The UC Interview Series: Sir Adam Thomson

Julia Ellings:

Julia Ellings works in Congress for the United States House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Energy, the Environment, and Cyber. She holds an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oxford. Originally from Seattle, U.S., she completed her undergraduate degree in government at Georgetown University.

Sir Adam Thomson:

Sir Adam Thomson has been the Director of the European Leadership Network (ELN) since November 2016. Before joining the ELN Adam had a 38-year career in the British diplomatic service. . His final diplomatic posting was as UK Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) between 2014 and 2016. Prior to that, from 2010, Adam served as British High Commissioner to Pakistan and was UK Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York  2002-06.  Earlier postings included Moscow, NATO, Washington, D.C., and New Delhi. Adam also worked in London on Israel/Lebanon, as the Soviet analyst for the United Kingdom’s Joint Intelligence Committee (1989–91), as the Head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s (FCO) Security Policy Department, and as FCO Director for South Asia and Afghanistan.

Past Experience:

Julia:                         Thank you, Sir Adam, for your time. We are pleased that you agreed to join the Interview Series project. I would like to start with a few questions about your earlier career. How did you decide to pursue a career in the Foreign Service and perhaps more specifically, what role did your educational background play in shaping your world view and career goals?

Sir Adam:               I got into the Foreign Service mainly from a lack of imagination and energy. My father was a British diplomat, and so it was easy for me to imagine myself doing something similar. And although I did look for other jobs after the Kennedy School, the British Foreign Office was the only immediate job offer I had, so I took it and then I was lazy and I never looked for anything else.

                                    Slightly more seriously, I'm not sure my educational background played a huge role in it, except that during my time at the Kennedy School in the US where we studied an awful lot of US domestic policy, the international scene began to seem increasingly interesting to me. It was the late 1970s, so very deep Cold War, and even then, it struck me that there were far fewer rules about how the international community operates than the national one. I already had a job offer from the British Foreign Service and that sense of the Wild West was somehow attractive to a young person. And I wasn't wrong.

Julia:                         Yes, we are in a similar situation in many ways now. So, tell me a little bit about your experience serving in Moscow. When did you get there, how did your impressions differ from what you anticipated while working in the Soviet and East Europe Desk in London?

Sir Adam:               It was an incredible privilege to first be trained for a whole year full time in Russian language, the most beautiful language I know apart from English, and then to work on UK policy toward the Soviet Union and then to go to Moscow. I don't know what I expected exactly. After a year of studying Russian, I suppose I had some rough idea, but it was still a complete revelation to me.

                                    I'd lived in the first world, I'd traveled in the third world, but I had never been in the second world. It felt like being on – to say a different planet is perhaps an exaggeration, but it was a completely different state of being than anything I had ever encountered before. It was, to a much greater extent than modern Russia, an absolutist state. Every aspect of life, down to the most personal, because you had to always assume you were being bugged, was in the hands of the Soviet system. Everywhere you went you had to assume you were being followed, everything you read was designed to advance the state's interests, and that was a very powerful, rather fascinating, and in a funny way exhilarating experience. We were very clearly operating in enemy territory.

                               As a result, it was a great first posting. It was a great lesson for a young diplomat that there were, and of course still are, huge parts of the world that absolutely and fundamentally did not think like we thought. Something that we must never forget.

Julia:                         Is that perspective something that took a little while to pick up on, or did you understand that quite quickly? The difference in mindset?

Sir Adam:               I think I understood that there is a difference in mindset fairly quickly. I have a trivial but very illustrative anecdote still vivid to me: one day, driving outside Moscow, my car went off the road and I had to drive through a field of very young wheat, just a few inches high. I remember being pursued by a Soviet farmer waving his stick at me, and shouting: "You're driving on the bread, you're driving on the bread!" You just never have had a Western farmer expressing it like that. This probably wasn't even a Soviet thing - it was a deeply Russian thing.

                                    What took me quite a long time in my career was to learn to put myself in the other person's shoes. As a young diplomat in Moscow, I learned that the world could be very different, and that people could look at things from a very different point of view. Although it is fair to say that I mostly interacted with people who actually quite liked the West because for nobody else was it safe to talk to a British diplomat. But, when I went into the Russian Foreign Ministry and got told less than I was able to read in Pravda that morning about some bit of Russian foreign policy, I do not think that I was being very sympathetic to the individual who was having to  that rubbish to me, and who might genuinely believe in what they were doing. I think it was really only very much later, when I was Ambassador in Pakistan, that I fully made the imaginative effort to understand where people were coming from.

Julia:                         That's really interesting. So then how did you or your colleagues perceive the strength of the Soviet Union? How much of a shock was its collapse, since that was only a few years after you left?

Sir Adam:               Yes, I left in 1983, and to the great disappointment of all my Soviet contacts, I went on to NATO. There I sat on something called the Economic Committee on which I represented the UK. I remember the Economic Committee very soberly and deliberately pooling all the available intelligence and concluding in 1985 that the Soviet economy had slowed and was probably only growing at about 1% a year. We subsequently quite quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union discovered that it had been shrinking at about 5% a year in 1985. That is a useful reminder that no intelligence is perfect, that the adversary seems always ten feet taller than reality, and that it is quite difficult to imagine anything other than linear development of foreign policy.

                           As the Soviet Union did come apart, I was the Soviet analyst for the UK's Joint Intelligence Committee. I was part of a small body of people called the Assessments Staff. We gathered material from all available sources, intelligence and open sources, and fused it into assessments that have to be agreed across the British government. It's a bit like the US National Intelligence Committee. Funnily enough, there was only one person doing the Soviet economy and one person - me - doing Soviet politics. As a result, I had a ringside view of the disintegration.

                                    I'm still very proud that I had the insight to be the first person to write an intelligence assessment - I think it may have been late 1989 - that began with the sentence "The Soviet Union is coming apart at the seams." I remember being rung up by three different people in our Ministry of Defense to complain about that draft assessment because if that was true, think what terrible things it would do to the UK defense budget. However, in the drafting process, I won my point and that sentence remained.

Julia:                         Wow. Did you have many people on your side or was it an uphill battle to maintain that assessment?

Sir Adam:               At that time, it was quite a battle. It takes everybody as individuals but especially as institutions to adjust to change. I had a similar experience with my good colleagues in the UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) when I was the Ambassador to NATO, trying to persuade them that perhaps the coolest thing for a military career was no longer fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, but doing guard duty in the forests of Estonia, and this as late as early 2016. I remember having arguments with the UK and MOD about the case for putting any assets into the Baltic republics.

Julia:                   Let’s return to NATO a little bit later. During your tenure as the British Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN), what were your impressions of Russia's role in the organization and its leadership as a permanent member of the Security Council? Particularly as at the beginning of your tenure, there was perhaps a moment of unique optimism for partnership in counterterrorism efforts between the West and Russia?

Sir Adam:               It's difficult to answer that question without explaining the backdrop. I arrived in September 2002 with troubles already brewing around Iraq. My first 18 months at the UN were utterly dominated by the attempt by Tony Blair and to some extent George W. Bush to secure the famous second resolution on Iraq from the Security Council to legitimize an invasion. That so dominated business in the Security Council that it's difficult to talk about the role played by the Russians without thinking also of the immense divide that this issue caused in Europe.

                                    Sergey Lavrov, who was the Russian Permanent Representative in the Security Council, was very often being joined by his French and German counterparts on one side of the debate, with the UK and US on the other. I had never been a big admirer of Russian foreign policy. That is not just because it either isn’t always credibly constructive or it fails to be understood as such, but also because the Russians have a very old-fashioned approach to doing diplomacy. They have a discipline which I recognize from my earliest days as a British diplomat, sticking to script, but they don't have the ability or most of them don't, to operate in a more agile fashion. Sometimes, this serves them well, other times it can be quite destructive.

                                    I remember leading an effort to try and secure a UN-led peace process in Cyprus that required a Security Council resolution. We secured the support of everyone else in the Security Council but also a Russian veto. It was very disappointing, especially because it was not clear how it concerned Russia's most vital interests. In short, I have some admiration for the skills of Russian diplomats as individuals - Sergey Lavrov is very talented and effective - but limited admiration for Russian foreign policy as a whole.

                                    Some of our present difficulties stem from or have their roots in the 1990s. Although I was not at the UN at the time, I vividly remember the Russian de facto veto on the West's attempt to get a Security Council resolution legitimizing military action for humanitarian reasons over Kosovo. This was in many ways the symbolic watershed moment when the West and Moscow parted company after the end of the Cold War. And while the Russians have strong arguments on their side for saying that Western action really required a Security Council resolution, it was also not clever I think  for the Russians to have simply blocked rather than trying to find some way through.

Julia:                         I would like to follow up a bit and talk about the UN in general. Jumping ahead, has Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine highlighted any strengths or limitations of the UN's governing abilities? Do you think that the UN, since 2014, made any significant missteps or things they could have done differently regarding the current conflict?

Sir Adam:               That's a big question. I am an admirer of the UN for all its faults. It does a tremendous amount of good in areas other than international security. There are all these international organizations that the UN created or under the UN umbrella that are very much the substance of the rules-based international order we keep talking about.

                                    In the security field, where for better or for worse, five countries have an absolute veto over hard security matters, the UN has always been and remains massively constrained. Which is not to say it can do nothing. It is never admired enough how the UN makes it possible to do peacekeeping missions that nobody else in the world wants to do. That's admirable and saves an enormous amount of trouble and basic human grief.

                                    But the UN is in an important sense failing now on the Ukraine invasion. I cannot think of a more visible and horrible example of a violation of one country's sovereignty and territorial integrity (although let's remember the West is not blameless either), and the UN is not proving able to do very much about it so far. I think that the UN system has perhaps been a little bit more cautious than it needed to be. At the same time, it has successfully engaged in some of the most successful work to mitigate the crisis so far - the grain deal, for example. And if you think of the International Atomic Energy Agency as a UN organization, the UN has done some work on nuclear power plants.Maybe it's right for the UN system to keep its powder dry on the big issues. But n the 1950s the UN General Assembly managed to unite for peace on Korea to greater effect that it did in February 2022 on Ukraine.

Julia:                              The grain deal is definitely something that I know many US members of Congress have focused on and appreciated to see brokered.

Sir Adam:               Yes, it shows not just that Russia and Ukraine can, where it suits their strong national interests, reach a pragmatic outcome, but that the US and the European Union can too, both of whom had to modify their sanctions regimes to make this possible. It's a small glimmer of light in a very dark picture.

Julia:                         Absolutely. You were appointed Permanent Representative to NATO in 2014. How would you evaluate NATO's response to Russia's annexation of Crimea, and military involvement in Donbas at that time - prior to the February 2022 invasion?

Sir Adam:               With hindsight, I think we can say quite clearly that NATO's response was inadequate. We will possibly never know, unless in some new world order the Kremlin's archives were to be reopened, the extent to which President Putin's judgments about the 2022 invasion were based on his experience of the NATO reaction to 2014.  But it's plausible that he saw NATO’s reaction as weak or mild or at least at a level that he could contemplate surviving again if he tried some more annexation. And I would also add that NATO was just completely unprepared in 2014 for the Crimean annexation.

                                    I arrived in April 2014 just after Crimea had been annexed, in order to play the British part in getting NATO to its summit in Wales in September 2014. At that time Crimea wasn't even in the agenda for what the alliance was working on nor was the alliance thinking it had to be addressed at the Wales summit. And NATO really struggled for several months to come up with a credible proposition. We owe a great deal to Philip Breedlove, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who bided his time until August and then put on the table a proposal for a NATO military response that found the sweet spot in the dynamics of the alliance. But it was just incredibly modest. It was a battalion in each of the Baltic republics, 1,000, maybe 1,500 men in each Baltic state and in Poland. It was a 2% of GDP defence spending pledge and one Allied brigade to be developed to be able to deploy at higher readiness. That reflected the art of the possible at NATO at the time. There were certainly allies that wanted to be way tougher than that, but it was not possible to shift the alliance’s center of gravity very quickly.

Current Issues:

Julia:                         I was going to ask how you personally interpreted the invasion, the motivations behind it, and did you have an idea about what the response should be that was perhaps different from what actually happened?

Sir Adam:                     With a hindsight that makes me look foolish, in 2014, while the Russian response to Yanukovych's overthrow was deplorable, it did not at that stage look to me, or I think to most others, as a part of a more expansionist worldview. I felt that although the Russian narrative about what had happened in Ukraine was false, nonetheless the way that the West had handled themselves over the Maidan process, left a certain amount to be desired in terms of how Russia might react to it. I think history is still being written on this. I am told by people more expert than me that although Putin may have found the rhetoric around Nova Rossiya in 2014-15 quite attractive, he himself actually pulled Russia back from pursuing it. I hope this doesn't sound too defensive and self-justificatory, but I think there is a certain amount to suggest that Putin's own thinking has evolved since 2014-15, perhaps even quite a lot in the past couple years. That would also mean that his agenda now is significantly different than it was in 2014, either because he didn't think it in those days or because he didn't think Russia was ready to undertake in 2014 what it has now attempted in 2022.

Julia:                         That dovetails beautifully into my next question: President Putin has frequently cited the threat of NATO expansion to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In your view, and I know it is impossible to get into Putin's head, but do you think that Russian leadership has believed this sincerely in the past few years, and has there been an evolution in their perception of this threat since 2014?

Sir Adam:                   It's very hard to give short answers to this question, and historians are going to rake over this endlessly. My experience, from serving in Moscow, from being at NATO, from being head of the Foreign Office's Security Policy Department in the late 1990s, where NATO expansion was a very live issue, is that many Russians genuinely, if mistakenly, see NATO as a military threat. But it's probably more complicated than that. I think all human beings, but perhaps especially those who have grown up in fairly authoritarian states, are capable of thinking and even believing two mutually contradictory things at the same time. I think it's possible for Russians intellectually to understand that NATO's posture may not be as threatening as they allege, and yet emotionally still feel that it is a threat. Russian intelligence has often penetrated NATO, so the Russian security establishment have a very good picture of what NATO is and yet they continue to misunderstand it.

                                    Where I think we can say more confidently that NATO is actually a threat to Russia is politically. It's not a completely simple picture, but, broadly speaking, NATO represents a collection of open societies in the Euro-Atlantic area. And these open democratic societies have provided inspiration in at least an indirect way for a whole series of so-called Color Revolutions, not just in Ukraine, but elsewhere around the world. That is very threatening to the system of government that has evolved in President Putin’s Russia. I'm very ready to believe what I hear from US and UK intelligence, that President Putin genuinely believed that the door was closing for him in Ukraine, that if he didn't act in some fashion, then Ukraine would increasingly over time move into the if not NATO, then Western orbit, something that in his worldview is unappealing. If that’s so,, this is an important point.  A lot of people might feel that either Putin's worldview - the necessity of great power spheres of influence - is either completely unjustified - I tend to that view myself - or that his actions are completely cynical. Unfortunately, neither interpretation makes for good policy.   Not just President Putin but a great many Russians do, however unreasonably, feel a degree of threat coming from the West, and that is something that NATO and Western policy is going to have to deal with imaginatively.

Julia:                              Just a quick follow up - do you think the accession of Finland and Sweden adds to that political threat from NATO?

Sir Adam:                   No question that the accession of Finland and Sweden add to the political threat.  Putin has had to play it down because it's a massive geostrategic disaster for him, really. It not only dramatically increases the line of contact between Russia and NATO, but it actually strengthens NATO. It also demonstrates that when the chips are down, countries tend not to want to join Russia, and tend to want to join the North Atlantic alliance. All of that is very damaging for the geostrategic philosophy that he's pursuing.

Julia:                              Perhaps relatedly, what impact has the war had on discussions of European Union (EU) strategic autonomy?

Sir Adam:                    I think the EU has actually had a “pretty good war” so far. It's in general a set of institutions that tend to advance by crisis, and this no question is a massive crisis for Europe and for the EU. More specifically, it has made more vivid than ever the necessity of European pursuit of greater capability to look after its own interests. And I think it has also been a lesson in the distinctions between healthy, practical pursuit of greater European capability and unhealthy rhetoric about European strategic autonomy, which can be damaging to the transatlantic relationship.

                                       We've seen Europeans discover for the umpteenth time that they are massively dependent on external, US military capability, and that that is not going to change any time soon. We've had both sides of the Atlantic worrying about a two-theater crisis with all the tension around Taiwan. Europeans understand very well that if there were a conflict, God forbid, with China, US capability would not be available in Europe if there was a crisis there too. So, I think this has been helpful for the way in which the EU now chooses to move forward on so-called strategic autonomy, or European sovereignty. It's driving deep thinking about European military capability, but also about European security in much wider senses: whether that is thinking about national resilience and critical national infrastructure, or Europe's relationship with sub-Saharan Africa, for example.

Julia:                         Since the February full-scale invasion, analysts have increasingly pointed to the shifting balance of power in the EU from Western to Central European countries. How would you describe such a shift, if you think one exists?

Sir Adam:                  I think it's a bit misleading to think of it in these terms. There are lots and lots of different balances of power inside the EU, just as there are inside US politics or the UN. Balances around different things, different coalitions of interest for different policy questions. A lineup on energy, for example, or on tech innovation, or economic rules is not necessarily the same as the lineup on how to react to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On that, it is not surprising that the Central and Eastern Europeans' voice has been loud. They have a point of view about Russia, and they are willing to back that with action. They are prepared to tolerate more economic pain, greater energy disruption, higher defence spending and so on.. That gives them quite strong leverage to add to the fact that on these matters, the EU operates by consensus. So, if they care passionately about it, they can block stuff that they don't think is going in the right direction. That doesn't mean to say that everything has shifted eastwards. But it does reflect the maturing of the EU and of the membership of its newer members. Inevitably, when you're new, you're a little diffident. Now nobody could describe any of the Central and East European countries as diffident. I also think it reflects something quite important about the transatlantic relationship too. You asked me about NATO's response in 2014, and I think the US in 2014 was, if not at the moderate end of the spectrum of opinion in NATO, then at least in the center ground, and not inclined to accommodate Polish wishes for NATO divisions to be permanently stationed on Russia’s borders.  Whereas now, Washington is perhaps rather more sympathetic to Central and Eastern European perspectives and less sympathetic to a German or a French one, for example. And that makes a difference in EU politics as well as NATO politics.

Julia:                           Thank you for highlighting some of those nuances, it's often easy to generalize, especially before we're able to reflect on these long-term trends and shifts and how the alliance is being affected. Speaking of which, I know there's been a lot of excitement about the strength of the coordinated transatlantic response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and relatedly, a couple fears that this may be more short-lived than people would have hoped. What, in your estimation, are the key factors that would ensure the strength of the alliance, and potential pitfalls that could undermine it?

Sir Adam:                 That's not a small subject. One of the really important, not particularly noticed developments as a result of this crisis is that Washington, Paris, Berlin, and London are once again talking to each other. Institutionally, I think that's incredibly important for the strength of the transatlantic alliance, and it was not a mechanism that was operating all that much under, for example, the Obama administration. It could very easily come apart again because of the domestic politics of any one of the participants. The dynamic might be quite different if it was Marine Le Pen rather than President Macron, the dynamic would clearly be different if it was President Biden or a President Trump, and so on, and that's important.

                                    Overall though, I would say that the evidence since 24 February is that, ironically, President Putin will do more or less everything necessary to ensure that the transatlantic alliance remains strong. He doesn't intend that, but Russian behavior keeps on pushing Western capitals back together again, giving renewed energy to their determination to support Ukraine. It's not in Russia's interests, but it appears to be a fact of life, that combined with Ukrainian military success and European tanks full of gas for this winter, the transatlantic partnership in its response to Ukraine is going to endure at least until January 2025, a significant milestone in US politics.

Julia:                         Now as you alluded to earlier, you are in your longest-serving post as the director of the European Leadership Network (ELN). What has motivated you to take on this position, especially at this very important time? And how have your experiences informed your commitment to the ELN's goals?

Sir Adam:                  Well, I did not expect to be in this policy area as my second career. The most thrilling thing I did professionally as a diplomat was in Pakistan working to scale up  girls’ education dramatically. I thought that my next career would be promoting girls’ education in the third world. Unfortunately, at NATO, I got very concerned in 2014-16 about the outlook for Europe's security. I had spent two thirds of my career working in one way or another on European security issues, and I could see that I had failed, and I was bequeathing to my children and any potential grandchildren a dangerous mess. The ELN offers an opportunity to do something about that mess from outside government, in a way that I think is extremely exciting.

                                      It's difficult to explain briefly, but I saw from inside government that on security issues, governments have less and less capacity to do what they need to do. There's a widening gap between what governments do and what they should do to deliver on security. I believe that networks like ELN can help fill that gap. Always accepting that governments take the big decisions on security, nonetheless, the ELN can do things that governments cannot. So, I launched myself on a second career of guerilla diplomacy, operating in the jungle from outside government, trying to infiltrate government and change the direction, if you like. The combination of working on literally existential issues and trying to build an institution that can be a tool that makes a real difference on those issues is hugely motivating.  

Message to the younger generation:

Julia:                         So, what advice might you have, to conclude, for young people who want to study or work in Eurasian affairs, at a time when those kinds of networks and engagement with Russia may seem futile or impossible?

Sir Adam:                I would say get involved. When I joined the UK diplomatic service, it was 1978 and engagement with the Soviet Union seemed absolutely impossible and futile, yet I went to Moscow. Today, the picture may look dark, it is dark, and that in itself is a reason for engaging to try to make a difference. It's also a world that is infinitely more fluid and exciting and interesting than the world of 1978, a very static Cold War with very sterile diplomacy. Now, far more is possible, and things change far more quickly. You can engage in lots of different ways - joining the ELN would be one good way - but I'd particularly like to speak to the importance of diplomacy, which tends to get neglected in the context of conflict or of outright geostrategic confrontation. I'm absolutely convinced diplomacy becomes more, not less, important in our very interconnected age. You often hear people say, "well you don't need an ambassador because you can pick up the phone and talk to the head of another government". That's profoundly mistaken, because precisely the incredible volume of information available to governments makes it harder than ever, I believe, actually to understand the other side. We have tons of information, a little knowledge, and not so much wisdom. We tend to just absorb the information we're given, but we need diplomats to explain to their own governments how the other side works. If times are tough, then tough diplomats get going, and we need a steady supply of really talented ones for the challenges we now face.

Julia:                            At the very beginning of our interview, you mentioned that you foresaw that the Soviet Union was unraveling. With all the imperfect information, like the GDP data, which you mentioned, how did you make that assessment, come to that conclusion?

Sir Adam:                   I'll have to think a bit, Julia. I can no longer pinpoint the month in which we wrote that assessment, but it was certainly after the Berlin Wall had come down. I think it had become really clear that people's ideas were changing, and that constituent parts of the Soviet Union, from Lithuania to Kazakhstan, were beginning to see themselves as not Soviet, but Lithuanian or Kazakh. They seemed to be beginning to believe it might be possible actually to live without the Soviet Union, as Lithuania or Kazakhstan-, given what had already happened in Eastern Europe. It's not a happy conclusion to draw right now, but it was partly, I guess, to do with the then-Politburo's clear reluctance to apply utterly ruthless force to the maintenance of the Soviet Union. And they weren't wrong, because afterwards, subsequent to my assessment, the Soviet Union lost the Russians and the Russian Federation. Yeltsin represented Russia, not the Soviet Union. And the coup of August 1991 failed because there wasn't popular support for the Soviet Union within Russia. These things can happen. That's why you need to have diplomats to tell you they could happen and that this or that is what's being said on the street right now. So, I guess it was the accumulating evidence of those trends that led me to my conclusion.

Julia:                         Sir Adam, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time.