Masters of None

This article appeared in Harper’s Magazine in August, 2024

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The practice of interviewing government officials became commonplace in the United States by the 1880s, but was considered uncouth in parts of Europe through the end of the First World War. As American audiences enjoyed a more intimate, and often critical, perspective on their leaders’ decision-making, one French observer disparaged the “spirit of inquiry and ‘espionage’ ” animating the American press.

Thomas Meaney’s dispatch from the Munich Security Conference [“Masters of War,” Letter from Germany, June] is an impressive revival of that spirit. His interviews with David Petraeus, Ben Rhodes, Niall Ferguson, a Ukrainian parliamentarian, and an unguarded Chinese foreign minister whom he chases down are relayed with the familiarity and irreverence of the original “correspondents”—often the friends of an editor whose long-distance correspondence was simply published. Meaney’s own exchanges come together in an incisive, entertaining, and ultimately damning account of official hubris among would-be world changers.

To be fair, Meaney parachuted into a target-rich environment. Assembling diplomats, journalists, and activists from different countries with different interests and understandings of geopolitical dynamics is bound to expose inconsistencies in the dream of a securitized global order—and the hypocrisies of those who try to conjure it. This gets at the major pitfall of summitry. Though summits seek to govern relations among heterogeneous countries, they are tacitly ruled by a homogeneous set of ideologies and incentives. Their bureaucratic logic obscures the anarchic logic of the world as it is.

Such summits can also expose how frequently officials’ priorities diverge from those of the people they represent. My colleagues and I at the Institute for Global Affairs recently found in a survey that majorities in the United States, Britain, Germany, and France want NATO countries to push for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Substantially more people want to avoid escalation and prevent Ukrainian suffering than want to fully restore Ukraine’s prewar borders or deter autocratic invasions. When the summiteers declare that Ukraine’s fight is for democracy itself, they risk both aggrandizing and trivializing Ukraine’s effort, as well as alienating the citizens they serve.

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