Babe Romualdez: A diplomat for our times

At the tail end of its imperial zenith, the kingdom of Sweden was led by a remarkable man the likes of which we will perhaps never see. Charles XII reigned over a Spartan kingdom that boasted more than 100,000 well-trained troops, in a nation of less than two million people.

Perched at the northern limits of Europe, where Eurasia bleeds into the heart of the West, the kingdom was the “Mistress of the North,” both feared and respected across Europe. Charles inherited the great legacy of his ancestors, including “Lion of the North” Gustavus Adolphus, who helped turn the entire Baltic into a “Swedish Lake” and extended Swedish domains far south into the heart of the Holy Roman Empire.

In the words of the late historian Robert Massie, “Swedish armies could march anywhere in Europe,” so much so that the Nordic kingdom was “a force to be reckoned with in every European calculation of war and peace.”

Charles, a proud and restless warrior, was a force of nature. Ascending to power barely in his teens, he wrestled with bears (he thought using guns for hunting was cowardly), drove horses into the highest hills (he thought horsemanship should be pushed to its vertical limits), and shunned both alcohol and passionate escapades throughout his life. Marching on enemies in the thick of northern winter, he would survey the battlefields with barely any armor — exposing himself to the greatest danger to serve as an inspiration to his legion of admiring soldiers.

Charles’ imperial exploits and steely convictions turned him into a surreal romantic hero throughout Europe. But it was precisely his strength, supreme self-assuredness and single-minded leadership that sowed the seeds of total disaster.

Well before Hitler’s panzer divisions and Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched into Russia, Charles was the first Western emperor to attempt to subdue the Eurasian superpower. It was a risky, and ultimately self-destructive, decision borne out of a burning sense of justice following unprovoked invasion by Russia and its allies on Sweden at the turn of the 18th century.

“I have resolved never to make an unjust war, but to end a just one only with the utter ruin of my enemies. I will attack the first to take the field, conquer him, and then deal with the others,” the self-assured king declared with a profound sense of grievance.

Despite repeated defeats, Charles XII managed to not only stay in the fight against Russia and its allies, but to also remain a central strategic player in northern Europe for almost two decades. And this was mainly thanks to diplomat-ministers such as Count Carl Piper and Georg Heinrich von Görtz, who made tremendous personal sacrifices to sustain and compensate for their monarch’s unchecked blunders, which drove eventually Sweden to its knees. Presaging the Metternichs and Talleyrands of the world, the two imperial advisors astutely threw off one ally against another despite an ever-weakening hand at negotiating tables, while heroically raising the necessary resources for national defense.

Last week, during a panel conversation with Justice Antonio Carpio and Ambassador Jose Manuel “Babe” Romualdez, I couldn’t help but be dazzled by the depth of patriotic commitment and responsible statesmanship on display.

The topic at hand was the perfunctory decision of our President to nix the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), even if this would recklessly expose us to a whole host of threats, from an expansionist China and a vengeful Islamic State to festering climate change.

While Carpio has emerged as the torchbearer of patriotic fervor outside the state apparatus, it’s precisely the likes of Ambassador Romualdez, operating within the state machinery, that reflect a flicker of hope amid the reckless exploits of our modern monarchs. Though always careful not to contradict the commander in chief, our chief envoy to Washington bravely took on, with nuanced and sophisticated language, a whole host of challenging questions from the audience. He even suggested that a “new” VFA is an option, to preserve optimal security cooperation with our only treaty ally.

Not unlike many of his heroic career diplomat counterparts, Romualdez, who is well into his supposedly retirement years, is doing everything within his powers to preserve the fundamentals of a century-old alliance while adroitly managing his principal’s grievances coloring our foreign policy. Courageously underscoring a key kernel of 21st-century geopolitics, he made it clear that “we cannot ignore a country like the US… No one can ignore the US, including China.”

rheydarian@inquirer.com.ph