News from Nowhere: Making Friends

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The UK’s Culture Secretary, Nadine Dorries, has spent the last few weeks making herself unpopular, or, to be precise, even more unpopular than usual.

She started the year by offending core Tory supporters at the traditionalist end of her own party in a series of attacks on the national broadcaster described by one columnist in The Times as an ‘act of cultural vandalism.'

She went on to attempt to defend her boss Boris Johnson in a series of aggressive and frankly incoherent television interviews. In one of these, conducted live on breakfast news, she appeared to be questioning the journalist’s right to ask her a sequence of ostensibly reasonable questions. This prompted some social media commentators to enquire how early she might have started drinking that day.

And then last week, she thought it would be a smart idea to visit Saudi Arabia. She tweeted that she was there ‘to discuss how we can use culture, tourism, and sports to strengthen our shared relationship.' She said she was ‘delighted’ to be there on this ‘exciting trip’. One British journalist responded that he had at first misread that as ‘culture, torture, and sports’.

Ms. Dorries has been described by a former editor of the Daily Telegraph as ’the most conspicuously uncultured holder of her office since its creation.' That was perhaps slightly unfair. She does, however, have the singular distinction of having been suspended from her own parliamentary party in 2012, after having taken the decision to absent herself without leave from Parliament, so that she might appear on a reality television show, one which viewers swiftly voted her off. 

But we must, of course, do our best to forgive and forget. Nobody’s perfect; and it has, after all, been quite a while since the last reports of irregularities in her parliamentary expense claims. And it was as far back as 2014 that she appeared on a TV game show in an ostensible attempt to raise funds for charity and managed to make nothing for the charity, but still kept the £3,800 appearance fee that she had earned for herself. That much, of course, is ancient history.

So, Ms. Dorries may not be the brightest star of the British Conservative Party, but her latest actions nevertheless seem consistent with the apparent long-term strategy of UK diplomacy in the Middle East. This has for decades been a strategy based primarily upon the exigencies of profitable trading relationships, regardless of the humanitarian records of one’s trading partners. It is a strategy which not only emphasizes the establishment of alliances that afford the greatest economic benefits, but which (in the interests of those commercial partnerships) also seeks to marginalise those states whose aspirations may be considered geopolitically inconvenient and which may on the face of it appear to offer nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. In essence, the UK tends to follow America’s lead, grasping for the immediate gratifications of the lowest-hanging fruit and leaving the regional field open for other international powers to pursue longer and better-considered games.

It is true, however, that Ms. Dorries managed to commit one of the greatest of sins that a British public figure visiting the Saudis can – she went out of her way to talk about it. Even that darling of Britain’s arms industry Prince Andrew always tried his best not to do that. The UK’s intimate relationship with Saudi Arabia is commonly supposed to be kept as quiet as possible, as the guilty little secret it is, and not shouted about on social media. It’s almost as gauche, in polite conversation, as discussing the war on Yemen, seeking the provenance of the decision to assassinate Jamal Khashoggi, or exploring the Bin Laden family tree.

Last month, the BBC’s glossy but otherwise ill-conceived new documentary series "Inside Dubai: Playground of the Rich" showcased the escapades of spoilt wealthy westerners, as they enjoyed lives of unbridled luxury cradled in the shadow of those grand towers that grew from the sand on the endeavours of thousands of foreign labourers, workers who have so often found themselves living in conditions of near-slavery. The programme was staggeringly uncritical, scandalously unscandalized. ‘If you’re having a bad day in Dubai,’ declares one of the show’s many millionaire fashionistas, ‘you’re really not having a bad day.’ 

Is there truly no such thing as a bad day in Dubai? You might like to try telling that to the countless construction workers who built the Burj Khalifa, and who in doing so endured abysmal, abusive, and dangerous working and living conditions, according to an independent 2006 report by Human Rights Watch. That part of the world is notorious for its shattering disparities in material wealth, economic opportunities, and social freedoms. It is a kingdom whose gaudy riches are relentlessly deployed to stave off the appearance of a fundamental entropy, a stately Dorian Gray concealing (and always about to be overwhelmed by) an unsustainable rate of moral decay, a mouldering leviathan preserved in the most sumptuously golden amber. It presents itself and the inevitable and natural order and settled state of things, but in fact, there seems little that might be accepted as normal or natural or incontrovertible in this. 

This new BBC series portrays a fantasy land born out of the puerile imaginations of those whose tastes run exclusively to gilded ostentation and conspicuous consumption. It could, in short, have been dreamt up by Donald Trump. If it had been, it would probably represent one of the former president’s least offensive contributions to the region.

Mr. Trump’s infamous relocation of the US Embassy to "Jerusalem" in 2018 was an act of pointless grandstanding provocation reminiscent of Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the Dome of the Rock eighteen years earlier. It upset even his country’s closest western allies. Like his series of escalating insults to Kim Jong-un – an aggressive turn of rhetoric that brought the planet to the brink of nuclear war and prompted a couple of high-profile summits but no concrete outcomes – this move was doubtlessly seen by Trump as a masterly gambit. It was not so much a negotiating tactic as an act of random disruption set to stir reactions, one which he intended as a mechanism to urge the relevant parties towards his much-hyped deal of the century, the limited set of accords which he brokered two years ago with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Trump’s strategy in the Middle East represented a virtual caricature of western approaches which have repeatedly tried for "peace" in the region either through the use of military interventions designed to impose alliances and alignments upon hostile states, or by befriending regimes already sympathetic to western business interests, ignoring any concerns relating to those nations’ records on human rights, international law or constitutional democracy, and thereby isolating those governments considered less likely to comply and join the neoliberal fold of globalized capital.

This mentality – one which seeks to threaten, cajole, and bribe, to divide and conquer – recalls that of the criminal underworld, the gangland boss who sees the accumulation of power as a zero-sum game, or the child in the schoolyard who views success only in terms of the obstruction and defeat of all potential enemies, or indeed the bullying British Prime Minister striving to crush the seeds of resistance within his own party’s ranks. It is one that seeks to create coalitions of those all too willing to become complicit with hegemonic authority, or of those too vulnerable to refuse. The West – at least according to its avowed ideals – should be better than that.

History has shown that peace is instead best achieved by developing mutual understanding between even the most antagonistic of opponents. The Cold War ended, for instance, when a moderate Soviet leader resolved to enter into an honest and open conversation with a hawkish American president. A little later, the initiation of dialogue between Nelson Mandela and F. W. de Klerk in the early 1990s prevented the collapse of South Africa into anarchy and civil war. Let us not forget that Mandela’s ANC had been engaged in acts of violent resistance to the violence of apartheid rule and that in 1987 Margaret Thatcher had famously described it as a ‘typical terrorist organization.' This was not a scenario conspicuously ripe for the prospects of compromise and reconciliation.

Through the 1980s, Mrs. Thatcher had meanwhile refused to distinguish between the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Fein, the political wing of that movement. Sinn Fein’s leaders were condemned as terrorists and denied a political voice. It was only when British governments began to pursue channels of communication with Sinn Fein – a strategy that privileged and prioritized the status of political dialogue within the republican cause – that the Irish peace process was able to progress. 

The decision made last November by a hardline British Home Secretary to extend the UK’s designation of Hamas military wing as a "terrorist" group to its entire political organization perhaps inevitably mirrored the policy of the United States. It also recalled the similar American prescription of the PLO in 1987. As was witnessed thereafter, however, historical progress only becomes possible through dialogue, and that dialogue is only possible through the recognition of the validity of the voices of all those whose vital interests are at stake.

These days, it might certainly seem more agreeable to western governments to restrict their dealings to conversations with Fatah, but – whether they like it or not – it is Hamas that controls Gaza; and, irrespective of one’s ideological perspective, pragmatism dictates the necessity of negotiation with all those who may hold the keys to peace. 

To view our opponents as monsters does nothing to prevent the recurrence of those cycles of atrocities that have afflicted human civilisation for millennia, though it may at times appear temptingly easy to see them so and to abandon the possibility of progress to the dustbin of history. Openness to rigorous dialogue and an acknowledgment of the complex nuances of moral difference, sometimes under such circumstances, require superhuman degrees of patience, empathy, and moral fortitude, qualities which are rarely shown by politicians courting immediate popularity through the current electoral cycles and news cycles. Cynics may consider this naïve, but such cynicism has rarely promoted understanding between mortal enemies or achieved durable peace.

You do not have to agree with someone to extend to them the dignity of dialogue. You do not have to approve their methods or endorse their arguments to acknowledge that they are entitled to their positions and are worthy, in those terms at least, of your respect. Negotiating techniques which allow room for all sides in any dispute to maintain such dignity are crucial to meaningful, equitable, and sustainable processes of conflict resolution and to the establishment of truly lasting peace.

Diplomacy is necessarily difficult. It requires that national leaders develop a political mindset that inspires them to do things not because they are easy but because they are hard. It is not simply about stressing areas of consensus and forging agreements with one’s natural allies, in a bid to force all other parties into line. It is about the patience required to establish and maintain meaningful and respectful conversations with people with whom we have areas of profound disagreement. It demands that we work to identify areas of both mutual practical advantage and common moral ground. Those areas are not always easy to find, but they are always there, somewhere. 

This process obliges national leaders to become international statespeople and to seek solutions that afford benefit and respect for all parties involved. That’s something which the likes of Nadine Dorries, Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Donald Trump, and successive generations of politicians and diplomats on all sides would do very well to learn.

The English poet W. H. Auden once famously lamented those vicious circles of historical recurrence whereby ‘those to whom evil is done do evil in return.' We can only hope to break those same cycles of violence by comprehending how they work, and by coming to accept the troublesome reality that to seek to understand the motivations of others is not necessarily always to condone their actions. The road to reconciliation requires that we do our best to sweep away our prejudices and hypocrisies and confront certain often unpalatable truths.