SOURCE: “Lying Abroad,” in The London Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 14, July 21, 1994, pp. 7–8.

In the following essay, Halliday offers a comparison between the treatment of international policy in Diplomacy by Kissinger, True Brits: Inside the Foreign Office by Ruth Dudley Edwards, and Mandarin: The Diaries of Nicholas Henderson by Nicholas Henderson.

The conduct of foreign policy has of late fallen into disrepute. The confusions of the post-Cold War world have made diplomacy seem especially futile. Economic decline has turned attention to the cost of overseas display, and the disappearance of a single external object of confrontation has reduced the public sense that external commitments matter to the country. In apparent reflection of this, and for all their differences of focus, these three books share a common defensive tone.

In the British case, the conventional justification for diplomacy—that it helps governments to foresee and manage change—appears especially...