80 JUNE 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL scope, nature, and impacts, and each provides tools and methodologies to address them. By highlighting the vulnerability to disinformation created by the collapse of traditional media systems, the siren call of “belonging” at the heart of most influence campaigns, and propaganda’s enduring presence in human history, these books contribute to a reasoned understanding of propaganda as well as improved resilience to its effects. A retired Senior Foreign Service officer and a former executive director of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Vivian S. Walker, PhD, serves as chair of The Foreign Service Journal Editorial Board, an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s MSFS degree program, and a faculty fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. Previously she taught at the Central European University’s School of Public Policy, the National War College in Washington, D.C., and the National Defense College of the United Arab Emirates. A British Take on Foreign Service Lessons in Diplomacy: Politics, Power and Parties Leigh Turner, Policy Press, 2024, $29.99/ hardcover, e-book available, 256 pages. Reviewed by Barbara Stephenson After a 42-year career in the U.K. Civil Service, the vast majority of that in the U.K. Foreign Office as a British diplomat, Leigh Turner, former British ambassador to Ukraine and Austria, retired to write his book, Lessons in Diplomacy. Part memoir, part how-to guide, part classic foreign policy, the book is more a collection of chapters than a sustained, coherent work. This has the virtue of enabling the reader to pick any entry point and start reading. As an inveterate U.K. watcher with multiple U.K. tours under my belt, I found the third chapter, on Brexit, a particularly compelling and rewarding read. In a mere 10 pages, Turner combines firsthand accounts of working on economic and monetary union with the European Community, as the European Union (EU) was known back in the 1980s, with pithy, insightful analysis of the underlying tensions that led to Brexit. Turner sees Brexit as a mistake and provides painful primary accounts of upholding nonsensical policy positions, as the difficulty of implementing Brexit made itself manifest. But he balances that with a well-founded critique of the push toward “ever closer union.” “I voted against Brexit,” he writes. “It weakens both the U.K. and the EU.” Then, he adds, given Europe’s history over the last 200 years, “I scratch my head at the concept of ‘European values.’” I don’t agree with Turner’s downbeat conclusion about the future of the EU, which is tackling governance challenges— especially for emerging technologies— that seem to have no other home across the democratic world. Still, Brexit was such a profoundly polarizing issue, one that ruined dinner parties and tore families and friends apart, that it is rare to find any treatment that is remotely balanced. And Turner’s third chapter, “How to Fail at Geopolitical Change: Brexit,” may well be the finest account of its length I have found anywhere. I also recommend Turner’s fourth chapter, “How (Not) to Introduce Democracy,” which opens with rich firsthand accounts of the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, when the Soviet Union went from seeming like it would last forever to collapsing. Drawing on contemporaneous letters home and a journal, he makes the social and economic chaos of Moscow in the early 1990s vivid. One sample: “My chronically unreliable Lada Niva is familiar with jerrycans but has yet to know the nozzle of a petrol pump,” Turner writes. He then describes bribing Sergei to sell him a jerrycan of gas, at a 1,000 percent markup, to get his Lada, containing his three-month-old child, back to shelter in minus 20-degree weather. Turner also weaves economic data into these accounts. For example: “Between 1990 and 1999, Russia’s GDP slumped from $517 billion to $196 billion—barely more than Poland’s.” This provides context and strengthens the impact of the graphic anecdotes, giving readers a window into why the Financial Times hired him to write “several dozen pieces.” As for the remainder of the book, readers can pick and choose topics of interest. The index is useful for locating anecdotes and observations about topics as varied as Brexit, diplomatic immunity, drinking alcohol, and Hill, Fiona—making it easy for Foreign Service readers to locate the bits that interest them, given the wideranging experiences that all diplomats seem to share. Those shared experiences—of nearly running out of gas with a baby on board, of seeking a post in Africa or Latin America and ending up in Bonn, of meeting celebrities and managing visits of elected officials—will make the book a comfortable, easy read for most FSJ readers, as it deals with a world we know well.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy ODIyMDU=