In a world where diplomacy seems like a fable from long ago, Donald Trump has put forth a 20-point peace plan for Gaza. So isn’t that diplomacy? Not quite, for with that peace move has come the US President’s warning that if Hamas does not accept the plan, there will be hell to pay. Diplomacy does not come with threats attached.
We have known in the last two years that Gaza has been bombed into an apocalyptic terrain of death and destruction, reminiscent of times when medieval barbarism was the weapon employed by powerful nations or tribes against weaker ones. In Gaza, the distressing fact is certainly that Hamas kept the Israelis it kidnapped in October 2023 as hostages. While some hostages have been freed, many others remain captive in Hamas hideouts. And, to be sure, there is no saying how many among those hostages are yet alive.
It was a sin for Hamas to cause terror in 2023. But for Israel and its friends, especially the United States, that moment ought swiftly to have translated into an opportunity for diplomacy to come into play. The Biden administration, like so many political set-ups in the West, sat on its hands. Hamas, after all, was and is reviled as a terrorist organization and so could not be part of a diplomatic process aimed at arriving at a settlement. With Trump making his re-entry into the White House, diplomacy or any chances of it being revived eroded further.
International affairs are a means by which nations, for all their mutual expressions of bitterness, negotiate their way out of crises. In the Middle East, on the watch of the Carter and Clinton administrations in the US, diplomacy was the weapon employed in defusing crises.
Or go back to the early 1970s, when Henry Kissinger shuttled back and forth to contain the conflagration erupting as a result of Anwar Sadat’s decision to launch a war against Israel on Yom Kippur. Beyond the armed conflicts, it was clearly felt that diplomatic measures required to be applied in order for tempers to cool down.
That is not how crises are being handled in these times. On the one hand, Israel’s military has left no fewer than 67,000 Palestinians murdered in Gaza, with none of the policy-makers in Washington or other western capitals finding it necessary to strongly condemn the tragedy visited upon the people of Gaza.
On the other hand, there is pressure from the United States for Hamas to go for an abject surrender and for a new political and administrative authority in Gaza that will have no space for either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority run by Mahmoud Abbas. What is now being bandied about is the proposition that Gaza will operate on the diktat of Donald Trump, with elements like Tony Blair being part of his team.
That is one more hint of how diplomacy is being kept at bay in occupied Palestinian territory. Anyone who remembers the devastation Tony Blair and George W Bush caused in and to Iraq on the basis of an unforgivable lie of Saddam Hussein being in possession of weapons of mass destruction will have little difficulty drawing the conclusion that Blair, and with him Trump and Netanyahu, are not the people who can cause peace to descend on the Middle East.
Additionally, with Europe, many nations of which recently accorded recognition to the State of Palestine, left out of the process of a settlement in Gaza, not much hope is there for diplomacy to take over.
Diplomacy, in other words, is being given short shrift nearly everywhere and not just in Palestine. The impunity with which Israel has bombed the capitals of sovereign states in the Middle East and has carried out innumerable assassinations of leading Palestinian and Iranian figures throws up the stark lesson that diplomacy may have passed into its death throes.
When the Trump administration pulls out of the Iran nuclear deal and goes into the disturbing business of showering the globe with tariffs of a multitudinous kind, the absence of diplomacy is revealed in stark terms. Washington, in unprovoked manner, launches air strikes on Iran. That is the mighty, in 19th century fashion, pouncing on the weak for little rhyme or reason.
This absence of diplomacy has left geopolitics in a state of paralysis. The Ukraine conflict is one more instance where diplomacy has never been undertaken and therefore has never been perceptible. The hawkish attitude demonstrated by NATO and the European Union in the crisis has only exacerbated matters.
No effort was made by the West to listen to Vladimir Putin’s grievance about Russia being steadily encircled by the West, a point made obvious when Brussels openly began propagating the idea that Ukraine needed to be part of NATO. It was collective irresponsibility for the West to do everything that undercut diplomacy and go for military measures aimed at helping Kyiv beat back Moscow.
If the West and Volodymyr Zelensky saw little need to engage with Putin on a diplomatic template, the Russian leader has not been far behind either in his refusal to have negotiations toward a settlement of the crisis. Putin’s attack on Ukraine certainly did not justify his complaint that NATO was getting a little too close to his country’s borders. Diplomacy as a means of ending the war is an option he has never exercised, even though some hope arose following his meeting with Trump in Alaska that the guns would fall silent in Ukraine. The hope now appears to have been extinguished.
Tough times are ahead for the world. In the absence of statesmen whose influence could have ensured a planet relatively secure and peaceful for its eight billion-plus inhabitants, bellicosity runs riot almost everywhere. Trump might end up getting the Nobel for Peace. That still would be no reassurance that the remaining years of his presidency would recreate the moral clarity of his predecessors on how they envisaged the world to shape up.
Besides, in the unipolar world emerging through the collapse of the Soviet Union, life and the sovereignty of nations are no more guaranteed to be safe and secure. Observe Netanyahu.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is an author and writes on politics and foreign affairs.
