International Studies Perspectives (2005) 6, 409–430.

Pax Americana: Bumping into Diplomatic

Culture
GEOFFREY WISEMAN
University of Southern California

The existence of a deeply rooted, state-based diplomatic culture with its

own distinctive institutions, values, and norms has been neglected
in both the study and the practice of international relations, especially in
the United States. This neglect has had consequences in recent years,
notably in connection with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Using Iraq as a
case study, I argue that the United States transgressed five norms of
diplomatic culture that are widely accepted: the use of force only as last
resort, transparency, continuous dialogue, multilateralism, and civility.
Criticisms of these transgressions and the US responses to these criticisms
suggest that even a paramount America cannot avoid diplomatic culture’s
pervasive influence.

Keywords: diplomatic culture, diplomatic norms, hegemonic excep-

tion, Iraq, George W. Bush

In what has been a resurgence of interest in diplomacy since the end of the Cold
War, the idea of diplomatic culture has been receiving fresh research attention. In
recent times, the existence of such a culture has been undervalued in both the study
and the practice of international relations (IR). In terms of the study of IR, the main
question is how diplomatic culture can be conceptualized, developed, and brought
into the larger conversation about IR theory. As for its role in the practice of IR, this
culture is, I contend, now widely accepted to various degrees, both tacitly and
explicitly, by all states in the international system, irrespective of their size, level of
economic development, and political orientation. Furthermore, it is accepted in all
the world’s regions and international institutions, and indeed by many nonstate
individuals and groups. The intent here is to describe the existent diplomatic cul-
ture and to explore its role in the specific case of Iraq.

Definitional Issues and Perspectives on Diplomatic Culture

To help describe diplomatic culture, this section offers a working definition of the
concept, considers some related definitional issues, and then identifies and expli-
cates four perspectives on it.
Diplomatic Culture
The distinctive diplomatic culture that I am speaking ofFwhich I define as the
accumulated communicative and representational norms, rules, and institutions devised to

Author’s note: Earlier versions of this article were presented at the DiploFoundation conference in Malta, February
2004, and at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, March 2004. I wish to thank the
ISP anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful remarks. In addition, James Der Derian, John Odell, Paul Sharp, and
Adam Watson offered stimulating comments. I would also like to thank Christina Gray and Christopher Griffin for
their research assistance, and the United States Institute of Peace and the Center for International Studies at the
University of Southern California for their support.

r 2005 International Studies Association.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
410 Diplomatic Culture

improve relations and avoid war between interacting and mutually recognizing political
entitiesFhas evolved over many centuries. Its main sources are (1) state diplomatic
practice (Hamilton and Langhorne 1995); (2) understandings and agreements
about diplomatic practice codified in international law, especially those treaties re-
lating specifically to diplomatic and consular relations, such as the Vienna Con-
ventions (Langhorne 1992); and (3) the memoirs and writings of classical scholars
and diplomats, such as Grotius and Callières (Berridge, Keens-Soper, and Otte
2001), and major modern texts, such as Satow’s Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1957),
Nicolson’s Diplomacy (1954), and Mattingly’s Renaissance Diplomacy (1955). This last
source now also includes contemporary works on diplomacy that focus on such
topics as the still-evolving methods and instruments of diplomatic machinery (Ber-
ridge 2002); the putative decline of ‘‘sovereignty-diplomacy’’ in IR (Hocking 1999;
Melissen 1999); efforts by certain self-identified middle powers to develop a theory
and practice of middle power diplomacy (Cooper, Higgott, and Nossal 1993); the
normative idea of according diplomacy a much stronger preventive function (Lund
1996); and the rise of nonstate actors as new diplomatic players (Sharp 2001;
Neumann 2002; Wiseman 2004). Important to the case at hand is the authorship of
these works. Diplomatic historians and scholars sensitive to ‘‘English School’’ theory
are heavily dominant, and ‘‘Third-World’’ writers are relatively absent. And while
the level of interest in the theoretical study of diplomacy is generally high among
writers in small- and middle-sized Western states (such as the Nordic countries,
Australia, and Canada), AmericansFwith some notable exceptions (for example,
Der Derian 1987)Fhave generally neglected it (Sharp 1999).

Other Definitional Issues

Several definitional claims and distinctions also need to be made explicit, starting
with the term diplomacy itself. The first step here is to reinforce the distinction
emphasized by British diplomat Harold Nicolson (1969:3–5) between foreign policy
and diplomacy, as the blurring of this distinction is one reason why diplomacy in
general and diplomatic culture in particular are neglected in US academic circles.1
Foreign policy, in the Westphalian, territorial, sovereignty-based sense, refers to the
formulation of a state’s grand strategy, or worldview. Only a state can have a foreign
policy, and foreign policymaking tends to be in the hands of policymakers, although
many others can influence it both in direction and in detail. Diplomacy refers to the
practical implementation of a state’s grand strategy. It is usually carried out by pro-
fessional diplomats. In other words, foreign policy tends to be about theory (sub-
stance, strategy, ends) and diplomacy about practice (procedures, tactics, means).
Diplomacy is usually associated with the general idea that states should use peace-
ful means rather than military force in dealing with each other. Accordingly, when
one thinks of diplomacy, one thinks of certain norms and values (the desirability of
continuous dialogue through mutual recognition and representation); certain insti-
tutions (foreign ministries, embassies); certain processes (accreditation, a written code
of diplomatic communications); and certain individuals (foreign ministry officials,
ambassadors, and other diplomats). In the Westphalian sense, only states are thought
to conduct diplomacy. Related assumptions are that states conduct diplomacy with
nonstate actors, and that nonstate actors do not conduct diplomacy with each other
but, instead, interact and have relations with each other. Costas Constantinou (1996)
argues that all human activity involves some sort of diplomacy, and there is much
‘‘truth’’ in this Foucauldian insight: individuals do deploy diplomatic meth-
odsFcourtesy, respect, tactFat every micro-power level of human interaction. I,
however, distinguish between personal-power diplomacy, which shows great variation
1
Statecraft is yet another key and vaguely used term. It is called upon invariably for rhetorical embellishment but
is in great need of definitional and conceptual clarification (cf. Jackson and Srensen 2003:141, 173).
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 411

within and across cultures, and state-power diplomacy, which shows less variation be-
cause of the diplomatic culture that, I contend, is commonly subscribed to.
The two principal forms of state-based diplomacyFbilateral and multilater-
alFare well understood, even if they are contested and often derided, concepts.
Bilateral diplomacy usually means the conduct of relations between two states, gen-
erally via resident missions. The rise of resident embassies in Italy in the fifteenth
century and their spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century gave bilateral
diplomacy its signature institution (Bull 2002:160). Of all the institutions of diplo-
macy, however, the bilateral resident embassy has especially come under derisive
attack as an anachronism in an age of high-speed travel and communication tech-
nology (Wolfe 1998). Multilateral diplomacy, which means relations between three or
more states at permanent or ad hoc international conferences, is generally con-
sidered to have become formalized, at least as a great-power mechanism, after the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 (Hamilton and Langhorne 1995:90–98; Berridge
2002:146–151). However, it did not become widely accepted (even if still largely
among only Europeans) until after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The UN’s
creation in 1945 established diplomacy’s universal aspirations, but they did not
become truly universal until after 1990, when the de-colonization process begun in
the late 1940s was largely completed.
Culture is a ‘‘slippery term,’’ one that ‘‘can be either trivial or momentous’’
(Eagleton 2003:48; see also Williams 1993). The idea of culture has long attracted
interest from disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, organiza-
tional theory, and literary criticism. Hofstede’s (1991:5) definition of culture as ‘‘the
collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group
or category of people from another’’ approximates Bourdieu’s concept of ‘‘habitus’’
and implies that there is no natural order of things, but a process that is learned,
directed, produced, and ordered in some way and by somebody (Giddens 2001:22).
All cultures reproduce themselves in complex ways, designating ‘‘not merely some-
thing to which one belongs but something that one possesses’’ (Said 1983:8–9). And
while some see cultures as highly resistant to change (Ninkovich 1981:6; Eagleton
2003:59), others treat them as semiotic and symbolic systems (Geertz 1973) and
dynamic practices of meaning-making (Weeden 2002:714). Whatever the pace of
change, culture constitutes or represents identifiable and self-identifying evolving
mindsets, beliefs, assumptions, values, and worldviews of very large categories, such
as a ‘‘civilization,’’ down to very small ones, such as a ‘‘family.’’ In between, there are
national cultures containing institutions with an organizational culture, which, borrowing
from Hofstede (1991:180), may be seen as ‘‘the collective programming of the mind’’
that distinguishes the members of one nation or organization from another.
In IR, the concept of culture has been introduced relatively recently to challenge
traditional theories (Lapid and Kratochwil 1996), but also to explain organizational
cultures (Sagan 1993; Zisk 1993) and military-doctrine decisions (Kier 1995). It also
richly informs literatures of nationalism (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Smith
1995); globalization (Featherstone 1990; Appadurai 1996); and civilizations (Hunt-
ington 1996). In Katzenstein’s landmark edited volume, The Culture of National
Identity (1996:6), the authors refer to the term culture
as a broad label that denotes collective models of nation-state authority or identity,
carried by custom or law. Culture refers to both a set of evaluative standards (such
as norms and values) and a set of cognitive standards (such as rules and models)
that define what social actors exist in a system, how they operate, and how they
relate to one another.

This definition helps reinforce the notion that certain institutions, societies,
states, or even larger collectivities, such as civilizations, can be talked about as
having a distinctive culture. With all this attention to culture, it is remarkable that
there has been so little disciplinary interest in the idea of a diplomatic cultureFthat
412 Diplomatic Culture

is, in the communicative and representational norms, rules, and institutions that
have evolved between states.
There is one final definitional issue to consider. It begins with Brian Hocking’s
(2004:148) definition of national diplomatic systems (NDSs) as ‘‘nationally based sys-
tems of diplomatic representation comprising overseas missionsFboth bilateral
and multilateralFoverseen by a central government department, traditionally
designated as the ‘‘foreign ministry.’’ My question is whether NDSs represent the
building blocks of a state-based ‘‘international diplomatic system,’’ one comprising
the institutions (for example, the diplomatic corps), norms (for example, contin-
uous dialogue), and laws (for example, the Vienna conventions), which in turn
constitute a diplomatic culture. In time, this could well evolve into a ‘‘global dip-
lomatic system’’ that incorporates an array of nonstate actors as well.

Perspectives on Diplomatic Culture

Little has been written explicitly about diplomatic culture, but what is identifiable
on the topic in the various literatures can be grouped in terms of specific ontological
perspectives: diplomatic culture exists and its importance is underestimated (the
view held predominantly by classical political philosophers, diplomatic historians,
and international society theorists); diplomatic culture exists but is not important
(the view held predominantly by traditional negotiation theorists); the existence of
diplomatic culture is either ignored or taken for granted (the view held by most
world affairs commentators and neo-Realist IR theorists); and diplomatic culture
exists but harms the national interest (the view held by Americans in general and
neoconservatives in particular). I now consider each of these perspectives in turn.

Diplomatic culture exists and its importance is underestimated

This first (and most explicit) perspective on the idea of diplomatic culture is the
English School’s international society concept of world order. Steeped in the clas-
sical writings of political theory, the English School embraces a foundational set of
assumptions and practices about how states do, and should, relate to each other.
The concept arose prominently from Hedley Bull’s well-known argument that
world politics is better seen not as an international system of interacting parts where
order is more or less maintained by the balance of power, but as an international
society, or a society of states, in which the balance of power, international law, war,
the great powers, and diplomacy all contribute to order. In addition to including
diplomacy as a component of order, he said that by facilitating communication
between political leaders, negotiating agreements, gathering intelligence or infor-
mation, and minimizing friction in IR, ‘‘diplomacy fulfils the function of symbol-
ising the existence of the society of states’’ (Bull 2002:166).
Bull (2002:304) defined diplomatic culture as ‘‘the common stock of ideas and
values possessed by the official representatives of states.’’ Diplomatic culture was
not created at any given moment but, rather, developed over centuries from the
social, or cultural, practices of official representatives of states in a range of dip-
lomatic institutional settings (such as the diplomatic corps), giving rise to a distinc-
tive code of conduct involving protocol, privileges, and a clear sense of hierarchy
with special rights and responsibilities for great powers (Bull 2002:160). Thus, for
Bull, ‘‘the diplomatic profession itself . . . is a custodian of the idea of international
society, with a stake in preserving and strengthening it’’ (Bull 2002:176; see also
Der Derian 1987:35, 1996:84–100). In this perspective, a diplomatic culture has
been formed in the process of building, or constituting, an international society.2
2
There is also a foreign service culture, a narrower concept. This refers to the career and service (lifestyle) issues
that confront professional foreign service officers of all countries: for example, hardship allowances, length of
postings, spousal responsibilities, and a spouse’s right to work in the host country.
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 413

A highly significant feature of diplomatic culture, emphasized by Bull and Wat-

son (1984) in their expansion of international society thesis, is that a putatively
European, or Western, set of ideas and practices found widespread acceptance in
the ‘‘non-West.’’ They also argue that postcolonial and even revolutionary states
eventually adopted most diplomatic norms, rules, and institutions of European
international society after initially renouncing or rejecting them as colonial or re-
actionary remnants (Armstrong 1993).3 In this view, non-Western states accepted
Westphalian, European diplomatic culture.
One important area where the expansion of international society thesis continues
to have relevance is the role of the great and the hegemonic powers (Cronin 2001).
Drawing on Heeren’s view that the Westphalian system is designed to protect ‘‘the
weak against the strong,’’ Pluralists such as Watson argue that while the system
restrains the strongest power one should expect even prudent hegemonic powers
(and their client allies) ‘‘sometimes to act outside and against the system’’ (Watson
1992:209, 2004b). In contrast, Solidarist writers (Vincent 1986; Linklater 1996;
Dunne 1998; and Wheeler 2000) are less likely to grant hegemonic exemptions.
They expect the states-system always to protect the weak from the strong, insisting
on a higher degree of great-power consent and legitimacy and close observance of
the rules, norms, and obligations of international society.

Diplomatic culture exists but is not important

This perspective emerges from negotiation theory and can be clearly identified in
Raymond Cohen’s Negotiating Across Cultures (2002:8). Cohen considers the impor-
tance of culture in international negotiations, arguing that while most negotiation
failures result from divergent interests, ‘‘cultural factors may hinder relations in
general, and on occasion complicate, prolong, and even frustrate negotiations
where there otherwise exists an identifiable basis for cooperation.’’ Cohen suggests
that there are basically two different negotiation models: ‘‘low context,’’ which is a
results-oriented model using a predominantly verbal and explicit (direct) commu-
nication style typical of individualistic societies, such as the United States; and ‘‘high
context,’’ which is a relationship-oriented model associated with nonverbal and
implicit (indirect) communication more typical of traditionally interdependent so-
cieties. In making this case, Cohen rejects the view that diplomats in international
society have more in common with each other than with the countries they rep-
resent and are therefore able to minimize cultural dissonance in negotiation. He
does note his own ‘‘initial assumption’’ that ‘‘shared expertise can indeed overcome
obstacles to communication and negotiation grounded in cultural diversity’’ and
that (here he is citing Nicolson) ‘‘there is a universal diplomatic language of spe-
cialized words and phrases used by diplomats when they communicate with one
another’’(Cohen 2002:4). He suggests that a case can be made for the existence of a
diplomatic culture, but that ‘‘it would be rash to conclude that this therefore elim-
inates the effect of cross-cultural differences’’ (2002:20).
Thus, Cohen acknowledges the presence of an international diplomatic culture
but warns against exaggerating its capacity to help negotiators overcome cultural
differences. He is ultimately skeptical of the importance of diplomatic culture and
‘‘the norms of a diplomatic set’’; their worldliness notwithstanding, diplomats are
still ‘‘influenced by their cultural backgrounds’’ (2002:23). Moreover, diplomats no
longer dominate international negotiations now that other government agencies
have assumed key negotiation roles at the expense of diplomats (2002:22). Cohen
suggests that the evolution of diplomatic services away from their aristocratic back-
3
A contemporary illustration of the expansion thesis is Kishan Rana’s Bilateral Diplomacy (2002), a sophisticated,
diplomatic manual written by a former Indian ambassadorFmore in the spirit of Callières and Satow than of
Kautilya.
414 Diplomatic Culture

grounds further dissipates the idea of a coherent diplomatic culture.4 His view
accords far less weight to diplomatic culture than does Bull’s, and Cohen does not
resolve whether diplomatic culture is more ‘‘high context’’ or ‘‘low context’’ (it
appears to combine elements of both, but this is a question worth closer scrutiny).
Additionally, Cohen’s view accepts the diplomatic-decline thesis and equates dip-
lomatic culture with elitist foreign services. This latter notion stands in stark con-
trast to that of the more down-to-earth, modern, and adaptive diplomatic services
from Sweden to Australia (Hocking 1999), which view diplomatic culture not as a
declining relic of European aristocratic networks, but as reinventing itself as a
transnational, or at least international, professional epistemic community (Hannerz
1990:244). In sum, much traditional negotiation theory focuses on negotiating
strategies between rational players, and even those theorists who generally take the
idea of culture seriously, and indeed acknowledge the existence of diplomatic cul-
ture, tend to downplay its significance.

The existence of diplomatic culture is either ignored or taken for granted

This perspective, the basis of which is found in IR norm theory (Katzenstein 1996;
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998), is not really a view but, arguably, a blindness of sorts.
This is the perspective of many important writers on world affairs, one of whom,
Samuel Huntington, serves well for explanation.
In Huntington’s famous civilizational theory of world order, ‘‘cultural commu-
nities are replacing Cold War blocs, and the fault lines between civilizations are
becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics’’ (1996:125). It is not that
Huntington envisages the world’s major civilizations all simultaneously at each
other’s throat in an apocalyptic war of civilizations. What he sees is a West versus the
Rest dichotomy (a point that contrasts vividly with Bull and Watson’s expansion of
international society thesis). In Huntington’s world order, culturally differentiated
civilizations are irredeemably opposed, share almost no common interests, preserve
exclusivist identities and values, and are therefore destined to clash violently.
However, Huntington gives very little consideration to three important issues: how
this civilizational self-imaging and other-imaging occurs; how these imagesFand the
policies that are said to flow from themFare in turn represented to other civi-
lizations or the world at large; and what role, if any, diplomats and the diplomatic
culture in which they operate might play. Civilizations per se do not have diplomats.
Huntington therefore overlooks diplomatic culture, and soFlacking any real sense
of diplomacy’s generally moderating effectsFhe arrives at a clash that, to him,
seems inevitable. However, if an international diplomatic culture can be demon-
strated to exist and to influence state behavior even in those states with putatively
civilizational identities, then Huntington’s thesis is at least partly challenged.
In fact, a prima facie case can be made that diplomatic culture has facilitated
countless diplomatic exchanges between disparate civilizations by providing a range
of mutually acceptable channels for dialogue (Jönsson and Aggestam 1999:151).
Important contemporary examples here are the Sino-American resolution of the
2001 US spy plane incident and Libya’s agreements with the United States and the
U.K. on the Lockerbie/Pan Am terrorist issue and its weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) programs. In short, in couching his prescriptions in terms of advice for US/
Western leaders to ensure that they do not lose the clash, Huntington ignores a set
of deeply ingrained cross-cultural diplomatic rules, laws, conventions, and norms
that provide a medium for resolving disputes between states operating under the
rubric of purportedly contesting civilizations. Huntington misses this communica-
4
Cohen’s book is really about ‘‘the culture of the interlocutor,’’ in Christopher Hill’s phrase (2003:141), rather
than about the mediating effects of diplomatic culture. It stimulated a research program on cross-cultural nego-
tiating behavior, focusing on national diplomatic negotiating style.
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 415

tive and representational mediumFthe many instruments of diplomatic cul-

tureFthat might help alleviate the very clash he fears.
The constructivist claim that some norms become so deeply internali-
zed over time that we do not appreciate their causative and constitutive effects
appears to fit well here. This problem of understanding deeply embedded norms
is helpful in explaining how the most powerful state player in the system views
diplomatic culture.

Diplomatic culture exists but harms the national interest

This perspective on diplomatic cultureFone that has long endured in American
political life and that took a more ideological turn under President George W. Bush
in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001Facknowledges that
diplomatic institutions and mores exist but is deeply skeptical of them. This skep-
ticism is rooted in historical American isolationism and American wariness about
diplomacy’s aristocratic European connotations, which are perceived as unsavory.
For a very long time, the United States kept its distance from European diploma-
cyFfor example, in its widespread practice of maintaining missions abroad at the
consular rather than ambassadorial level (Armstrong 1999:53). Even when the
United States came to embrace many diplomatic institutions and practices as its
power expanded throughout the twentieth century (for example, near-universal
representation at embassies worldwide), it adopted distinctive practices that set it
apart from the Europeans (for example, rigorous treaty ratification, non-recognition
of hostile regimes, and a relatively high proportion of politically appointed ambas-
sadors). Such practices, along with growing American power, fed the belief that the
United States was not entirely a part of the diplomatic systemFthat is, it was a senior,
associate member of international society, rather than a fully fledged member.
After the September 11 attacks, neoconservatives quickly galvanized under Pres-
ident Bush (Halper and Clarke 2004). The administration articulated a new, ag-
gressive American foreign policy that declared a global ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ a new
war that would deploy US military might to dislodge dictators with links to ter-
rorists, find and destroy illegal WMD, and promote democracy in such nettlesome
regions as the Middle East. This neoconservative moment rekindled historical
American animosity toward diplomacy. The State Department came under partic-
ularly fierce attack for not defending the president’s interests vigorously enough, a
failure that was seen as a product of its perceived liberal-minded, appeasement-
prone biases and of unhealthy fraternization with foreign elites. In the caricatured
neoconservative view, American diplomats had been socialized by diplomatic life
abroad (known pejoratively as ‘‘localitis’’), such that they had lost the ability to
protect US interests. Accordingly, if diplomats in general and the State Department
in particular impeded policy objectives, then they would be sidelined. These views
were enunciated variously by senior Republican Party political figures (Gingrich
2003), by neoconservative intellectuals (Frum and Perle 2003:226–228), and by
commentators and journalists whose books bore such titles as Dangerous Diplomacy:
How the State Department Threatens America’s Security (Mowbray 2003).
The Bush administration’s post-September 11 policies and practices soon gave
rise to a robust debate that Joseph Nye summed up as follows: ‘‘Not since Rome has
one nation loomed so large above the others. . . . Respected analysts on both the left
and right are beginning to refer to ‘‘American empire’’ approvingly as the dom-
inant narrative of the twenty-first century’’ (2003:60). Some (neo)conservative in-
tellectuals (Ferguson 2004; Gaddis 2004) were unapologetic about the idea of an
‘‘unspoken’’ American empire. Some critics on the academic left, however, de-
nounced it, calling Bush’s ‘‘incoherent empire’’ (Mann 2003) a quixotic ‘‘quest for
global dominance’’ (Chomsky 2003) in which the administration’s foreign policy
had been militarized and diplomacy, in both its bilateral and multilateral versions,
416 Diplomatic Culture

marginalized. Still other critics argued that the imperial trend had already been
evident in the Clinton years (Bacevich 2002). But most focused on the neocon-
servative ascendancy under George W. Bush. While much of the ‘‘New American
Empire’’ critique from both left and right was overstated (Cohen 2004; Ikenberry
2004), the leftist variants conveyed widespread anger not only with the Bush ad-
ministration’s foreign policy goals but alsoFin a new turnFwith its dismissive view
of diplomatic values and norms.
The criticism was not limited to the two ends of the political spectrum, however:
it also came from Democrats and centrists and even some traditional, moderate
conservatives. For example, in June 2003, twenty seven former senior US diplo-
mats and military commanders, many of whom had served under presidents Re-
agan and George H. W. Bush, issued a statement (DMCC, Diplomats and Military
Commanders for Change 2004) highly critical of the Bush administration’s foreign
policy. Several influential Realist scholars, notably John Mearsheimer and Stephen
Walt (2003), criticized the crusading fervor of the administration’s foreign policy,
which they saw as ignoring fundamental Realist common sense about balancing and
maintaining coalitions and alliances. Other moderate conservative commentators
lamented that the neoconservatives wanted to make radical change but ‘‘cannot
abide the means to achieve it, which inevitably involves contact with other countries,
negotiations, compromise, empathy’’ (Zakaria 2004:11). Many of these arguments
came to a head over the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, to which I now turn.

The Iraq War and Diplomatic Norms

My central argument is that the Bush administration, in its handling of the war in
Iraq, not only tangled with substantive international laws but also bumped into a set
of normative constraints that I consider to be diplomatic culture. I develop this
claim by considering five interrelated norms of diplomatic cultureFthe use of force
only as last resort, transparency, continuous dialogue, multilateralism, and civility.5
I have chosen these norms for two main reasons. The first is that they represent
the core self-identifying beliefs, or shared understandings, of diplomats that are
observable, even if far from measurable. These particular norms had, in varying
degrees, become widely accepted, even internalized, by international society. The
second reason is that the Bush administrationFin its post-September 11, neocon-
servative formFwas confronted with all of these norms, and it was not until the
administration contested themFdirectly and indirectly, knowingly and unknow-
inglyFthat many people felt the need to defend them. I argue further that the
administration first disregarded these norms only to be obliged to deal with each of
them at some point and in some form.
Before elaborating on this argument, it is important to differentiate between
violations of international law and transgressions of diplomatic norms. The post-
September 11 environment raised the fundamental question of how the whole
system of international law, which takes the territorial state as its subject, can be
adapted to deal with violations from nonstate actors (Kennedy 2004). The Bush
administration’s record on this question became a matter of some controversy and
appeared to clash with an American tradition of respect for international law
(Henkin 1979; Franck 1990; Chayes and Chayes 1993). The Founding Fathers’
‘‘aversion to entanglement,’’ in Gaddis’s phrase (2004:22), ‘‘was by no means an
objection to treaties.’’ As a great power in the twentieth century, the United States
developed a reputation for general compliance with international law. Even during
the Cold War, the United States justified military interventions abroad in terms
of international law concerning the right to self-defense, its superpower status
5
I am, of course, evaluating the United States and not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. For the record, I believe that
Hussein’s regime was a human rights abomination and would obviously and utterly fail my fivefold test.
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 417

notwithstanding (Damrosch and Oxman 2003:553; Farer 2003:623–624). Such

justifications were no doubt required to reinforce the West’s moral superiority over
the Soviet Communist system. Still, in its relations with the Soviet Union, the
United States went through decades of arms-control negotiations that generally
resulted in complex, law-based agreements, such as the Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks treaties. Even with the Cold War’s demise in the 1990s, the United States and
the successor Russian state signed important arms control treaties.
Those who were to be Bush’s advisers had deep reservations about many in-
ternational legal practices and traditions before Bush took office (Rice 2000:47,49).
A neoconservative position loomed in the new administration’s first few months,
one in which international laws and norms generally were seen as not entirely
necessary in legitimizing American actions abroad. Administration officials also
challenged Cold War arms control treaties, in particular, the rationale being that
those treaties were cumbersome, legalistic, and unnecessary under post–Cold War
conditions. There was some merit in this claim. However, to the consternation of
many observers, the administrationFwhile still claiming that it respected interna-
tional lawFpursued policies designed to free the United States from the con-
straints of several major treaties and agreements that enjoyed wide international
support, notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, the Kyoto environmental protocol, and the treaty to establish an In-
ternational Criminal Court (Eisendrath and Goodman 2004:30–31; Reus-Smit
2004:36–38).
After September 11, the Bush administration’s approach to international law
took on a more ardently neoconservative hue (Krauthammer 2002/2003). Taking
advantage of overwhelming public support for decisive action against terrorism,
the administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty. Then, after the 2001 war
to overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States announced that
it would apply a new military tribunal system, denying full prisoner of war status
under the Geneva Conventions to as many as 800 ‘‘enemy combatants’’ transferred
to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As a short-term response in a war
against unconventional terrorist combatantsFshadowy individuals and groups that
were not recognized under the laws of war, that had egregiously violated those laws,
and that might have held important information about planned terrorist at-
tacksFthe Guantanamo move was understandable. The problem was that the de-
tainees were held in legal limbo for much longer than can be reasonably thought of
as short term, and, moreover, without yielding much critical intelligence and without
due legal process designed to clarify their prisoner status and possibly establish
their innocence (Center for Constitutional Rights 2004). It was not until two years
later that hearings to determine the legal status of the detainees were implemented,
and that was only after the Pentagon was forced to do so by a June 2004 U.S.
Supreme Court ruling. The troubling theme in the Guantanamo caseFreflected
more broadly in the Bush administration’s questioning of such hallowed instru-
ments of international law as the UN Charter and the Geneva ConventionsFwas
that the administration appeared willing to bend, even violate, the laws of war
without seeking wide international endorsement in its ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ a slogan
that the administration guilefully displaced by the even broader ‘‘war on terror’’
(Nunberg 2004).
The Bush administration’s approach to international law hardened over Iraq.
There, it ran into serious trouble in terms of both just cause (jus ad bellum in just war
theory) and just conduct (jus in bello), a set of legal norms that have developed over
centuries. By saying that Iraq posed an imminent threat because of its WMD ca-
pabilities and its links with terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda, the admin-
istration was making a legal case that it was acting in justifiable preemptive
(anticipatory) self-defense. However, as serious doubts arose about both of these
major legal justifications for going to war, the administration recast its war justi-
418 Diplomatic Culture

fications (and achievements) more in terms of ending the Hussein regime’s massive
human rights violations and building democracy in Iraq and the Middle East as a
whole. If the administration was trying to build a case for the need for a preemptive
international legal doctrine in an age of terrorism, the disintegration of its WMD
and Iraq–Qaeda claims documented in a range of expert non-partisan, and even
bipartisan, reports seriously undermined that case.
In terms of the war’s conduct, or jus in bello, it was the administration’s handling
of the US occupation that ran into serious problems. These problems stemmed
partly from the way in which the administration rhetorically subsumed the invasion
and occupation of Iraq under its war on terrorism, a move that the war’s growing
number of critics did not accept and regarded as disingenuous. Probably the most
notorious problem was the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal (Danner 2004). Con-
gressional and media investigations suggested that prisoner abuse arose from the
understandable need to obtain intelligence about possible attacks on coalition forces
and civilians. However, as with the Guantanamo case, things went too far. Another
example here is the infamous ‘‘torture memo’’ of August 2002. This memo, re-
portedly drafted by the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,
was represented by supporters of the administration as an objective, in-house legal
review to determine how far US interrogators could go in the use of physical
measures when interrogating suspected terrorists (McCarthy 2004; Yoo 2004). The
memo argued that the United States had considerable freedom under the Geneva
and Torture Conventions, recommending a very restrictive definition of torture:
pain leading to major organ failure or death. In response to the public outcry about
the memo, the president, secretary of state, and other senior administration officials
ended up disavowing torture as a means to obtain information (Caplan 2004).
Moreover, in claiming that it had cooperated closely with the International Com-
mittee of the Red CrossFthe guardian of the laws of warFthe administration
attempted to appear as if it had merely been trying to extend or redefine the limits
of legal action rather than denying that it was bound by international law.
The most generous interpretation of these events would be that the Bush ad-
ministration was not arguing that international law should apply to every state
except the United States (a neoimperial argument), but was instead making the
reasonable point that the United States was simply acting as a responsible and key
rule-setter, encouraging the international community to adjust and update inter-
national law to take account of terrorism (a benign hegemon argument). The
problem with this interpretation is that to accept it, one must overlook the fact that
the administration’s neoconservative adherents in key departments overreached
time and again, showing themselves inter alia to be oblivious to, or even above, the
constitutional and political limits of their mandate, often taking a defensible argu-
ment to indefensible extremes. Internationally, even normally pro-American con-
servatives voiced their anxiety about the perceived undermining of American
democratic values (see Nye 2004:60). At the highest levels, the Bush administration
failed to understand that some norms put down very deep roots and cannot be
ignored. In particular, the norms of just warFjust cause in going to war in the first
place, and just conduct once in the warFcould not be discarded because of one
catastrophic act of non-state terrorism. Failing to recognize how deeply entrenched
and taken for granted these norms are in international law and in the world public
mind, and lacking (as I argue below) the political sensitivity, patience, and diplo-
matic skill required to promote norm shifts of such a large scale, the administration
lost the political and moral authority to lead a new global consensus on revising
international law in ways that would collectively help fight nonstate terrorism.
My main argument is based on this self-serving view of international law that has
been so evident in the US handling of the situation in Iraq. The Bush adminis-
tration violated international law in its war in Iraq (the evidence for this violation is
compelling), but, more important to the topic at hand, it also transgressed key
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 419

norms of diplomatic culture, transgressions that help explain the well-documented,

rising worldwide resentment against US policies and actions.

Use of Force Only as Last Resort

The first transgression of diplomatic culture was the United States’ eagerness to use
force rather than to exhaust diplomatic negotiations. In the Cold War era, the US su-
perpower was often criticized for a perceived proclivity to go to warFfor example,
in Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, and Bosnia (Brown 2003). However, the Bush ad-
ministration’s enthusiasm to use military force in the post-September 11 context,
notably against Iraq, seemed qualitatively different. This new enthusiasm ran
counter to the norm, which developed slowly but inexorably throughout the twen-
tieth century, that military force be used only as a last resort, after all other al-
ternatives are exhausted, and even then, only in self-defense. Despite this norm, the
Bush administration seemed intent on invading Iraq in the face of widespread
international misgivings and explicit appeals to exhaust all diplomatic means before
using force. These misgivings were compounded when President Bush asserted his
new preemptive doctrine (U.S. Government 2002a, b) that was in reality a lightly
veiled and legally dubious preventive doctrine that rhetorically transformed a long-
term threat into an imminent danger. For many critics, this was no more than a
shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach, one that clearly violated the primacy
and principles of diplomacy as a means to solve problems, including those that
could lead to war, through dialogue, communication, and negotiation.
A good question at this point is, Where was the State DepartmentFdiplomatic
culture’s agentFin all this? Historically, denigration of diplomats has deep roots in
American culture (Hook 2003). With its worship of sporting and entertainment
heroes, America’s political and popular culture permits few hero-diplomats of the
order of Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg (George Kennan is a possible rare exception).
And when Americans do honor heroic diplomats, they do so generally only decades
after the event: consider Peter Balakian’s (2003) tribute to American diplomats
stationed in Istanbul and other Ottoman cities who reported the Armenian gen-
ocide, and Robert McNamara’s (McNamara, Blight, and Brigham 1999:429) de-
scription of U.S. Ambassador to Moscow Llewellyn ‘‘Tommy’’ Thompson as ‘‘the
unsung hero’’ of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Against this background, the general public perception in the case of Iraq was
that Secretary of State Colin Powell and the State Department were marginalized in
the decision-making process by the neoconservative ‘‘unilateralists’’ in the White
House and the Pentagon, led by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his
deputy Paul Wolfowitz (Newhouse 2003). In fact, this perceived power shift was
evident even before the warFfor example, in the growing power abroad of mil-
itary commanders. Several critics claimed that the locus of American representation
abroad was shifting from ambassadors and embassies to new military pro-consuls
operating an expanding network of military bases around the world (Bacevich
2002; Johnson 2004). Washington Post reporter Dana Priest (2003:16–17) argued
that at the behest of Bush and Rumsfeld, regional commanders-in-chief (or, as they
are now known, theater combatant commanders) ‘‘grew into a powerful force in
U.S. foreign policy because of the disproportionate weight of their resources and
organization in relation to the assets and influence of other parts of America’s
foreign policy structureFin particular, the State Department, which was shriveling
in size, stature, and spirit even as the military’s role expanded.’’ Priest (2003:14)
further warned about ‘‘the consequences of substituting generals and Green Berets
for diplomats.’’ In fact, she argued that ‘‘long before September 11, the U.S. gov-
ernment had grown increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign
affairs. . . . The military simply filled a vacuum left by an indecisive White House, an
atrophied State Department, and a distracted Congress’’ (emphasis added). The grow-
420 Diplomatic Culture

ing reliance on ‘‘special forces’’ was also tied to these developments. Priest
(2003:17) claimed that even before the 2001 Afghanistan War, special forces teams
were operating in 125 countries (see also Kibbe 2004). In Nye’s (2004) terms, the
soft power agents of diplomatic persuasion in the State Department were eclipsed
by the hard power agents of brute force in the Department of Defense.6
This image of the State Department is, of course, oversimplified. There is some
evidence, for example, that Powell may have been more the ambiguous actor in this
drama than the conventionally depicted weakened, if honorable, secretary of state
working hard to prevent war (Keller 2001; Woodward 2004). In addition, the
prominence of John R. Bolton, a leading neoconservative Realist in the State De-
partment throughout this period, implies a more complex organization than has
been portrayed by the department’s supporters and its detractors. Nonetheless,
before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were indications (Reuters 2003) that
many former and serving State Department diplomats saw the administration as
unwisely denigrating the negotiation norm in a rush to war, ignoring more-cautious
and, as it turns out, more-accurate State Department assessments of the purported
Iraqi threat (Jehl 2004; U.S. Congress 2004).
The fact that the invasion was supported by the British and others and was regard-
ed as a military triumph produced some initial vindication of the early use of force
(Keegan 2004). In spite of this, however, Washington’s war justifications attracted
increasing worldwide skepticism (discussed further, below). Another problem, one
that was highlighted by liberal and even some conservative critics, was that Pres-
ident Bush’s intervention in Iraq had, by creating a breeding ground for terrorism,
worsened the very problem it sought to tackle. Finally, the 15-month formal oc-
cupation (March 2003–June 2004) proved to have been poorly planned and man-
aged, thereby strengthening criticism of Washington for its resorting to force rather
than pursuing sustained diplomatic negotiations (Eisendrath and Goodman 2004).

Transparency
The second norm of diplomatic culture that the United States transgressed is
transparency. This norm, which builds on the perceived primacy of negotiation
over force, holds that negotiations are more likely to succeed if information is
deemed to have been obtained overtly rather than covertly and policies and views
are conveyed accurately to all parties in a frank and forthright manner. This
‘‘openness’’ norm is perhaps the least persuasive of the five norms being presented,
partly because of the popular image of diplomats going abroad to dissemble for
their country and partly because it has often been imposed rather than chosen.7
However, I view this norm as having some basis in the idea of professional
integrity and truthfulness that is emphasized in many classical diplomatic textsFfor
example, Nicolson’s account of the ideal diplomat. It also has a basis in the concept
of open diplomacy (transparency, in contemporary usage) insisted upon by Presi-
dent Woodrow Wilson at the end of the First World War in his famous appeal for
‘‘open covenants of peace openly arrived at.’’ The norm is, of course, an idealized one,
as Wilson’s own reliance on closed-door negotiations shows. But Wilson’s ‘‘new di-
plomacy’’ deplored the manifest secrecy of ‘‘old diplomacy,’’ an approach that, iron-
ically, Nicolson labeled, and scorned, as the ‘‘American’’ method (Nicolson 1954:122).
By extension, it is difficult to reconcile this transparency norm, as broadly and
normatively defined here, with spying. The normative expectationFwhich has
evolved over the past century or so under such rubrics as treaty ratification and
6
I am using soft power here fairly narrowly, taking it to be roughly synonymous with diplomacy or diplomatic
persuasion. As developed by Joseph S. Nye, soft power is a broader concept, involving cooption rather than coercion
and drawing on a country’s culture, political values, and foreign policies (2004:11).
7
In fact, this norm has a history as what I call an ‘‘imposed norm’’Fthat is, one that a reluctant group or state has
imposed upon it by an actor or forces outside the group or state (Wiseman 2002).
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 421

public diplomacyFis that diplomats should be engaged in overt, rather than covert,
information collection and should be actively and personally involved in explaining
that information to foreign governments as well as to publics. The democracy
rationale is that diplomatic activities are thus rendered more accountable, which is a
special problem for secret intelligence activities.
The Cold War stymied the Wilsonian preference for the norm of open diplo-
macy. Under conditions of ideological hostility, nuclear deterrence, and closed ter-
ritorial borders, the United States shifted toward more clandestine forms of
information gathering about the world, a shift reflected in the creation of the
national security machinery in 1947. Subsequently, the US intelligence machinery
grew dramatically: it consists today of some fifteen agencies and is thought to have a
budget much larger than the State Department’s. And within this evolving Cold
War era general intelligence bias, there was an overwhelming predilection for
technical over human intelligence. According to one senior American diplomat
(Finn 2003:20), technophilia (my term) continued in the 1990s, after the Cold War
had ended: ‘‘The intelligence community relied far too heavily on electronically
acquired data and too little on what they call ‘humint,’ human intelligence gath-
ering by real, live people.’’ In short, since the end of the Second World War, the
United StatesFwithout much critical or sustained debateFhas embraced a culture
of intelligence over a culture of diplomacy.
The Bush administration reinforced this trend in several ways. Before the Sep-
tember 11 attacks, the administration supported the development of a missile def-
ense system beyond the limited one endorsed by President Clinton, thereby
showing its faith in a high-technology solution to ‘‘rogue-state’’ WMD. After Sep-
tember 11, this preference came into even sharper relief in the debates over
whether pre-war intelligence on WMD and terrorist links provided the basis for
going to war in Iraq. This intelligence dependency reached new heights in Bush’s
preemption doctrine, as highly reliable and accurate intelligence was a sine qua non
for this doctrine to work. One problem was that there was no human intelligence in
Iraq before the war. According to Newsweek, ‘‘the CIA did not have a single human
spy inside Iraq after 1998 to report on what was really going on in Saddam’s
weapons program’’ (Isikoff 2004:38). Consequently, the United States relied on
largely technical intelligence both before and after September 11.
Politicization of the intelligence process has a long history (Johnson and Wirtz
2004). Whether or not the Bush administration willfully misrepresented intelli-
gence about Iraq in order to justify the preemptive invasion is not my primary
concern hereFalthough there is evidence to suggest that it did (Cirincione et al.
2003). My argument is that the administration demonstrated an unhealthy reliance
on intelligence, a reliance compounded by the fact that preemptive action was being
considered. Consequently, overstated and unsubstantiated claims were made, or
repeated, about Iraq’s WMD capabilities: the 45-minute strategic chemical weapons
capability, the purpose of aluminum tubes sold to Iraq, the attempt to purchase
uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons, and the discovery of biological weapons
trailers. These claimsFpresented as evidence to support the contention that Iraq
possessed attack-ready WMD and to support the call for preemptive actionFall
proved to be false or to have had their significance exaggerated (Clarke 2004; U.S.
Congress 2004; Wilson 2004). Moreover, whenever the Bush administration turned
to human rather than technical intelligence, as with its reliance on information
provided by Iraqi exiles linked to Ahmad Chalabi, much of it proved to be tainted
and even fraudulent (Mayer 2004).
In due course, the public debate about Iraq (at least as it concerns WMD and
Saddam Hussein’s alleged links with Al Qaeda) was couched in terms of an intel-
ligence failure, rather than a general failure of foreign policy and diplomacy. Even
the absence of a U.S. embassy and consulates in Iraq was seen through a unidi-
mensional intelligence lens. For example, Kenneth Pollack (2002), a supporter of
422 Diplomatic Culture

the Iraq invasion and a former National Security Council member and CIA analyst
in the Clinton administration, argued after the intelligence failures became appar-
ent that ‘‘without an embassy [in Baghdad] it was very hard for U.S. case officers to
penetrate the country’’ (Pollack 2004:86). Thus, even this admission of the impor-
tance of having an embassy in place betrays a heavy American bias in favor of
intelligence over diplomacy: an embassy, in this view, is useful because it provides
diplomatic cover for intelligence agents.
I would argue that skilled diplomats based in Baghdad might well have been able
to provide Washington with reports assessing particular difficulties, such as the
likely Iraqi (Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite) reactions to the occupation and the general
difficulty of democracy-building in Iraq. This counterfactual argument is supported
by the fact that, since the late 1960s, the United States has had a checkered embassy
presence in Baghdad, to which I return below. In short, as Robert Reich (2004) has
pointed out, even many critics of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq did not
usually recommend better foreign policy and diplomacy; instead, they recom-
mended better intelligence.
If diplomatic theory and practice are threatened by a culture of intelligence, so
too are democratic theory and practice. My point here is not simply, as many anti-
war critics argue (with some justification), that domestic, or electoral, calculations
were behind the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq (Friedman 2004). Rather,
as other critics have argued (Brzezinski 2004; Dean 2004), the administration, un-
der Attorney-General John Ashcroft, brushed up against the U.S. Constitution in
the ‘‘war on terrorism.’’ In this view, the controversial U.S. Patriot Act and other
measures were seen as crossing the line between prudent homeland security and
abuse of civil liberties, flirting dangerously with cherished democratic freedoms
and, consequently, turning the United States into a new version of what Harold
Lasswell (1941:455) called many years ago a garrison state.8 Such claims were
overstated by liberals but dismissed too readily by neoconservatives. As a general
rule, democratic theory would, or should, argue for diplomacy over intelligence.
While most countries can afford only diplomacy, the United States can afford both:
the problem is that under President Bush the United States is giving far too much
weight to intelligence.
Despite its preference for preemptive-force-based-on-intelligence, the Bush ad-
ministration soon acknowledged that diplomacy had a role to play, even if that role
was seen in limited, tactical terms. A good example here is the 2003 Libyan dis-
armament agreement in which Colonel Qadaffi renounced Libya’s illicit WMD
program. While the administration claimed the Libyan deal as a product of its
willingness to use force (the demonstration effect of the Iraq invasion) and its good
intelligence, others (Leverett 2004; Porter 2004) gave credit to the combined role of
diplomacy and domestic Libyan politics. For example, an international think tank
(IISS [International Institute for Strategic Studies] 2004) described the Libyan deal
as ‘‘a brilliant success for traditional non-proliferation diplomacy, mixing pressures
and inducements to change behaviour rather than regimes.’’ Further, and not en-
tirely unrelated to the Iraq crisis, Secretary of State Powell and the State Depart-
ment continued to deal diplomatically, in one way or another, with renegade
countries such as Iran, North Korea, and Sudan. There was a disconnect between
the (neoconservative) ideologues in the administration, who barely tolerated di-
plomacy as an instrument and did not know how much they actually depended on
it, and the (liberal international) pragmatists, mainly in the State Department, who
promoted diplomacy’s values based on their professional ethos without really
knowing how strong those values might be in the American consciousness.

8
Lasswell had the Second World War in mind when he defined a garrison state as a state whose military prep-
arations threaten to convert it into a totalitarian state. Aaron Friedberg (2000) also skillfully applied the concept to
the United States during the Cold War.
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 423

Some hint of the American public’s sentiment emerged in the 2004 US pres-
idential campaign, when the debates brought out what appeared to be a reservoir
of hitherto unarticulated domestic support for more diplomacy. It was significant
that Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry campaigned heavily on
the argument that the United States needed to consult more with its friends and
allies abroad. It was also significant that he said the United States needed to find
other ways to deal with America’s adversaries, which leads to the third norm that
the administration transgressed.

Continuous Dialogue
This third norm of diplomatic culture, continuous dialogue, is the idea of engaging
rather than isolating the enemy. This is the way by which new, revolutionary, and
recalcitrant states eventually become socialized by international society. War is
thought to be less likely if diplomatic dialogue and communication are conducted
continuously with such statesFfor example, through the bilateral exchange of
diplomatic missions in respective capitals. Historically, the United States has re-
jected this argument, for many years refusing to establish diplomatic relations with
such states as the Soviet Union after 1917, the People’s Republic of China after
1949, Cuba under Castro, and Vietnam after 1975. The same view applied to Libya
under Qaddafi, Iran after the 1979 revolution, and North Korea since its incep-
tion. In other words, the United States developed its own rules for membership in
international society.
The United States’ historical rejection of this ‘‘talk-to-the-enemy’’ norm is evident
in the US–Iraq relationship. Iraq suspended diplomatic relations in 1967 after the
Middle East War and only reestablished them under a 1984 agreement, at which
point the U.S. embassy in Baghdad was reopened, only to be closed again in Jan-
uary 1991 during the First Gulf War (Wilson 2004:77). In other words, beginning
in 1967, there was no American embassy in Baghdad for 29 of 36 years, including
from 1991 to 2003. This state of affairs was not entirely of the United States’
making, but the important point is that there was no US diplomatic presence in
Iraq leading up to the 2003 invasion, which allowed the pro-war faction in Wash-
ington to present its case knowing that there was no embassyFnor the media,
intelligence, business, and humanitarian presences that often accompany the es-
tablishment of diplomatic relationsFto contradict it. In bureaucratic politics terms,
an embassy would have at least provided the weakened State Department with a
constituency, so that at critical moments, such as his February 2003 Security Council
speech, Colin Powell could have relied on his own department rather than on the
CIA, which led to such dreadful results. The real pity here is that the utility of
bilateral diplomatic representation and communicationFa core diplomatic
normFwas scarcely considered in public debates. Its consideration might have
helped with the Iraq situation, and it might also have cast light on how to deal with
other WMD-suspect states, such as Iran and North Korea, with which the United
States has refused to deal bilaterally.

Multilateralism
The fourth norm that the United States transgressed is multilateralism, or mul-
tilateral diplomacy. The United States has a history of resistance to this long-stand-
ing diplomatic norm, which is yet another of the norms whose twentieth-century
development owes much to an American president. With his proposal for the cre-
ation of the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson
was largely responsible for the advancement of the multilateral diplomacy norm.
Portentously, domestic resentment toward the League concept surfaced immedi-
ately, spurring Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s successful campaign to
424 Diplomatic Culture

deny Senate ratification of the League of Nations and therefore US membership in

it. This resentment has continued ever since, boiling over at times. It did so in the
1990s, in fact, when conservative Republican Senator Jesse Helms lambasted the
UN for alleged cronyism, waste, and anti-Americanism (for background, see Patrick
and Forman 2002; Foot, MacFarlane, and Mastanduno 2003; Muldoon et al. 2005).
The neoconservatism of the Bush administration and its supporters tapped into
this tradition of resentment toward international organization (Kagan 2003:144–
149; Muravchik 2004). Many critics saw the administration’s approach to the UN
during the Iraq crisis as the most polemical and sustained attack on multilateralism
since 1919. While some aspects of the neoconservative critique of the UN system
were merited, many were not. The administration seemed unable to understand
that the United States gained much from the UN being located in the United States
and that the United States exerted enormous influence over the UN through both
its budget contributions and its permanent membership in the Security Council,
where it enjoys primus inter pares status. In the leadup to the Iraq invasion, the
administration harshly criticized the UN for years of inaction against Iraq, directing
especially blistering criticism toward France, Germany, and others that opposed the
war in Iraq, as well as toward UN weapons inspectors who were working to find Iraqi
WMD (Blix 2004).
For many, even when the United States did go to the UN, it was seen to do so
only begrudgingly and for self-serving reasons. President Bush’s General Assembly
speech of August 2002, UN Security Council Resolution 1441, and Secretary of
State Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the Security Council were generally
seen in this light. My contention is that the multilateral diplomacy norm is so widely
and deeply accepted that much of the world was dismayed by Washington’s ap-
parently dismissive approach to the UN over Iraq. Thus, when President Bush
asserted in his 2004 State of the Union Address to Congress (U.S. Government
2004) that ‘‘America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our
country,’’ many saw the remark as yet another neoconservative rejection of inter-
national organizations.
In 2004, however, when the US-led occupation of Iraq was plagued by extensive
violence and the prison-abuse scandal, the administration toned down its rhetoric
and returned to the UN to seek support. It made the (prudent) decision to endorse
the Brahimi transition plan and to seek a UN Security Council resolution endorsing
the return of Iraqi sovereignty in June 2004. It also obtained UN assistance to
prepare for the January 2005 Iraqi national assembly elections. In short, even if the
United States’ return to the UN was only tactical, it is still significant that the
administration felt compelled to legitimize at least some of its actions in terms of
diplomatic culture’s norm of multilateralism. It appears that even a hegemon (at
least a smart one) needs a multilateral side, a conclusion that lends some weight to
the international society and constructivist claim about the power of norms to con-
strain even the most powerful state (Wheeler 2000:7).

Civility
The fifth American transgression of diplomatic culture concerns the Bush admin-
istration’s diplomatic style and, as such, goes well beyond the substance of the
administration’s foreign policy. The issue here is that Washington appeared to
evince little regard for, or sensitivity to, a well-established norm of civility. Diplo-
matic tact is the very essence of diplomacy in Satow’s famous view. Arguably, this
norm echoes what the Declaration of Independence referred to as the need for ‘‘a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind.’’ Throughout the Cold War, Washing-
ton encountered criticism for its occasionally overbearing behavior, even in relation
to America’s friends and allies. As former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-
Ghali (1999:198) remarked about a difficult exchange with Secretary of State War-
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 425

ren Christopher and UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright: ‘‘The Roman Empire

had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.’’
The civility norm builds on the previous two normsFcontinuous dialogue and
multilateralism, which, in our case, take the form of bilateral and multilateral dip-
lomatic representationFin the sense that one is more likely to observe common
courtesies with those with whom one has personal contact, and vice versa. In other
words, American policymakers might not talk as tough about countries if those
countries had resident American ambassadors, one of whose tasks is to convey and
defend the words of their far-off government. Megaphone diplomacy is easier than
face-to-face diplomacy, and most diplomats believe that it is also both less honorable
and less effective.
The Bush administration attracted much criticism for its often imperious, or at
least insensitive, way of dealing with both friend and foe, its seeming impervious-
ness to the need for tact. Part of the problem was that the administration allowed
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to conduct so much of its ‘‘war diplomacy.’’ When
Colin Powell conducted the diplomacy, at the UN and elsewhere, the United States
was given a reasonable hearing. But when Rumsfeld led the charge (as was his
style)Fas in his ‘‘clumsy and heavy-handed’’ (Nye 2004:78) attempt to divide ‘‘old
Europe’’ (those opposed to the United States) from ‘‘new Europe’’ (those who
support it)Fthe diplomatic and public fallout was extensive (Cohen 2004:60; Ei-
sendrath and Goodman 2004:32; Kagan 2004; Gaddis 2005). The Bush admin-
istration’s impatience with diplomatic niceties was for many critics evidence of
imperial hubris that extended well beyond the boundaries of Raymond Cohen’s
direct, low-context negotiating style. Even countries that supported the invasion of
Iraq (for example, the U.K., the East Europeans) manifested in their pronounce-
ments a healthier respect for diplomatic civility than did the United States.
For the administration and its supporters, however, their behavior was simply a
fitting, tough-minded response to the situation, reflecting their impatience with
quaint and obsolete norms of civility that were inadequate for dealing with odious
regimes and terrorists, as well as those who were not making a strong enough stand
against tyranny. In the event, by 2004Fwhen the occupation had soured and
international support was needed for the transfer of sovereigntyFthere were in-
dications that the Bush administration had come to understand the need to show
respect for the diplomatic code of behavior. In addition to making a hesitant return
to the UN, the administration gradually toned down its rhetoric toward France and
Germany and resumed ‘‘normal’’ relations with them.9 Elsewhere, administration
officials, led notably by Secretary of State Powell, went to great lengths to emphasize
the many ways in which the United States collaborated with the international com-
munity on solving important problems, such as Kosovo and Afghanistan; dealing
with China and Japan over the North Korean nuclear crisis; and consulting with
France and Germany and the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iranian
nuclear inspections. In short, the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policy
yielded in some degree to the subtle and what it viewed as pesky requirements of
diplomatic politesse (Gaddis 2005). This trend continued following Bush’s reelec-
tion in November 2004, as evidenced in his 2005 State of the Union address; in
statements by Powell’s successor as Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, at her
confirmation hearings and on her first official overseas visit to Europe and the
Middle East; and in President Bush’s choice of Europe for his first overseas trip of
his second term in February 2005 (a telling choice, I would argue).10

9
One can only surmise, and future research may confirm, that the State Department and U.S. embassies abroad
worked very hard in their reporting and recommendations to restore ‘‘good relations.’’
10
One apparent exception to this trend was President Bush’s ‘‘recess’’ appointment of the controversial John
Bolton as the US ambassador to the UN in August 2005.
426 Diplomatic Culture

Conclusion
My goal has been to make the case that before, during, and after the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, the Bush administration brushed aside but ultimately bumped into an
international diplomatic culture. In making this case, I considered five norms of
that culture: the use of force only as last resort, transparency, continuous dialogue,
multilateralism, and civility. The evidence from this case suggests that international
and domestic US opposition to the administration’s Iraq policies was based not only
on resentment about the administration’s shifting rationales and conceptual dis-
tortions but also, at least in part, on a sense that well-established codes of inter-
national conductFthat is, the communicative and representational norms and
practices that constitute diplomatic cultureFwere being willfully disregarded or
ignored. I contend that this brushing aside on the part of the administration
stemmed partially from the tendency of many neoconservatives to equate diplo-
macy with ‘‘old’’ EuropeFappeasing, elitist, obsolescentFand thus to view diplo-
macy as inadequate for handling the situation in Iraq. This assessment of
diplomacy, however, neglects diplomatic culture’s adaptive capacities and, impor-
tantly, its widespread international acceptance. The administration’s failure to com-
prehend the power of diplomatic norms and the degree of support for them caused
it to miscalculate the extent to which it could overstep these norms with impunity.
My conclusion, however, stops well short of suggesting that the administration’s
brushing aside of diplomatic norms was a system-transforming neoconservative
experiment designed to establish a new American imperial order in which the old
rules would be displaced by new ones devised in Washington. The administration
did not reject all norms of diplomatic culture. If it had, it would have, for example,
withdrawn from the UN (relinquishing its Security Council seat), closed all its dip-
lomatic missions (some 250 of them), and renounced all treaties. To reasonable
observers, nothing this extreme was likely. I conclude, drawing on what Adam
Watson and Paul Kennedy have said, that the Bush administration overreached in
its implicit claims to hegemonic exception. By this I mean that international society
tacitly accepts some exceptions for the hegemon’s behavior because of the hege-
mon’s onerous mix of system rights and responsibilitiesFfor example, to forestall
an imminent invasion, stop a genocide, or prevent a known massive terrorist attack.
This understanding might even allow for the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the hege-
mon’s leaders. But by making the case for war in the name of preemption and the
war on terrorismFboth of which were misleading rationalizations with respect to
IraqFand by transgressing deeply held diplomatic norms, the Bush administration
made a false claim for hegemonic exception. A serious consequence of this mis-
calculation is that future claims against the likes of Iran and North KoreaFwhat-
ever their merits in terms of non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and democracy-
buildingFwill prove more difficult to sustain.
With respect to the four perspectives on diplomatic culture that I outlined early
in this article, the Iraq case lends some weight to the first one, which is the claim by
the international society theorists that discernible features of a diplomatic culture
can be identified and that a plausible case can be made for the importance of this
culture as an independent factor explaining the behavior of states (including he-
gemons). Ultimately, American traditions of prudence and international norms
constrained a neoconservative administration from taking matters too far beyond a
point deemed acceptable for a hegemonic power.
Given the United States’ paramount status, Americans in general and neoconserv-
atives in particular should reconsider the role of US diplomats and their contribution
to the evolution of the international diplomatic culture to which they belong and that
they have helped construct. If the U.S. fails to grasp the fact that diplomatic culture is
not a European artifact but, rather, a key constitutive element of a worldwide in-
ternational society, it is bound to repeat the mistakes it made with respect to Iraq.
 GEOFFREY WISEMAN 427

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