Diplomacy has never been gentle, but it has always rested on a tacit agreement: leaders may quarrel over interests, but they preserve civility. Roosevelt and Churchill with Stalin, Kennedy and Khrushchev with Castro, even Reagan and Gorbachev understood that tone mattered as much as substance. In Washington today, that convention is dead.
The spectacle presented by US President Trump, Vice President J D Vance and their lieutenants at the Pentagon and State Department has transformed diplomacy into performance art – a politics of insult and provocation that erodes America’s moral and intellectual standing. The Oval Office encounter with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in February was emblematic. Carried live on television, the meeting descended into a quarrel that resembled a reality-show audition more than an exchange between heads of state. Trump accused his visitor of “disrespecting this country” and snapped, “I think we’ve seen enough; this is going to be great television”.
Vance chastised Zelensky for failing to thank America “loudly enough” for brokering peace, warning him not to “litigate this in front of the media”. The Ukrainian, hardly a stranger to stagecraft, could only conclude afterwards that the exchange was “not good for both sides”. Allies watching saw something more serious: a superpower that humiliates its partners for sport. This style is not confined to adversaries. France’s Emmanuel Macron, once courted, is now dismissed with sneers. London’s mayor has been labelled “a loser” by the American president, as though foreign policy were an extension of a campaign rally.
The collapse of the boundary between domestic insult politics and international statecraft leaves alliances brittle. When the US treats partners as props, the result is not only bruised egos but diminished credibility on matters that demand cooperation – from trade rules to climate policy. The disdain extends inwards. In a Pentagon address, Trump accused generals of being “too timid to win wars”, while his defence secretary berated them to “stop whining and start fighting”. The remarks drew gasps, but the intent was clear: treat the nation’s top brass as contestants in a boardroom show, cowed into obedience by taunts.
Such rhetoric would once have been unthinkable; now it signals to allies that even America’s military establishment is fair game for spectacle. This vulgarity highlights a deeper crisis in the model of liberal democracy. Western governments present elections as the safeguard against arbitrary rule, yet those same elections can elevate leaders who behave like clowns and bullies. When the world’s most powerful democracy installs a president who mocks allies, derides his generals, and turns diplomacy into television, the claim that liberal democracy guarantees dignity rings hollow. Votes may fill offices, but they cannot ensure wisdom.
The liberal order risks becoming a system where populist demagogues, armed with grievance politics and mass media, reduce serious governance to pantomime. Washington’s constant invocation of a ‘rules-based order’ now sounds hollow. America has been the serial violator of those rules, invading Iraq on fraudulent grounds, bombing Libya and Syria and dragging Afghanistan into two decades of ruin. Millions died, institutions collapsed, refugees scattered. Yet Washington still scolds others for breaching sovereignty.
The hypocrisy is not new; what is new under Trump is the gleeful abandonment of even the pretense. He sneers at international law not as an irritant but as irrelevant. The message: power decides, not principle. Nothing illustrates this better than America’s stance towards Israel. For decades, Washington has shielded it diplomatically while funding its military machine, regardless of the occupation of Palestinian land or the toll in Gaza. Today, the complicity is starker than ever.
A humanitarian flotilla attempting to reach Gaza has been repeatedly harassed by Israeli naval forces, with activists detained and aid seized. Turkish officials call it piracy; human-rights groups speak of terrorism at sea. Protests erupted in multiple capitals after Israeli units boarded vessels carrying medicine. Some in Congress pleaded with Secretary of State Marco Rubio to intervene, warning that silence was complicity.
Yet silence it was. America’s indifference amounts to endorsement. That indifference is matched by the hollowness of Trump’s latest peace blueprint. Like every ‘historic plan’ Washington has floated, it is presented as a breakthrough yet weighted so heavily towards Israeli demands that failure is inevitable. Security guarantees flow to Israel; Palestinians are told to accept boundaries drawn by the occupier. The right of return, sovereignty, dignity – mere afterthoughts. Trump parades Muslim leaders at summits to simulate consensus, but these gatherings resemble morality plays: rulers coerced into smiling for protection that is itself unreliable.
History shows where this leads. From Oslo to Annapolis, blueprints have failed not for lack of imagination but because Israeli governments, indulged by Washington, refused concessions on settlements, borders, or genuine statehood. The ‘Annapolis process’ refers to the Annapolis Conference held in November 2007 at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It was hosted by former President George W Bush and his secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attended.
The aim was to restart serious negotiations on a two-state solution, with the US as mediator. It produced a joint statement pledging to reach an agreement by the end of 2008, but the talks faltered, mainly because of continued Israeli settlement expansion, Palestinian political divisions and lack of US pressure. So, it’s a series of high-profile peace initiatives that generated big headlines but collapsed without delivering justice or a durable settlement. Examples include the Oslo Accords (1993–95), the Camp David Summit (2000), the Road Map for Peace (2003) and the Annapolis plan (2007).
These were all ‘blueprints’ in the sense that they laid out steps, phases and goals for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I argue that the problem was never the absence of plans. Plenty of peace frameworks have been drafted; what undermined them was Israeli unwillingness to compromise and American indulgence of that stance. When the stronger party is flattered and the weaker dismissed as a nuisance, diplomacy becomes an empty choreography.
Civil society offers a striking moral counterpoint. Greta Thunberg, best known for climate activism, has joined the flotilla, placing herself physically at risk to highlight Gaza’s plight. Malala Yousafzai, once a symbol of defiance, has limited herself to statements. Perhaps she fears that open alignment with the Palestinian cause could jeopardise her future in the West, where her reputation rests. Whatever the reason, the contrast is glaring: one young activist unafraid of confrontation, another restrained by calculation. Icons owe their stature to public courage; when silence replaces it, questions follow.
The larger tragedy is that America’s abandonment of even the veneer of impartiality undermines not only prospects for peace in the Middle East but the stability of global order itself. For decades, world politics operated on the assumption that, while Washington bent rules, it at least valued their existence. Treaties and institutions provided predictability amid power struggles. By turning diplomacy into spectacle, the Trump administration signals that predictability no longer matters. If the superpower can dispense with restraint, why should lesser states bother? The danger is not just crassness. By scorning diplomatic ritual, Washington legitimises a broader cynicism.
Big powers need no encouragement, nor do smaller strongmen eager to mimic great-power swagger. If the hegemon abandons the rules, others will follow. Manners are not an accessory to power but one of its instruments. To treat this style as harmless eccentricity would be an error. The White House’s preference for humiliation over negotiation, its indulgence of Israeli excesses, its eagerness to stage every summit as spectacle – these are not quirks but symptoms of intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
A nation or the world can recover from poor policies but recovering from the erosion of the conventions that make diplomacy possible is harder. If global order is to mean anything, it must rest on mutual respect and some semblance of principle. America still has the power to shape that order, but power untempered by respect is ultimately self-defeating. By turning allies into foils, generals into targets for derision and international law into a punchline, Washington undermines not only others’ trust but its own long-term position. Great powers have declined before, but rarely has the descent been choreographed so publicly, or wrapped so deliberately in farce.
What is required now is not indulgence but censure. America’s allies must say openly what many admit privately: this style of diplomacy is reckless, unbecoming and dangerous. To shrug it off as theatre risks normalising it – and once normalised it becomes the standard by which others measure their conduct. The collapse of decorum may begin with insults in the Oval Office or tirades at the Pentagon, but it ends with a world in which no one even bothers to pretend that rules matter at all.
The writer holds a PhD from the University of Birmingham, UK. He tweets/posts NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: mnazir1964yahoo.co.uk