Diplomacy by WhatsApp

Drop the bomb emoji.

Joseph Stella, Telegraph Poles (1915)

If the stakes weren’t so high, the barrage of text messages between world leaders in the days running up to the World Economic Forum in Davos would be amusing. Texting turns everyone into a semiliterate twelve-year-old, and presidents, prime ministers, and secretaries general are no exception. We’re used to the President of the United States communicating with the American public in weirdly punctuated streams of all-caps, exclamation marks, and typos, but to know that texting has now become the de facto language of diplomacy is a revelation, and a worrying one.

Whether it’s a handwritten letter, a telephone call, a fax, an email, or a text, the medium through which people communicate shapes what they say and how they say it. Some mediums encourage formal speech while others encourage casual banter. Some are suited to full sentences and well-turned paragraphs; others to sentence fragments and cliches. Some promote consideration; others, abruptness. In general, a medium’s speed of delivery is inversely correlated to the thoughtfulness and nuance of the messages it carries. The growing hegemony of the instant message, it seems fair to say, is not fostering eloquence in either private correspondence or public speaking. Texts are great for quick, offhand exchanges. They debase pretty much everything else.

Because texting is resistant to the expression of complicated or subtle ideas or arguments — it is, by design, a medium of speed, compression, and simplicity — it’s particularly ill-suited to grappling with complex issues or solving complex problems. To use it for international relations and other aspects of governmental policy making, particularly in fraught situations, is a sure route to misunderstanding, anger, and the escalation of tensions.

The most telling precedent for what we’re seeing today is the change in diplomatic practices that occurred with the arrival of international telegraph and telephone lines in the late nineteenth century — an episode I describe in my book Superbloom. The unprecedented ability of far-flung leaders and diplomats to talk directly with each other without delay spurred great hopes. It seemed obvious that the resulting exchanges would ease friction and encourage goodwill among nations. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his work on wireless telegraph systems, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” His rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that wireless telegraphy would “make war impossible.”

What actually happened was altogether different. In the lead-up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, telegraphic communications inflamed tensions rather than dampening them. Writes the French historian Pierre Granet: “The constant transmission of dispatches between governments and their agents, the rapid dissemination of controversial information among an already agitated public, hastened, if it did not actually provoke, the outbreak of hostilities.”

The start of the First World War in 1914, two years after Marconi announced the end of war, was similarly hastened by the new communication mediums. After the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through newly strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern describes in The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.”

Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, the world was at war. “The moral qualities—prudence, foresight, intelligence, penetration, wisdom—of statesmen and nations have not kept pace [with the] rapidity of communication by telegraph and telephone,” the distinguished British diplomat Ernest Satow wrote in his 1917 Guide to Diplomatic Practice. “These latter leave no time for reflection or consultation, and demand an immediate and often a hasty decision on matters of vital importance.”

His words are as resonant now as they were a century ago, and they should give today’s leaders and diplomats pause. Successful statecraft requires deliberation, discretion, and discernment, qualities rarely evident in messages thumbed out through apps on phone screens.