Diplomacy is a political performing art that informs and determines the decisions of other states and peoples. It shapes their perceptions and calculations, so that they do what we want them to do, because they come to see that doing so is in their own best interests. Sometimes diplomacy rearranges their appraisal of their strategic circumstances–and, when needed, the circumstances themselves. Ultimately, it aims to influence their policies and behavior through measures short of war. Diplomacy succeeds best when it embraces humility, and respects and preserves the dignity of those to whom it is applied. Most of what diplomats do is unseen, and it is relatively inexpensive. Diplomacy’s greatest triumphs tend to be preventing bad things from happening, but gaining credit for something that was avoided is difficult.

This chapter looks at the effects of World War I on Palestine and the Zionist movement. During the war, the entente powers viewed Ottoman territories as spoils of war, although they differed on who would get what. This was because the secret treaties they signed with each other and pledges to others were mutually contradictory and/or ambiguous. One pledge, the Balfour Declaration, promised the Zionist movement a home for the Jewish people in Palestine, thereby giving political Zionism the victory it needed to ensure the survival of the movement. After the war, the entente met to decide the future of Ottoman territory and came up with the “mandates system,” which created a new political form comparable to a temporary colony. Britain received the mandate for Palestine. The Jewish community there cooperated with the British and established structures compatible with the mandate. The indigenous community rejected both the Balfour Declaration and the mandate. As a result, it lacked the structures that might have prevented the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

At the outbreak of World War I, a handful of British and Italian diplomats and statesmen wished to exploit the traditionally good Anglo-Italian relations to change the geo-strategic chessboard of the conflict. But centrifugal forces produced the longest and more complex negotiations over a neutral country’s intervention in the whole war.

This chapter discusses the precarious status of Germany’s formal colonial empire and its tenuous hold in its spheres of interest in the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and Venezuela by 1905. It also explores how tensions during the Second Venezuela crisis, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Tangier crisis solidified British perceptions of German menace in need of containment. Germany’s formal colonies were a bitter disappointment in need of major reforms, while neglect and disengagement defined German relations with Japan. Meanwhile German investment in the Anatolian and Baghdad railroads in the Ottoman Empire generated new points of friction with Britain and Russia. A British-led Anglo-German intervention in Venezuela was perceived in the United States as a German provocation. Similarly, the Russo-Japanese War and Tangier crisis generated much British hostility toward Germany fueled by overblown fears of its navy that worked to bring about an Entente with France and agreement with Russia. Once again, a vast gulf separated the reality of Germany’s meagre capacities and its fragile finances from exaggerated images of menace often drawn from German naval propaganda.