Civilization
Anything But Decline, in a Changing World
February 2025 · Italy
Talk of a "crisis of diplomacy" is, on closer inspection, a question about politics itself — and about whether the institutions we already have can be called back to their purpose.
Diplomacy has been described as the "intelligent and precious handmaid" of politics. The phrase is exact. Diplomacy does not stand alone; it is one of the institutional expressions through which political action becomes effective at the international level. To speak of a crisis of diplomacy is therefore, in truth, to speak of a crisis of politics — of the capacity of states to recover their deepest purposes and the values they intend to serve.
Politics as the art of the difficult
Politics is, before anything, a pragmatic activity — which does not mean it should lack vision; the absence of vision is in fact its primary weakness. But it is bound to pragmatism in its solutions: the circumstances it faces, and those alone, are its testing ground. It is sometimes called the art of the possible; history suggests it is often the art of the seemingly impossible — as when peace is built where none seemed available, from South Africa's peaceful transition out of apartheid to other moments when relationship triumphed over rupture.
In that work, diplomacy is the instrument of possibility. It depends on skilled cultural mediators who cannot be replaced by a scatter of information gathered online, nor by forms of "parallel diplomacy" claiming to speak for public opinion. A mountain of data is not worth a single piece of considered judgement; the expression of sentiment cannot substitute for professional, contextual assessment.
Thinking peace
Wars are an unmitigated evil, but they are not all alike, and their proliferation reflects the rising complexity of the global system as much as any single cause. The most important measure of an international community may be less the firmness of its reaction to aggression than its capacity to keep thinking peace — and to ask what qualities a peace must have to be lasting.
If the major powers are genuinely committing to manage conflict and avoid war, then the task of building a just and durable peace is far from over. It may need no new supranational superstructures — only that existing institutions, foremost the United Nations, be called back to their proper role: offering high-level technical support to legitimate governments, crisis by crisis. That is not the decline of the diplomat. It is a call to a demanding new season of responsibility.