03-03 Diplomacy

It was 1983, at a meeting with a group of senior government officials in Singapore at the 10th International Small Business Congress, that I was told that Singapore had bought something like 350 Israeli tanks for their national defence.
It was such a surprise to learn that Israel and Singapore had established diplomatic relations shortly after Singapore was expulsed from Malaysia in 1965.
Such a tricky, complicated diplomatic initiative with Singapore so closely linked to a Muslim country like Malaysia. At the time Singapore got its water supply from Malaysia. The photo of the two Prime Ministers tells it all.
For me, it was a further confirmation that all forms of development by either individuals or collectives requires both self-discipline and organizational skills. And both Israel and Singapore are short of natural resources and out of necessity, have had to build their economies around technology and innovation.
Some think diplomacy is mostly a PR operation as nations try to explain themselves. I see it as advocacy, and you are either good at it, or not. Soft power is perhaps the best word to describe such a sophisticated global political operation.
I spent much of my life building the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), which is an advocacy organization promoting the interests of Canada’s small business community.
And I have spoken at least a dozen times to graduate students studying business-government relations. They are always surprised when I tell them that CFIB is an organizational story and not a political story. It is the same phenomenon in the world of real politics, with leaders attaining the top job, being the product of the best organizational machine.
Now we have a small country like Israel with the political smarts to build strategic alliances all around the world. And having diplomatic relations with Israel means other kinds of partnerships are at play, either economic or military.
And while the Palestinians are sending thousands of rockets into Israel with their military arm Hamas that is getting funding from Turkey and Iran, Israel just quietly manages this insolvable problem while focusing on large global diplomatic initiatives.
In the US there is tension between the Chinese technology company called Huawei, which the US government believes is an arm of Chinese intelligence. A senior executive of the company was recently arrested by the Canadian government in cooperation with the FBI in the US.
But Israel is being clever, and playing both sides of the street. They are partnering in hundreds of ways with both the US and China. In fact, Huawei has an R&D centre in Israel. And China, like Israel, is short of natural resources and wants to build its future by being a technology and innovation giant.
And here we get back to complex but strategic diplomacy with China needing both the oil of the Arab states and the technology of Israel.