barely able to sustain themselves let alone defend a frontline of many hundreds of miles. Lavrov correctly realises that any NATO presence would of course risk a wider NATO response to future Russian attacks in Ukraine, which Russia so far has successfully avoided. The UK is doubtless calculating that even Trump would be forced to step in if British troops were killed in Ukraine. Lavrov wants to make sure that doesn’t happen. It’s only a matter of time before Trump concedes this too - over the heads of those whose troops would be there and, of course, Ukraine.

Right now, the Americans having given all the rest away, the only real card Zelensky has left is to refuse to agree and keep on fighting. This is not exactly attractive particularly if the US stops supplying weapons and of course risks marking him as the spoiler for any Trump-Putin deal (though Trump seems happy to heap on the insults even before then). Lavrov is doubtless already calculating this end-game through and working out what he can get or, maybe, give - perhaps a little piece of paper signed by Putin promising not to invade anyone again.