Statecraft and diplomacy in the age of political candour

IT USED to be that the concept of “plausible deniability” was considered a useful tool in statecraft. Not any more, it seems, considering US President Donald Trump’s recent pronouncements about the Venezuela situation. More on that later.

The expression itself had its first airing in the aftermath of the 1973 military coup in Chile. America’s intelligence services were deeply involved but Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state, blithely denied that Washington had anything to do with the overthrow of an elected government, thereby elevating diplomatic double-talk to an art form.

Later, as the congressional Watergate hearing into the Nixon administration rolled on, it became apparent that “plausible denials” were pervasively used as a political tool in operations against perceived enemies of the White House.