The UC Interview Series: Sir Laurie Bristow

Interviewer: Anna Davidson, UC Fellow

Anna is completing a DPhil in Area Studies for Russia and East Europe at the University of Oxford on how the use of nuclear energy cooperation in official and elite discourse shapes perceptions of international identity. Anna is also an energy and strategy consultant for various international organisations. She completed an MSc with thesis distinction in Russian and East European Studies at Oxford and a B.A. in International Relations and Russian from the University of Georgia in the USA, during which she conducted fieldwork in the Republic of Georgia.

Interviewee: Sir Laurie Bristow

Since March 2020, Sir Laurie has served in the UK government as Regional Ambassador to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and China for the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). Prior to this, he was UK Ambassador to Russia (2016-2020) with an extensive background serving in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office as Director of National Security, Director of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Minister and Deputy Head of Mission in Moscow, Ambassador to Azerbaijan, and various diplomatic missions including in , Turkey and Romania.

I) PAST EXPERIENCE: Diplomacy of international law, Cosmonauts, and the World Cup

Anna:            To begin our first segment, you have both a B.A. and a PhD from Cambridge University, an MBA from The Open University and your research on English literature, I believe, with a focus on poetry, was in quite a different field than the one you ended up working in. So, before you became Sir Laurie, you were Dr. Bristow! Would you mind taking us back to that time and tell us about how your educational interests and experiences have shaped the way you approach the field you’re currently in and perhaps how they have made you more valuable in it?

  Sir Laurie:   It’s not actually a particularly unusual profile for a British diplomat. Unlike some foreign ministries we tend to look for people who have the aptitude, the outlook, the curiosity to do this job and learn the skills we need of them over time. So, we are looking for people who might not have thought of themselves as candidates for the diplomatic service.

Studying English is pretty good grounding for some of the things that I do. Dealing with very complex arguments, arguing a case, and also accepting that we don’t always hold the only valid view on a subject. The MBA was something that I did a bit later, and that was more about understanding how organisations work, particularly how the private sector works.

A bit of personal history as to why I chose to go into the diplomatic service rather than stay in academia. This was in the late eighties and early nineties. By the time I finished the PhD, I decided that I did not want to be an academic and was looking around at what else was happening in the world. And of course, the really big thing that was happening was the end of the Cold War. So I joined the Foreign Office in the year that it all ended, the Berlin Wall came down, the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia set off on a different path. And I’ve been working on the consequences of that ever since.

My first posting in the early 1990s, more or less straight out of university, was to post-Ceaușescu Romania. I was fortunate enough to be there during the three-year period where the country was making the transition from what had happened before to where they wanted to go to.

Anna:              So you were in the UK and then posted to Romania, I’m sure that was quite a transition for you.

Sir Laurie:     Yes, I was in the UK for a year or so, was taught Romanian to go there, and turned up in the winter of early 1992. It was one of those experiences that you get only once in a lifetime: to watch an entire society trying to remake itself and, in my own small way, to try to be a part of that.

Anna:              All of the different places that you’ve worked in are very diverse. How did you communicate and work with so many different types of cultures and legacies? How do you balance representing the culture and values of the United Kingdom while at the same time connecting with the people you’re with?

Sir Laurie:     It’s a really important question, it’s actually at the heart of what we do. So, the first requirement is to understand the country you represent, what it is trying to achieve, its interests, and its values. But if you’re going to do that successfully, you’ve got to understand the country you’re working in as well. Try to work out how to work effectively with the people, with the government, and with society that you are in.

As I’ve got more senior in this job, particularly in the last four years in Moscow, I found that an absolutely crucial part of it was interpreting back to seniors in London what was happening in the country where I was working. If you take Russia as an example, there are all the people who have views on Russia, but those views are not always necessarily backed up by a detailed understanding of why Russia is behaving the way it is. So a very important part of my role there was to try to explain very succinctly why something had happened, what the Russian government was trying to achieve, and what that  meant in terms of our options for responding to it, both in the short term but also in the longer term.

Anna:            Was there anything that you found practically that helped you when you relayed the information back to the UK?

Sir Laurie:     There are a couple of really important points there. One is of course that the job of an ambassador is not to apologise for the country that you’re working in or to study it in an academic sense. It is to promote the interests of the country that sent you there. So never ever forget that, it is the job.

Within that though, there are a couple of other points. One is around how you hold difficult conversations. I had some pretty difficult conversations in Russia, with the Russian government. The toughest of course were around the Skripal poisoning where we were trying to get messages across to the Russian side that were about deterrence: “If you do this sort of thing, then you will find that the price is higher than you could possibly have imagined.” The way I tried to deal with those conversations is to be as clear as possible about what we are going to do and why, and to hear very clearly the nuances of what was coming back at me; but also to keep it professional as far as possible.

It doesn’t, in my experience, help if you let emotions run ahead of you. A particularly important point there is that if you’re going to keep someone like me as an ambassador in Moscow at a time when something like the Salisbury poisoning is happening, it is for a purpose and that purpose can only be served if you keep the channels of communication open.

The other really important point here is to try and bear in mind the long term as well as the short term. If you’re dealing with a very big crisis, it can become all-consuming.  But particularly when you’re trying to manage a relationship like this one, you’ve got to try and think of where you want to get to. Where do you want to get to in ten, twenty, and thirty years? My rule of thumb is that if all you do is crisis management, then crises are all you will get.

Anna:            You mentioned twice now the importance of communication and keeping the channels of communication open. Would you say that that’s the core responsibility of your job?

Sir Laurie:   The core responsibility of the job is to promote the interests and the values of the country that sent me there and to do that you need to keep the channels of communication open with the government.  But also more widely, because a very large part of the relationship that we want to construct with Russia is actually outside the intergovernmental sphere. It is the business relationship, educational links, cultural links. Essentially, achieving the kind of relationship with Russia as a nation that best serves our interests.

Anna:            When you think of Russian culture, you think of the arts and music and theatre. How did you go about making that part of how you engaged with them?

  Sir Laurie:   There is a huge respect and admiration for Russian culture in the UK and vice versa for British culture in Russia. If you’re trying to think about the totality of a relationship between two nations, that is really important. Some of the things we were able to do there were around supporting contacts in the arts.

Along with some friends and colleagues, I set up a youth orchestra a couple of years ago bringing together 50/50 young Russian professional musicians and young British professional musicians, none of whom had ever worked together before, most of whom had never been to one another’s country before. Most of the Russians didn’t really speak English. And I can guarantee that none of the Brits spoke Russian. But we put them all together and ten days later, they were getting rave reviews in the national media in Russia and in the UK.

We also supported some very important exchanges between national museums and galleries in the UK and Russia. The job of the gallery or a museum is to help this generation understand the world it lives in. And to do that, you need to understand how you got here. So one very important exhibition was the Cosmonauts exhibition. This was about the achievements of the Soviet and Russian space programme brought to the Science Museum in London, explaining to the world, not just to London, what lay behind the space race and behind the technological advances  - which was, of course, the Cold War and national prestige.

Anna:            So you found that engaging in those other areas that we might not think of as diplomacy actually enhanced the relationship between the UK and Russia?

Sir Laurie:   They’re massively important. I’d add to that universities and science. If you think about what the world was like thirty years ago, at the end of the Cold War, there were very few links between scientists, hardly any at the student level, other than language exchanges. One of the more rewarding things that I did several times a year during my time in Moscow was awarding degrees in joint degree programmes offered to Russian students by Russian and British Universities. The best way to think about that is that these are people who will be doing our jobs in ten to twenty years.

Anna:              I’d like to give our readers a glimpse of your experiences inside the trenches of Russia-West relations To do this, would you mind sharing three types of stories with us: one of your biggest surprises, one of your biggest challenges, and one in any category that you choose.

Sir Laurie:     First of all, the trenches. There were times in the last five years when it felt like that whilst I was in Moscow. It is pretty obvious to anyone who has been following events of the last five years that we’re in a particularly difficult phase in Russia’s relations with the UK and with the West more generally. But the other side of this, though, is to keep in view actually what we’re trying to achieve. It is about building a stable, mutually productive relationship with a country that is very important to us in any number of ways.

Big surprises? One thing that quite often can come as a bit of a shock, even if you’ve been studying the country for some time, is the vehemence of the rhetoric used by the government and by some people close to them, supporting them, against “western values”. Things like democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and so on. The interesting thing for me, though, is how authoritarian regimes such as this one like to use the rhetoric of democracy and human rights and the rule of law and so on for their own purposes. There is something in there if you’re trying to understand what is happening in the country and why it does the things that it does. Why is it attractive to use that rhetoric at the same time as challenging it, attacking it, and doing things that are clearly contrary to it? The conclusion I’ve drawn from that is that Russian society itself is still in search of a very clear consensus about the relationship between the individual and the state.

The biggest challenge, obviously in my time in Moscow, was the Salisbury attack. There is no serious doubt about what happened there despite the sometimes absurd theories put around by the propaganda machine in Russia for its own purposes. I think for this discussion, the most important thing to bear in mind is the wider context. Why we think it happened? How do you manage a relationship that has gone that badly wrong, when agents of a foreign state are using a nerve agent to try and kill people in your country? That doesn’t mean that I in any way wish to excuse or condone what happened, clearly we don’t, but if you’re going to respond effectively then you need to understand what they thought they were doing.

In terms of the third question, one of the things I found most personally rewarding in my time in Russia was the world cup, not because I’m a big football fan (I’m not) and not because I have any illusions about how the state was using that. But just the experience of being amongst thousands and thousands of foreigners almost all of them seeing Russia for the first time and coming away thinking, You know what, that’s nothing like what I expected and Russians are nothing like what I expected. I had fun. There is something to work with there.

II) CURRENT ISSUES: Navalny, Belarus, COVID-19, and Climate Change

Anna:              Let’s talk about perhaps what you would say are the most important issues that we need to understand at the moment and pay attention to in Russia-West relations.

Sir Laurie:     Well the obvious starting point is that the political relationships between Russia and the West are essentially broken. The big question now is how do we move forward from that? My take on this essentially is that the relationship is broken largely because of things that are happening in Russia and it will only improve significantly when change comes to Russia. Doubtless you could say more about the mistakes that have been made in Russia policies in the West over the years.  But we do not have the relationship that we want with Russia. And it will take a long time to get there.

There is only really one serious question now in Russian politics: when, how and in whose favour does the political transition happen? However long it takes, a year or ten, Mr. Putin is coming to the end of his time in power. There is very little that we can or should influence because these are essentially choices for Russians.

In the meantime, a very large part of the job for people like me is to try to maintain as much stability in the relationship as possible. That means trying to keep in good repair the rather broken and battered mechanisms that we have for doing that. We’ve lost most of the main arms control agreements, for example, but that does not mean that conflict is necessary or desirable for anyone.

We also need to do better at discussing seriously what the rules based international system actually is and what we're trying to do with it. You’re very familiar with the rhetoric that comes out of Moscow that the rules based international system is some kind of Western construct. We don't understand it that way. We understand it as the network of rules, obligations, institutions, and ways of dealing with each other, that keep things civilised and peaceful, even when we have fundamental disagreements.

Anna:              If we can talk about the situation with Alexei Navalny, would you say that this presents a significant challenge for how the West and especially the UK should engage with Russia? As you know, many individuals including Navalny himself, placed responsibility for the Novichok nerve agent poisoning on Russian President Vladimir Putin, but the Kremlin has denied this.

Sir Laurie:     I'm not going to comment on Mr. Navalny’s personality or politics; that's for him and for the people he's speaking to. But clearly, it's a very important moment: an attempted murder of a Russian citizen, who is very prominent in public life, using a nerve agent. I don't think there's any serious doubt about what the agent used on Mr. Navalny was; it's been checked by independent experts.

Political violence is not new. It was my privilege to know, a little bit, Boris Nemtsov when I was last posted in Moscow. Very sadly, he was gunned down on a bridge in the middle of Moscow. I think what's different about the attack on Navalny is the method used. It's a nerve agent of a particular type, which is very closely associated with certain programmes pursued by the Soviet Union and by Russia. It's hard not to take that as a message, whether it's a message to us, or to people inside Russia. What does it tell us about what is happening inside Russia and why? Even if it’s not a dramatic departure from other things we have seen in recent years, it is an important moment.   

Anna:            So you’re saying that it's the method that is new. And is that because the method basically has a signature on it?   

Sir Laurie:    Yes. And it's pretty demonstrative.

Anna:            How should German and French leaders, who strongly rebuked the attack, or the West in general go about interpreting such a message?

Sir Laurie:   British leaders as well have condemned the attack roundly. We stay in very close contact on this with our European and US and other counterparts. I think the most important element here is to think about what it tells us about the environment in which the attack took place. A prominent Russian politician travelling from one city in Russia, to another city in Russia, on a Russian aeroplane, under the surveillance of the Russian authorities, was attacked with a chemical agent produced in Russia. What conclusion do you draw from that?

Anna:              Let’s look at something completely different: the situation in Belarus. What is your opinion of the developments there and how would you say the future of Belarus has or has not changed because of them?

Sir Laurie:     From my perspective, what's going on in Belarus itself is pretty clear. This is what happens when an unaccountable authoritarian leader who has passed his sell-by date tries to rig an election. It is not the first time any of us have seen this film. What we find very disturbing is some of the methods being used by the authorities to try to regain control. You've got very large numbers of peaceful demonstrators, young women carrying flowers, singing the National Anthem, carrying flags, who have been confronted with the threat and the use of ammunition by their own government.

Looking more widely, this comes for me to a question of how does Russia, or perhaps more accurately the current Russian leadership, perceive its interests in the other post-Soviet states. Russia sees Belarus as something akin to a satellite or a buffer zone between itself and the West with whom its relations are increasingly difficult. It is important domestically because the model of leadership in Belarus is rather closer to the model of leadership in Russia, than it is to any form of democratic accountability. There are business and energy interests involved, including personal interests. And of course, Belarus is very important as part of Russia's military posture in the eastern Baltic. So again, it's about us and about how Russia manages that side of the relationship.

But at the end of the day, Lukashenko has lost the argument in Belarus. The argument that he's resorting to is one of force and that I think is unlikely to end well for him. The principle here that we all have to apply is that what happens in Belarus is for the people of Belarus to decide.

That said, we do have a range of interests in the country. Primary amongst them is that it really comes back to values and to what happens in a European country or country at the heart of Europe when the leadership tries to keep itself in power beyond the point at which the people say, “No, we'd like to see different leadership.”

Anna:            So would you say that with us sitting here in the UK or even beyond to the US we are in danger of overlooking that part? That it is up to the Belarusians to decide what sort of government they want, instead of trying to impose our own interests there but at the same time to maintain our interests and values?

Sir Laurie:   Yes, I think that's right. There is a question here about how we approach this. I'm not someone who believes that it is possible or even desirable for Western countries to try to export democracy. We've had that debate repeatedly over the last 20 years. But I think it is important that we say what we believe: that democracy and the rule of law and human rights are better than the absence of democracy and human rights and the rule of law. And that if other people agree with that, we should try to support them in upholding those values.

Anna:            If we can now look at this from a macro lens for our readers, you are working in sort of a macro job now as Regional Ambassador for the UK to the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and China as part of the UN COP26, which the UK is hosting in 2021. Before this, you served as the UK Ambassador to Russia until January of this year. For those reading who may have a future in diplomacy, would you say that your approach differs between working with a region as opposed to working with a single state?

Sir Laurie:     The heart of this is the difference between bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. But it's easy to overstate those differences. It's still people representing governments and talking to other people representing governments or civil society or business or the media, it's just that the context is different.

It's clear that manmade climate change is probably the biggest challenge of all for our generation. And so five years ago, the governments of the world, pretty much all of them, agreed at Paris, to try to limit global warming to within two degrees centigrade and, as far as possible, 1.5. We're nowhere near on track to achieve that. So what the COP26 conference this time next year is about is trying to build real impetus, real change towards getting the world on track to achieve that headline target.

There are other things that we have to do as well: foremost amongst them is to ensure that we are all able to adapt to the consequences of climate change that's already locked in. In particular, that involves providing the right level of support to countries that don't have the means to adapt themselves. To be able to unlock public and private finance to do that adaptation is very important. The diplomacy is basically, as it is in any context, about identifying alignments of interest, building coalitions around that, building the political case for making things happen.

One very important thing that's happened recently, the incoming Japanese Prime Minister has announced that his country will achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. That’s another big economy falling in line with the Europeans and with us, the Chinese have made similar commitments, saying that we really need to take this seriously.

Anna:              Do you find in those interactions that the individuals who are representing their governments tend to find it easier to turn off other elements of relations that might be dealt with by other ambassadors? Is it easier to work in that environment since you can focus on the large, specific goal of COP26?

Sir Laurie:     I wouldn't say easier, it's different. I will try and spell out a few of the factors in play. There are very, very big economic decisions that follow from the things that we're trying to achieve in the Paris Agreement around the shape of your economy, where do jobs come from, standards of living, and so on.

There is a separate set of issues linked to what we understand by security. This is a whole different area of security, but nonetheless, it is security. What would it mean if you had temperatures in big cities that are a lot higher than they are today? What would it mean if you had serious food or water shortages as a result of climate change? These are big things. And it's important for policymakers to understand those links, but also to communicate those with the public. Because if you do not have public support for what you're trying to do, ultimately, it's not going to happen, you're not going to succeed.

Anna:            It would be interesting to see the developments of this, in light of what we’re going through right now, a global pandemic. And this is really the first time that a single factor is affecting the entire world and that might speak to how we go about addressing climate change.

Sir Laurie:   That's absolutely right. The optimist in me says that what's happening now around the pandemic is a very powerful incentive for us to think seriously about big systemic risks. We're not there yet. But I think the fact that so many governments are now talking openly and clearly about this, including Mr. Putin - in recent weeks he made a very important point at the Valdai Club about the impacts on Russia and on the world of climate change.  That gives us something to work with.

III) MESSAGE TO YOUNGER GENERATION: Understanding motivations and anticipating change

Anna:              We're coming near the end of our discussion, so now we'll move to your message to students and to the younger generation.

Sir Laurie:     I get asked a lot by people, “Can you advise me on whether this is a good career to go into?” And my answer always is that it depends on what you want. If you don't know what you want, you need to find out. If you do know what you want, then perhaps there is a conversation about how you could achieve that. My own advice would be, always work on something that motivates you and that you enjoy doing. Thirty to forty years is a long time to spend doing something you don't really want to be doing. And you do better at things that you enjoy.

My second piece of advice, which I have to say I didn't follow, is: don't work for the same organisation for too long. Be prepared to take risks, go outside, try new things, and see if you still want to come back to it.

Third, I think specific to this job, is to always start with trying to understand why people think what they think and do what they do. Because if you don't, if you're not able to reach that insight, it's a one-way conversation.

Anna:             It sounds like there's a lot of empathy involved in your career.

Sir Laurie:     You need to be able to understand what motivates others whether or not you agree with it.       

Anna:              That ties into my next question. As you know, this interview is conducted as a part of the UC interview series, an initiative dedicated to collaboration between generations. Many of those reading will be quite similar to me, they’re young and they’re pursuing careers in this sort of field. So, what message would you offer to our generation of young diplomats, scholars and policy-relevant experts?

Sir Laurie:     The most important thing to think about is  about change.  Where does change come from? Why does it happen? If you look back at the world of the 1980s, when I was an undergraduate and graduate student, it doesn't look much like the world that we're living in now. And that's inside only thirty or forty years. That's a very short period of time, most of our working lifetime. In that time, we've seen the end of the Cold War. We've seen 9/11, we've seen the rise of the Internet. When I started working, I didn't have a computer at my desk.

If you fast forward even twenty years, I think it's pretty obvious that technological change will have moved things forward very, very fast indeed.  With that will have come changes in the balance of economic and therefore political power between states. But also - going back to something I was touching on earlier - between individuals and governments or societies and governments. One of the things I'm most interested in is that question. It's a kind of a demographic question, actually. It's about how states and societies relate to each other, how they organise with regard to each other. And to come back to your question, one of the most interesting and important things for us all to do now is try to anticipate where those very disruptive changes might come from. Otherwise, they come as a terrible surprise when they wash over you.

Anna:              Based on that, what do you want the future of US-Russia relations to look like?

Sir Laurie:     It’s quite straightforward. What we do want, as the UK with Russia, is the kind of normal, stable, collaborative, mutually advantageous relationship that we have with any other big country. Where we manage our differences of view in a way that enables us to focus on where the alignments of interests lie. That’s what we want with Russia.

Anna:              Sir Laurie, thank you for your time and for the fantastic insight.

Sir Laurie:     Thank you, Anna.