The Washington/Mandelson debacle: lessons
This week:
Naked Diplomacy: advice for diplomats, and what’s changed
Join UNESCO’s cultural leadership programme
“Disastrous from start to finish”: lessons from a debacle
Help the UN on migration around the world
Control AI: my guide
13 top diplomacy vacancies
Join the US diplomatic service: deadline today
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Book of the week
Naked Diplomacy
Tom Fletcher published Naked Diplomacy 10 years ago. He was already a star British diplomat, not least for his bold and engaging blogposts written while serving as British Ambassador to Lebanon.
Returning from Beirut, he took time off to write. His book includes a short history of diplomacy, and advice on “what makes a good diplomat”.
The core is an argument that diplomacy can’t rely solely on confidential cables, closed-door meetings and carefully choreographed communiqués.
Diplomats have to be more open, more connected and more willing to engage directly with the societies they sought to influence.
Tom encourages them to build wider networks, communicate with authenticity, embrace experimentation and accept that influence depends on trust more than hierarchy.
Image: HM The King engaging widely in Havana
This aged well. His lessons are practical: any diplomat, from new entrant to ambassador, and any international professional can apply them.
Tom wrote when Twitter was the dominant diplomatic social media platform and AI barely featured in discussions of foreign policy.
Now AI is influencing policy analysis, intelligence assessment, language translation, public diplomacy and crisis response. And deepfakes, synthetic media and algorithmic manipulation have made the information environment yet more contested.
That only strengthens the central thesis.
The diplomat of 2026 won’t succeed by competing with machines at processing information. The comparative advantage of diplomacy will lie in judgement, political intuition, ethical decision-making, relationship-building and the ability to negotiate between people with fundamentally different interests and worldviews.
AI can amplify those qualities, but it cannot yet replace them.
The Naked Diplomat remains worth reading, in spite of dated technological references. An update covering AI would be an equally powerful volume 2.
The core message would remain: diplomacy benefits from tradition, but survives by adapting.
Tom himself has written today:
“My first book, The Naked Diplomat, has just had its tenth birthday. I’m thrilled that it resonated with so many people, in so many languages. I left a job I loved to write it. It took me in directions I could not have imagined, including this one.
Looking back, three ideas framed it:
that the world would be reshaped by the political and economic implications of plummeting trust in institutions; perceptions of inequality; and technological change that would move faster than the norms and rules needed to contain its societal impact;
that the more that citizens took power, the more peaceful the world would become - that digital technology and social media would strengthen our common humanity and our instinct to coexist. But that this required us to be more active and engaged as citizens, and avoid distraction and apathy (cute cats …); and that as power shifted from states, we needed new coalitions and thinking to respond to the new challenges of the 21st century;
that diplomacy would only survive if it radically changed the way it worked and communicated, dropping the jargon and protocol that separated diplomats from the public. Diplomacy is not rocket or brain science but a basic human instinct.
The first holds—but even that underestimated the pace.
The second is unfinished. Technology has empowered—but divided more than I anticipated. I was too optimistic about social media, and too naive about how power would push back.
The third has progressed - communication has changed -but trust has not kept up.
The assumptions beneath it all look more fragile now: that progress lifts all boats; that history bends toward justice; that technology would help close gaps.
But I am doubling down on human connection.
Diplomacy newsletter of the week
Tom’s comments are in today’s edition of the weekly newsletter Humanifesto, covering the UN’s humanitarian work worldwide.
This week’s edition covers some of the most pressing and difficult of UN challenges, including the responses to Ebola, drought in Mauritania, cholera in Nigeria and much more.
But “I’m not yet ready to discuss West Ham”.