by When Foreign Policy Meets Reality TV
International relations experts are scrambling to update their textbooks as modern diplomacy increasingly resembles a reality television show where contestants are eliminated not through tribal council but via angry tweets at 3 AM. Traditional diplomatic protocols involving nuance, subtlety, and multilateral negotiations have been replaced with what scholars are calling “stream-of-consciousness foreign policy.”
The new approach to international relations features impromptu declarations that catch even the declaring nation’s own diplomats by surprise. Ambassadors worldwide have developed a morning routine that involves checking social media before official briefings, because apparently that’s where policy announcements happen now. It’s efficient in the same way that steering a ship by asking random passengers which way to turn is efficient.
Allied nations have responded by developing sophisticated “is this official policy or just Thursday” detection systems. One European foreign minister described the current diplomatic landscape as “trying to negotiate with someone who’s also negotiating with themselves and losing.” The traditional 48-hour news cycle has been compressed into 48-minute crisis windows, keeping State Department translators busier than ever explaining what their own president meant.
Critics argue that conducting diplomacy via impulsive declarations undermines decades of carefully constructed alliances. Supporters counter that unpredictability is a strategy, conveniently ignoring that “strategy” usually involves some element of planning rather than pure vibes-based governance.
Meanwhile, international summits have devolved into damage control sessions where diplomats spend most of their time explaining that previous statements should be “interpreted contextually,” which is diplomatic speak for “please ignore what was said; we’re making this up as we go.” The only constant in modern foreign policy is that nothing is constant, including the policies themselves.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/erratic-diplomacy/
SOURCE: Erratic Diplomacy (https://bohiney.com/erratic-diplomacy/)
