UNDIPLOMACY, OR THE DARK AGES REVISITED

THE only safe haven during Europe's dangerous Dark JL Ages and beyond was the castle, with its great moat, drawbridge and armed men glaring from the turrets. The era seethed with raids and counterraids, kidnapings and ransoms. No traveler was secure. Even Richard Coeur-de-Lion, King of England, so feared capture as he headed home from the Crusades in 1192 that he scuttled across central Europe in assorted disguises. No luck. Seized by Austria's Duke Leopold, poor Richard spent a year in captivity before his weary subjects began to cough up 150,000 silver marks--twice the annual revenue of England.

Power and Perfidy

Without stretching historical parallel too far, one can perceive in world events today certain startling resemblances to those times devoid of international order. A distinct strain of nasty, small-scale, almost personal violence among nations is emerging. The taking of hostages, for example, is becoming more and more popular: witness North Korea's use and abuse of the captured Pueblo crewmen or China's 19-month detention of Reuter's Correspondent Anthony Grey. There is also Ghana's jailing of the crewmen of two Soviet trawlers on suspicion of espionage. More recently, armed

Communist Chinese junks pounced on six yachts off Macao and seized 15 persons, among them six Americans.

Terror is another weapon: Iraq's brutal hanging of nine Jews as Israeli spies was clearly intended to intimidate the Israeli government, and the Arab commando attacks on El Al's jets have precisely the same aim. Israel, a master of the extralegal reprisal (the Beirut airport raid), has also excelled in long-range kidnaping, as in the classic case of Nazi War Criminal Adolf Eichmann, whom Israeli agents spirited out of Argentina in 1960. Former Congolese Premier Moise Tshombe still sits in an Algerian jail, caught in a mid-air kidnaping in 1967. Such is the climate of the times that fifteen planes have been hijacked to Cuba so far this year. On a larger scale, the latest Soviet-East German squeeze on West Berlin is a modern-day refinement of the ancient tactics of siege.

All this seems unhappily reminiscent not only of the Dark Ages but of what Sir Harold Nicolson called the "wolflike habits" of the Italian Renaissance, when Niccolo Machiavelli lectured Medici princes on the judicious use of power and perfidy. In those days, diplomats were regarded as no better than spies. An envoy's status abroad, in fact, was hardly assured until the Congress of Vienna established a European balance of power in 1815. The relative stability that followed, as Henry Kissinger pointed out in his 1957 book, A World Restored, "resulted not from a quest for peace but from a generally accepted legitimacy ... an international agreement about the nature of workable arrangements and about the permissible aims and methods of foreign policy."

Unfortunately, the notion of legitimacy in world affairs has begun to fade. Primitive diplomacy--or undiplomacy--is increasingly back in style, partly because the world's two great powers are locked in a nuclear stalemate. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union is free to simply send in a gunboat to sort out an awkwardness. Modern communications link the world so closely together that a raw display of power in Pyongyang, for example, may produce severe reverberations in Moscow almost instantly. In addition, even small nations today have enough firepower of their own to blow an unfriendly gunboat out of the water. And the bipolar alliances that arose from the ashes of World War II almost inevitably ensure that a blow struck at a weak nation may be answered by a considerably more powerful ally. As a result, the big powers' key problem is how to control the actions of their smaller brethren: consciously or unconsciously, small nations have come to realize that they can act with relative impunity to achieve their own goals. The United Nations, once looked upon as a potential peace-keeping force, seems as unable to solve miniature clashes as it is to sort out major confrontations.

The new incidents of old-fashioned nastiness have several intriguing elements in common. For one thing, they generally involve nations that have no mutual diplomatic relations or, if such links exist, they tend to be severely frazzled. For another, the favorite object of attack almost always involves vehicles--airliners, autos or ships--which points up the essential vulnerability of international transportation. A third point of similarity is that Communist and other totalitarian nations seem most ready to flout established diplomatic legitimacy (there are exceptions), doubtless because such regimes are freer to act without taking public opinion into account. Certainly the arbitrary use of raw power to achieve national goals is characteristic of these governments, and physical violence is an integral part of the new undiplomacy.

Old Rules, New Game

Unhappily, violence in international relations is burgeoning both in frequency and scope. Hannah Arendt warns that "the amount of violence at the disposal of a given country may no longer be a reliable indication of that country's strength or a reliable guarantee against destruction by a substantially smaller and weaker power." "Destruction" may be too strong a word, but it is true that the old balances between large and small states are changing. As Yale Political Scientist William J. Foltz points out, disruptions in established diplomatic order "tend to take place at times when the world is shifting from one form of world order to another, when the new rules of the game are still being worked out." The old rules, as laid out after 1945, implied that the great powers would guarantee the peace--but that task has found no lasting takers, and the smaller powers thus feel free to make up their own rules.

Clearly, there are no easy answers to the problem. For the U.S. at least, the beginnings of a solution may lie in establishing diplomatic relations with the 16-odd Communist, Arab and other nations with whom no formal ties now exist. In a moral sense, of course, it is often important to withhold recognition of despotic, illegitimate or aggressive regimes. In a practical sense, the tactic may also handicap the withholder by cutting off communication with countries that wield important strategic power--witness the U.S.'s current inability to influence Cuba or North Korea, not to mention Communist China. Indeed, the key to world stability at present surely lies in a greater effort to achieve such influence. Not only should the big powers be far quicker to sense and soothe the smaller powers' frustrations. Equally important, it may be time for them to unite in using some judicious force against those who take so much advantage of the nuclear stalemate.

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