Sir Laurie Bristow is a former British Diplomat and President of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. He joined the United Kingdom diplomatic service in 1990, as the Cold War ended and change swept across Europe. His first overseas posting was to Romania in the spring of 1992, where he worked for three years during the post-communist transition.
Laurie served as Ambassador for the United Kingdom three times. He was Ambassador to Azerbaijan from 2004 to 2007 – He was the UK’s Ambassador to Russia from 2016 to 2020, and Deputy Ambassador to Russia from 2007 to 2010, and most recently he was Ambassador to Afghanistan during the fall of the Republic to the Taliban in August 2021. In 2021, Sir Laurie published Kabul: Final Call where he tells the no-holds-barred story into the collapse of Afghanistan, the chaotic evacuation, and the quiet heroism of the British soldiers and civilians on the ground, who brought over 15,000 vulnerable Afghans to safety, against impossible odds, in under two weeks.
In 2020, Laurie worked on the COP 26 climate change conference, as Regional Ambassador for China, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. His other senior roles in London included Director for Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Director for National Security. He was knighted in 2019, for services to British foreign policy.
In this interview I speak to Sir Laurie Bristow, former UK Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Russia and Afghanistan. We discuss the role of diplomacy in our world, the role of diplomats in global peace and security, and what we can learn from when diplomacy goes right, and when it goes wrong.
Q: How true is the phrase history repeats itself?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: So, I think the full quote is, “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, the second as a farce.” And I think, like most of us, there have been elements of both in my career. But, I mean, to try to answer the question seriously, I think one of the things I have learned with history is that it’s important to study it, but it will rarely give you the right answer. Quite often because there is no right answer, and what you’re really looking for is to understand how you got here—the decisions and the forces that operated on you but also on your counterparts, the many faces of your opponents. Part of that, of course, is about motivation.
So, particularly with Russia—the country I worked on and in for a very long time—you need to understand why the current leadership behaves the way it does. History can certainly help you with that, because an awful lot of it, I think, is about understanding the formative experiences of late Soviet KGB men: the things that they believe happened during the ’80s and the ’90s, how they understand that to have affected Russia’s interests and their interests, and, truthfully, how they understand how to do something about it. Within that, I think there are lots more things I could say, but a large part of it is around the emotional intellect that historical events bring all of us. It’s not unique to Russia; it’s not unique to the UK. When you’re trying to understand the motivations of people, quite often understanding the emotional drivers is at least as important as understanding the facts that took them there. So, in the case of Putin and the people around him, it’s resentment and it’s anger and it’s determination to recover something they believe they lost, and it’s about us.
Q: How do you balance your moral and social norms with those of the ‘other’?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: So, first of all, there’s a lot of talk among people who either practice or study international relations about strategic empathy. I’ve stopped using those words because it can sound too much like sympathizing with or agreeing with the position of the other side, which, in large parts of my experience, has been about the very opposite of that. It’s been about dealing with people who fundamentally disagree with us and mean to do something about it.
What I prefer is a more common language version of this, which is about understanding the motivations of both the other side and your own people. We’re working in the UK, in a democracy. People vote for the government they want; they vote for the policies they want, and the government needs to reflect on the voters and what the public is telling them. So how do you map that onto the practice of diplomacy?
I am never again going to accept a box of Ferrero Rocher from anyone—that’s just not going to happen. So we need to do away with the idea of what diplomats do and how they work. Being diplomatic in the sense of not really saying what you mean or softening the message—quite a lot of the situations I’ve had to deal with have been situations where it’s been absolutely essential to be clear and precise, and also to listen very carefully to what’s being said to you and the tone in which it’s being said.
It’s also, I think, about finding and using scope for cooperation when your interests align, even with people who are not like you. That’s a large part of what diplomats do. And it’s about neutralizing your opponent’s ability to harm you if your interests don’t align. Then, of course, it can very much be that you’re dealing with autocracies or with movements like the Taliban or with Mr. Putin’s Russia. But it’s not only the case in those kinds of situations. We have disagreements all the time with democratic governments and with allies and partners, but the question here is how do you find the leverage to create the best outcomes for you.
One other point I think people quite often misunderstand about diplomacy: first of all, it’s a field of extreme complexity. Nobody ever has control of all of the levers, and nobody ever has complete information. But also, there’s always the day after. So you’ll reach your conclusions of today’s problems, but then there’s tomorrow and the week after, and next year, and ten years after that. When dealing with really difficult issues like Russia or Afghanistan, it’s very easy to get stuck in the moment—how do we get through the day—and to lose sight of where we do want to be five or ten years from now.
Q: Do you think there is a good general public understanding of what diplomats really do?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: …quite a lot of diplomacy, of necessity, takes place behind closed doors. The kind of conversations you sometimes need to have with allies as well as opponents are not something you would necessarily wish to put in front of the public. I mean, there’s this saying about terrible things that go into the making of sausages, and there’s a bit of that, honestly. The role of confidentiality in very frank exchanges with friends as well as opponents is pretty important. You need to stay in control of the public narrative.
That said, I think it is important that the public understands how its government, its representatives, use the levers at their disposal. Diplomats are one of those levers. It’s about understanding what’s happening in the world, but it’s also about trying to influence and shape outcomes in the world. Of course, this is happening on a spectrum, with military force at one end and soft power at the other end. And, of course, increasingly private actors—the media, business, and so on—also do things that have an impact in the world that we might describe as interstate relations. I mean, it’s self-evident. But I think trying to explain what diplomats actually do, and maybe what they don’t actually do, is quite important.
Q: How do you approach building trust so quickly, often with opponents?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: First of all, the basics of this are to understand what your interests actually are and what your priorities are—what your hierarchy of interests is. What are the things that really matter to you? What are the things on which you can be prepared to compromise?
Also, try to understand how it looks to the other side. This is one of the really important things about dealing with Putin’s Russia or with the Taliban, or any number of other difficult situations—there’s no shortage of them in the world now. If you only understand what you want and don’t understand what the other side wants, you’re not going to get very far. Then you’re into the realms of wishful thinking.
Picking your battles is obviously an important element here—that’s what I mean by the hierarchy of interests. What are the things that really, really matter to you? What are the things where you can produce a good outcome? What are the things you can live with if something goes wrong, or where there’s actually nothing you can do about it—you have no agency over what happens.
So maybe, to be a bit more concrete about that, having red lines and keeping to them is really important, particularly when dealing with a strategic opponent like Russia. I touched earlier on meaning what you say and saying what you mean—so, clarity of signalling. Leaving exactly the message, through both content and tone, that you intended to leave, and also understanding exactly what’s being said to you in terms of tone and content.
Maybe the other thing to mention here is about options and leverage. In some of the worst situations I’ve been in, quite a lot of it is down to running out of options. In the final days of the fall of Kabul, we were losing control of the situation very, very quickly. We were basically out of options—basically because of things that we’d done. Part of the job of a diplomat is always to try to improve your options and improve your leverage over a situation.
Q: How quickly did Kabul fall, and what can we learn from that?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: …in terms of how Afghanistan collapsed at the end, the word we were using in both our planning and to describe it at the time was “cascading collapse.” So a relatively small thing happens, then because of that, something bigger happens, and then because of that, something much bigger happens.
To illustrate what that looks like, we’d been doing a lot of planning and scenario planning about how we’d get through 2021. The best-case scenario looked like we’d essentially muddle through somehow: the military withdrawal would take place, and the Afghan government and armed forces would make it through to the winter, maybe in control of quite a lot less of Afghanistan than we hoped. When it happened, the speed of the collapse was extraordinary.
Within a couple of weeks of us finishing the military withdrawal—up to that time, the Taliban had taken control of most of the countryside, the main roads, the border crossings, and so on, but they hadn’t taken or even attempted to take and hold major cities. The first provincial capital they took was Zaranj on the 6th of August. All of the rest fell in the following eight days, and Kabul fell nine days later—nine days for the loss of every single provincial capital.
Of course, what that means is that you are literally, every hour, coming back to the question: “Is this actually even worse than we thought it is?” And each time, the answer is, “Well, yes, it is.” You’re going rapidly from one scenario to the next, and the scenario is getting worse each time.
Hindsight is a great thing, but of course you only have it after the event. And going back to your first question about history, one of the things that I’ve studied a lot—I wrote a book about it on the fall of Afghanistan and lecture a lot about it to academic and other audiences—is what you learn from failures. The failure in Afghanistan was not just in the last few months; it was over 20 years. And what it amounts to is that at no time in that 20 years had we created the conditions that would allow our military to leave.
Q: I think creating the conditions for the military to leave is essential, quite rightly, but did we also not create enough trust between the population and “the West” ?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: …there are more players involved than just the West and the population; there are also the leaderships. Looking at the Afghan leadership, there is the Taliban itself, and there are other influential actors outside Afghanistan and outside the West. So to unpack a few of those: after the military operation to overthrow the Taliban in 2001, we—the West—essentially worked with Afghan political leaders, warlords, and others to establish Afghan institutions—a presidency, a government, an army—and processes to support those institutions and give them legitimacy in the eyes of the population.
Looking back on it—in hindsight—I think among the many mistakes we made there was, first of all, not thinking clearly enough about where the Taliban fitted into this. The Taliban are Afghans. Their constituency—the people from whom they draw power—is a substantial proportion of Afghans. Some of them agree with the Taliban; many don’t. But they’re a fact of life—you can’t wish them away.
And, at the risk of grossly oversimplifying, for pretty obvious reasons in the early days after 9/11 and after the intervention, it was politically very difficult for the U.S. and its allies to engage with the Taliban. Of course, the Taliban had their own view on that, and what happened over the following years was a Taliban insurgency against both the government and our forces supporting it.
I mean, there were various efforts after that to engage the Taliban in negotiations, but of course the one to focus on is the Doha Agreement—the one between Donald Trump’s administration and the Taliban, not the government of Afghanistan, just the Taliban—which said all foreign forces would withdraw by the middle of 2021, and we would like you to negotiate with the government. That creates a hard-wired situation where we’ve said we’re leaving—our forces are leaving (not our diplomats). But what you’ve created there is a situation where the Taliban have really no good reason to negotiate with the government. That, in turn, destroys trust between the government and us, and removes any basis for a negotiation that would deal with trust between the government and the Taliban.
To come back to the counterinsurgency war: at the height of the Obama surge—so, ten years on from 9/11—you’ve got 130,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan conducting a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban. And the sorts of things that happen in a counterinsurgency war—it’s really hard for that to be done in a way that builds trust among the population, both in the government itself, which we’re trying to support, and in our forces; in most material ways, it actually erodes that trust. And that’s the problem I think we never really got to grips with.
Q: Can diplomacy really end conflict?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: Diplomacy as a tool is as strong or as weak as the people operating it and their motivations. Let’s go back a stage: why do conflicts begin, and why do conflicts end? This is directly relevant to, as you mentioned, the very large number of conflicts happening in the world today and the way they relate to each other.
Broadly speaking, conflict begins when either both or all parties involved see more to be gained from fighting than from not fighting. As part of that, the underlying disagreements can no longer be deferred into the future—that’s how wars start. You think you can gain more by fighting, or you’re forced into it because the other side thinks they can gain more by fighting, and you can’t postpone the moment any longer.
Wars generally end in one of two ways. One is that one side wins and the other loses, which happens relatively rarely. More often, as you described, the reasons or the ability to continue fighting are outweighed by the need to pursue your objectives through other means—either because you can’t continue or because the balance has changed. Of course, that’s an extremely difficult transition point.
We’re seeing this now in a very difficult and troubling form in efforts to try to close down the conflicts around Gaza and Hezbollah. I mean, I think anybody would agree that it would be better for all concerned for those conflicts to finish and for the talking to start. How do you get there? The fighting has to stop. But for the fighting to stop, you need to disengage forces. Leaders need to make the decision to stop fighting. In the case of Israel and Gaza, I would say that a precondition for that is that the hostages have to be released—the ones that are still alive. The humanitarian situation has to be addressed, because without that, all the incentives work in the opposite direction, obviously.
But then you’re in the really difficult bit: what are you going to talk about? It’s the issue that’s coming at us now quite quickly with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There’s a lot of loose talk about “now let’s negotiate,” “now let’s get Ukrainians to negotiate.” What’s the negotiating about? What is on the table, what is off the table? Is Ukraine’s survival as a state on the table? Is its ability to choose its destiny on the table? Or is it essentially about discussing the terms of capitulation to Mr. Putin? I think at the moment, Mr. Putin thinks it’s about the terms of capitulation.
Q: What have you learned about some of our opponents in this world from meeting them, and interfacing with them as a diplomat?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: …when I was working in London some time ago, before I went back to Russia as ambassador, I said something in a senior meeting: if you want to know what Mr. Putin is thinking, listen to what he’s saying. I absolutely guarantee you won’t like it, but that’s what he thinks. Of course, it doesn’t follow that he’ll necessarily tell you what he’s going to do—those are two different things. But if you want to know what he’s thinking, listen to what he’s saying, and then work out why he’s saying it and what that means about his own choices.
For example, you mentioned de-escalation. Does he actually want to de-escalate? What he wants is to win. And I would say his understanding of what winning looks like in the war in Ukraine is, first of all, that Ukraine no longer exists as a sovereign country. But second, it’s about us. It’s about who are the dominant powers in European security. What is the role of the United States in this? Is the United States forced to recognize Russia’s rights as a great power? And finally, it’s about Russia itself as a great power. There are elements of a frankly imperial mindset here that go a long way back into Russian thinking. But unless we understand that, we won’t make good policy. We’ll be dealing with a fantasy world rather than the world as it is.
On that, one of the things I’ve come to look at a lot in recent years—partly because of the jobs I’ve done—is the importance of cognitive biases, in particular optimism bias and confirmation bias. So, believing that things will go better than the evidence is telling us they will, and believing that the world is as we would like it to be, not as it is.
So if you’re dealing with the Taliban, they are a fact. We don’t like them; we don’t like the things they do. But they are there, and the question for us is: what are we going to do about that? What are our interests, and what are our levers for making things we want to happen, happen, and stopping things that we don’t want to happen from happening? That’s really, I think, the way to think about this. And to do that, you need to build and maintain a critical detachment. I hugely enjoyed living and working in Russia; there’s frankly nowhere I would rather have been at the time. But you have to be realistic about the nature of the regime that you’re dealing with and behave accordingly.
Q: How hopeful (or not) are you for today’s world?
[Sir Laurie Bristow]: I recently gave a lecture titled “The Dumpster Fire.” If you look at the world around us at the moment, I have never seen a time with so many conflicts—so dangerous, so much risk—things interacting with each other in perilous ways. I mean, there’s of course a question of geography and politics in there, but also systemic issues: climate change, weapons of mass destruction, the implications of not just big tech but artificial intelligence and mega data. Problems where we haven’t even got our arms around what the question is, let alone what we think the answer is in many cases. And some of those trends are exhilarating; they’re almost faster than we can understand them. This is one of the great things now about working in a university—it’s the space to think about these things.
Alongside that, I think you’ve got a couple of other things going on, which I find both interesting and extremely important. One is the degradation of the institutions and mechanisms that enabled us to at least manage differences of view and potential conflict. We in the West have called this the rules-based international order, but I think the rules-based international order as we understood it and benefited from is now receding in the rearview mirror. We don’t really know what’s coming next. We do know that a lot of countries have views on what that should be—one of them, of course, is China. And there are lots of other middle powers who, in my view, rightly have voice and agency. They have more power in the modern world than they had even 20 or 30 years ago.
There’s a more general issue here that I find very interesting, and a lot of it is about us. It’s about trust and the breakdown of trust in public institutions. To put it really starkly, what happens when large parts of the population, sometimes with good reason, don’t believe their politicians or institutions? And what do you do with that? Part of my mind tells me that questioning people in authority is actually a good thing. But what’s problematic is when nobody is able to say what is true and what isn’t. That’s a real, real problem.
An opportunity—when I was really struck—I was in New York a couple of weeks ago for the General Assembly week, and of course the weekend before, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, held his “Summit for the Future,” which is an inherently optimistic thing to do. However, his own opening remarks were pretty pessimistic about the state of the world. But I guess one thing to comment on here is that old adage: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” And when you have a highly disruptive situation, there’s always the opportunity to stop doing things that are no longer working and to focus on what really matters—not in the past but in the future.
Greater transparency and the effects of the information technology revolution are bringing more information to more people, and therefore greater accountability. The problem is, some of that information is rubbish or untrue. We’ve got to find ways through this.
At a very basic level, the world’s population has grown hugely in the last few decades, but on the whole, very large numbers of people have been lifted out of poverty. One of the effects of global economic development has been a lot more people with better lives than has been the case in the past.
Maybe to bring it back to one specific example—Afghanistan, and in a slightly different way, Russia. It’s very difficult now to be optimistic about the outlook in Afghanistan or in Russia. They are in very dark places, for different reasons. But one of the things that happened to me over my time working in both of those countries and on both of those countries is that I got to know very, very courageous and principled Afghans and Russians who want something different for their country than what they’ve got. So I think holding on to that and thinking about how we work with those people—if that’s what they and that’s what we want—to help them achieve their goals, that seems to be a worthy thing to do