LAST UPDATE | 12 hrs ago

DONALD TRUMP AND his political twin in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, continue to threaten and challenge the world in 2026 with their malign and specious doctrine that “might is right”.

It is not just Venezuela and wider Latin America, it is not just Ukraine and wider Europe that are in their respective sights. It is the very nature and practice of diplomacy.

In the conduct of international relations, diplomacy is ultimately the only alternative to war. It is about respectful relations between countries, compromises between their competing interests, respect for international law and support for international institutions.

It means respecting the borders, sovereignty and dignity of others. Two of the world’s military superpowers have chosen, for the moment, to set themselves against those principles. This disturbing era is not the time for other countries around the world to give up on diplomacy. Far from it. It is rather precisely the time for decent democracies, including the European Union, to double down on it.

However depressing the current global outlook, for those who want to work towards eventually replacing aggression with agreement, there is no alternative to diplomacy. It’s true that the practice of diplomacy is going through an exceptionally rough patch, but we have a straightforward moral obligation to try to make it work as effectively as we can.

As someone famously pointed out, “jaw-jaw” is self-evidently better than “war-war”.

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Moreover, despite the growing constraints that diplomacy faces from those who have decided to prioritise brute force or the threat........

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