Arabic and Atom Bombs

Sir Geoffrey Adams on his diplomatic career

When Sir Geoffrey Adams was British Ambassador to Iran, then-President George W. Bush summoned him to the Oval Office for a personal meeting. “That was weird,” Adams told me, as we sat amid the clatter of coffee machines in the Market Street Costa. Adams had prepared for a one-on-one with Bush — but when he got there, he ended up getting grilled on Iran by the “entire National Security Council of the United States”. 

Adams, now an Honorary Professor at the School of International Relations, first came to St Andrews in the ‘80s to study Arabic. His 42-year career with the Foreign Office included serving as the Director-General, Political of the Foreign Office, the main adviser to the Foreign Secretary, the British Consul-General in Jerusalem, British Ambassador to Egypt, Iran, and the Netherlands, plus stints in Jeddah, Cape Town, and Paris. Before meeting him, my general impression of diplomacy was that it involved bow ties and cocktail parties. What exactly do diplomats do? Are they just advisers, or do they shape the decisions politicians make? (In other words, are they pencil-pushers or Grand Viziers?)

Adams, perhaps unsurprisingly, was diplomatic about the last question. There’s often a “creative tension”, he said. Civil servants who have been doing the same job for years will be coming at things from a different perspective than ministers who’ll be reshuffled in a year or two. “Sometimes politicians find officials hard to understand, and sometimes officials find politicians hard to understand,” Adams said. But he never found it “awkward” to be overruled by politicians. “I think that’s right [...] no one elected me.” 

Placing the responsibility on the politician makes it easier to justify promoting policies you might disagree with — but still, if a diplomat cannot in good conscience implement a certain policy, they “need to resign”. On his part, Adams said he always felt the demands of his ambassadorial postings were “reasonable”. It helps that most people in the Foreign Office, including him, are “around the centre of politics”. 

Being a The Rest Is Politics centrist certainly helps when you’re negotiating treaties, where  stepping into the shoes of your counterparts is crucial. For instance, when Adams was dealing with “very difficult and very tough Iranian negotiators” over nuclear proliferation treaties or the release of British hostages, he needed to know where they were coming from. Understanding why Iran sees Britain as “powerful and manipulative” involves understanding the two countries’ history. “As recently as 1953, Britain with the US overthrew a government of Iran in the hope of getting a government that was more amenable to our interests [...] So you can kind of see why Iranians might think that.” Sometimes, though, compromise is not going to happen. “We had to deal with Iran over terrible violations of human rights,” Adams told me. “I couldn’t say, ‘Oh well, maybe it’s understandable’ [...] You have to say, ‘No, we can’t accept that.’”

To properly know his counterparts, Adams needs to learn the language — even in the age of Google Translate. Adams learnt Dutch before his posting at the Hague, even though everyone he worked with spoke perfect English, both reading and listening to the language gave him an insight into Dutch culture that he couldn’t have gotten otherwise. 

Being a good public speaker in any language is important — Adams has strong opinions on after-dinner speeches. “I tell people to be brief. Always be shorter than you think [...] and [do] not try to be funny. Too often, I think, people making speeches try to be amusing, and very often it doesn’t work.” 

Adams would recommend his job for anyone interested in “living and working abroad, sometimes in difficult places, getting under the skin of countries, working out what makes them tick”. But aspiring diplomats should recognise the drawbacks of the job. For one, it’s hard to raise small kids when you’re constantly moving countries (Tony Blair once asked Adams for child-rearing advice — “important to have a nanny”, Adams replied.) Likewise, If you have a partner, they need to get used to moving around every couple of years. Adams was “fortunate” in that his wife, a freelance writer, could do her job from abroad. 

People need to understand they’ll be advancing British interests over other countries: “it’s important to not be naive about that.” But still, the whole point of diplomacy is finding a common ground. “I certainly remember thinking, on occasions, that the person I was negotiating with [...] had a case,” Adams remembered. “Very often, you’re talking to people who are prepared to meet you halfway.”

Nobody should be put off by an impression that diplomacy is just for posh men — that stereotype was true in the 1930s, when Adams’ own father was rejected from the Foreign Office because, back then, diplomats needed substantial personal savings to fund their trips abroad. But these days there’s been a “massive” widening of access, partly led by Adams in his role on the board of the Foreign Office. “Since part of our job is to represent Britain abroad, we should look like modern Britain, both in terms of ethnicity but also in terms of class.”

Diplomacy is often frustrating, and Adams isn’t free from regrets — especially from his time in Jerusalem. “Along with many others, we failed to bring peace to Israel and the Palestinians,” Adams said. But his four-decade career has included plenty of achievements, too. Adams was especially proud of his time working in South Africa at the end of Apartheid, where he “played a part, in a small way, in achieving a relatively peaceful transition to democracy”.

Or, take Adams’ meeting in the Oval Office. President Bush was weighing up whether to invade Iran — Adams reckoned his expert advice, “in a very small way”, helped stop Bush from launching another war. “You shouldn’t be over-ambitious about the amount of good you can do,” Adams told me. “But you can do good, and you should do good, and it’s most certainly not all about going to parties.” 

Photograph by Alden Arnold