In 1604 the English statesman Sir Henry Wotton ( 1568-1639) memorably defined a diplomat as “an honest gentleman sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.”
Whether construed as cynicism or witticism, this observation over four centuries later remains pertinent to understanding that realism must be the foundation of all successful diplomacy.
In the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia fought the single largest battle in the history of warfare, a titanic struggle involving 9,000 tanks, 5,000 aircraft, and 2.7 million soldiers. Russia's decisive victory, coming just months after a similar triumph at Stalingrad, proved to be the beginning of the end for Hitler's “Thousand Year Reich.”
Today another Battle of Kursk, albeit much smaller in scale, has very likely heralded the concluding stages of the bloodiest conflict on the European continent since the Second World War.
Volodomyr Zelensky’s bold but desperate gambit to change the dynamics of the war last August by sending his best soldiers across the Russian border to attack the province of Kursk in hope of relieving pressure on his beleaguered forces in the Donbas and gaining a valuable bargaining chip in any future peace negotiations has now ended in failure. Following some of the most savage fighting of the war—with huge casualties on both sides—Ukraine has lost all the territory they gained and been driven from Russian soil.
Retrospectively this 21st-century Battle of Kursk may possibly turn out to be the last great combat operation of this tragic and senseless conflict, but also an event which brought both sides to a recognition that the war could only be ended by diplomatic rather than military means.
Given that the United States was the dominant force in NATO's three-year proxy war against Russia, it was almost inevitable that the principal players in any move towards the peace table would be the leaders of those two nations. Also self-evident was that the precondition for this dramatic turn of events was the new American President’s rejection of his predecessor's belief that “unending war” was somehow a useful basis for US policy in Ukraine.
Needless to say, the adherents of President Biden's “in it to win it—as long as it takes” war policy in Washington, Europe, and Kiev were aghast at this sudden turn of events. Unable to accept at face value President Trump's preference for a “stop the killing—and the dying” approach to war policy, they immediately filled the air with cries of “betrayal” and however implausibly asserted that the President of the United States had become a “Russian asset.”
Henry Kissinger once observed that a fundamental requirement for any diplomat is the ability to ”talk civilly and constructively with people you don't like.”
Ergo, when President Roosevelt fought World War II as an ally of Joseph Stalin, no one suggested he did so out of personal fondness for the brutal Russian dictator. And when President Eisenhower ended the Korean War through negotiation no one accused him of being a “puppet” of Mao Zedong.
Why then should the rationale for Donald Trump's relationship with Vladimir Putin be seen as any different from his predecessors partnering with distinctly undesirable yet very powerful foreign leaders while promoting the wider national interests of the United States?
When President Roosevelt met Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and effectively “ceded” Poland to Russian control, he was bitterly assailed—particularly by millions of Polish-Americans for having “sold out” or “betrayed” the Polish people who had heroically risen up against Hitler's tyranny only to be “handed over” to that of Stalin. Yet FDR made this difficult decision because he believed realities on the ground gave him no other choice. Borders in postwar Europe would be defined not by diplomacy in a vacuum, but by the limits to the advance of the victorious Red Army.
Likewise, some critics howled when Eisenhower approved the final terms that ended the Korean War by accepting the partition of Korea at the point where the stalemated armies of both sides stood when a ceasefire was agreed. South Korean president Syngman Rhee initially refused to sign the agreement and demanded that the war be continued until the Communists were driven out of the entire Korean peninsula.
Ike however told Rhee that if he didn't sign the painfully negotiated agreement, “all American aid to South Korea would cease forthwith.” Rhee reluctantly signed, and not only has that imperfect peace endured for over 70 years, but South Korea rose from the ashes of war to become one of the most prosperous nations in Asia.
This spring, as the awkward mechanisms of peacemaking yet again creak into motion, let us hope that all parties have the patience to learn from these lessons of diplomatic realism.
William Moloney studied history and politics at Oxford and the University of London and received his Doctorate from Harvard University. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Hill, Washington Post, Washington Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Baltimore Sun, Denver Post, and Human Events.