The world is full of treaties, summits, strategic partnerships, and international organizations. But most of them are designed to make countries stronger against one another, not to make them less afraid of one another. What would it take to imagine diplomacy as something larger?
There is an odd contradiction at the center of international politics today.
Never have governments had so many opportunities to talk to one another. There are summits, hotlines, ministerial meetings, strategic dialogues, economic forums, security conferences, regional organizations, special envoys, back channels, confidence-building measures, and international institutions of almost every imaginable variety.
And yet the world often seems to be moving in the opposite direction from the purpose those institutions were supposedly created to serve.
China and Russia have drawn closer. Iran has deepened its relationships with China and Russia. The BRICS grouping has expanded. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a significant Eurasian institution. China, Japan, and South Korea have revived their trilateral diplomatic machinery. The United States, Japan, and Australia have intensified their strategic coordination. Europe is attempting, with varying degrees of success, to maintain channels to China, Russia, Iran, and other difficult partners.
The paradox is that nearly everybody is talking, while fewer and fewer people seem to be talking about how to build a world in which the underlying reasons for confrontation become less important.
Diplomacy has become abundant. Grand diplomacy has become scarce.
That distinction matters.
The diplomacy of the blocs
Consider what might be called the new architecture of international cooperation.
China, Japan, and South Korea have spent a quarter-century developing what is officially known as Trilateral Cooperation. Their institutional arrangement is surprisingly substantial. The three governments created a permanent Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat in Seoul in 2011, intended to facilitate cooperation, research, ministerial meetings, and practical projects. The stated ambitions include “lasting peace,” “common prosperity,” and “shared culture.”
After a long period in which historical grievances and strategic tensions impeded cooperation, the three countries held their ninth trilateral summit in Seoul in May 2024 and agreed to restore regular summits and normalize their three-way system.
This is diplomacy in the best traditional sense: countries that have substantial reasons to distrust one another nevertheless construct institutions in which they must continue speaking.
But notice something else.
The arrangement exists largely because the three countries share an interest in regional stability. It is not a project for reorganizing the world. It is a mechanism for managing a difficult neighborhood.
The same is true of the U.S.–Japan–Australia Trilateral Strategic Dialogue. It is an important and increasingly sophisticated institution, but its logic is different. It is principally about maintaining a favorable strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific, coordinating policy, improving interoperability, strengthening resilience, and deterring coercion. The three countries explicitly describe their cooperation in terms of maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific and upholding a rules-based order.
It is diplomacy—but diplomacy organized around deterrence.
This is one of the great characteristics of the present international system: countries increasingly cooperate with one another in order to be better positioned to deal with countries with which they cannot cooperate.
That is not necessarily irrational. It may even be necessary.
But it is not the same thing as reconciliation.
Moscow and Tehran have chosen another model
The January 2025 Treaty on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Russia and Iran illustrates the other side of the emerging system.
Moscow and Tehran formally committed themselves to a comprehensive, long-term strategic relationship. The treaty was subsequently ratified and entered into force in October 2025.
The significance of the agreement goes beyond any single economic or military provision. It represents an attempt to institutionalize a relationship between two states that see themselves as operating under sustained pressure from the Western-led international system.
The underlying philosophy is familiar: if Washington and its allies have their alliances, sanctions regimes, military partnerships, and international institutions, Moscow and Tehran need their own network.
China’s relationship with Iran follows a similar logic, although it is considerably more complicated.
In March 2021, China and Iran signed a 25-year Comprehensive Cooperation Plan. Chinese officials described it as a long-term framework covering areas including energy, infrastructure, science and technology, health, agriculture, and cultural exchanges. Implementation discussions began in 2022.
The agreement was frequently portrayed in the West as evidence of an emerging Chinese-Iranian alliance. That interpretation was exaggerated. China’s actual economic investment in Iran has been much more limited than the rhetoric surrounding the 25-year agreement might suggest. China has much larger economic interests in places such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Beijing has generally avoided giving Iran the sort of formal defense guarantee that would transform the relationship into an alliance.
Still, the significance of the agreement is real.
It gives China and Iran a diplomatic framework extending beyond the immediate political crisis. It says, in effect: whatever happens in the next election, the next confrontation, or the next American sanctions package, we intend to continue having a relationship.
That is an important diplomatic idea.
The Shanghai experiment
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, represents an even more ambitious attempt to institutionalize a non-Western diplomatic space.
Its membership now encompasses a substantial portion of Eurasia, while a wider circle of observer and dialogue-partner countries gives it an even broader reach. The organization says its long-term strategy is to deepen its relationships with the United Nations and other international and regional organizations.
The SCO is often described in Washington as an anti-Western organization. That is too simple.
Its members do not agree on everything. China and India have serious strategic tensions. India has complicated relations with China and Russia. Iran and the Gulf states have competing interests. Central Asian states frequently want neither Washington nor Beijing nor Moscow to dominate their foreign policy.
The SCO therefore represents something more interesting than an anti-American alliance.
It is an experiment in multipolarity.
Its members are effectively saying that the international system should not be organized around a single center of power. They want mechanisms through which countries can cooperate without first accepting the political assumptions of the Western alliance system.
Whether this produces a coherent alternative world order remains uncertain.
But the aspiration is unmistakable.
And then there is BRICS
BRICS may be even more consequential because it is less geographically confined.
Originally Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the grouping has expanded dramatically. By 2026, it includes eleven full members, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Again, calling BRICS an anti-American alliance misses the point.
India has no interest in becoming China’s junior partner. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have extensive relationships with the United States. Brazil is not Russia. Indonesia is not Iran.
What unites them is less an ideology than an aspiration: they want greater influence over the rules by which the international system operates.
This includes trade, development finance, international payments, representation in global institutions, and the use of national currencies.
India is currently pressing for greater interoperability among BRICS digital-currency systems, although formidable political and technical obstacles remain.
The most important thing about BRICS, therefore, may not be whether it eventually produces a common currency—it almost certainly will not do so in the foreseeable future.
Its importance is that countries that once had little institutional means of coordinating their dissatisfaction with the Western-dominated financial system now have a permanent political venue in which to do so.
What is the West doing?
It would be unfair to suggest that Western governments have abandoned diplomacy.
They have not.
The United States and China, for example, continue to negotiate even amid profound strategic rivalry. In May 2026, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping reached understandings intended to stabilize the relationship, including economic measures and commitments to continued high-level engagement. The two governments are also preparing new forms of dialogue on artificial-intelligence safety—an unusually important example of diplomacy extending into a problem that neither country can solve alone.
Europe, too, has continued looking for diplomatic channels.
The European Union has supported negotiations involving Iran and has explicitly said that a negotiated and lasting settlement is preferable to indefinite confrontation. In June 2026, European leaders welcomed an American-Iranian memorandum of understanding as an opportunity for greater regional stability and urged continued diplomatic efforts.
Europe has also begun exploring how direct discussions with Russia might eventually be restored. In June 2026, French, German, and British ambassadors traveled to Moscow for discussions with Russian officials, amid debate about whether Europe should develop its own diplomatic channel concerning the war in Ukraine.
The European Union’s Global Gateway initiative represents another form of engagement. It seeks to compete with China’s infrastructure diplomacy by providing investment, connectivity, and development partnerships to countries across the world. EU officials describe it not simply as economic policy but as a means of creating security, prosperity, and growth with partner countries.
So the West is not absent.
But there is a difference between engagement and reconciliation.
Much of Western diplomacy remains conditional:
- cooperate with us and receive market access;
- cooperate with us and receive investment;
- cooperate with us and receive security guarantees;
- violate our rules and face sanctions;
- threaten us and encounter deterrence.
The Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Indian, European, and American systems differ enormously in their political assumptions, but they increasingly resemble one another in this respect.
Everyone has a network.
Everyone has a strategy.
Everyone has a list of friends and adversaries.
And almost everyone believes that the other side is principally responsible for the deterioration of international relations.
Why isn’t there a great diplomatic project?
The first reason is simple: security is easier to organize politically than reconciliation.
A government can explain a military alliance.
It can explain a trade agreement.
It can explain a sanctions package.
It can explain a weapons purchase.
It is much harder to explain why billions should be spent building relationships with countries whose governments are unpopular at home.
Imagine an American president announcing that the United States would spend the next decade establishing permanent educational, scientific, municipal, cultural, environmental, medical, and technological exchanges with Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Indian, African, Arab, and Latin American institutions.
The immediate political question would be: Why are we helping them?
The better question might be: Why wouldn’t we?
But democratic politics tends to reward the first question.
There is another problem.
The postwar international system was constructed on the assumption that increasing economic interdependence would gradually make war less attractive. For a time, this seemed plausible.
But economic interdependence turned out to be reversible.
Trade can become a weapon. Technology can become a weapon. Banking systems can become weapons. Energy can become a weapon. Supply chains can become weapons.
Even access to international financial institutions can become an instrument of geopolitical pressure.
The result is a world in which countries increasingly ask not, “How can we become more dependent upon one another?” but “How can we make sure that we can survive if dependence becomes dangerous?”
That is a profound psychological change.
The missing category: civilization
Perhaps the greatest failure of contemporary diplomacy is that it has become too governmental.
Governments negotiate with governments. Defense departments negotiate with defense departments. Central banks negotiate with central banks. Trade ministers negotiate with trade ministers.
But civilizations do not actually live through treaties. People do. Universities do. Cities do. Scientists do. Artists do. Engineers do. Students do. Religious communities do. Businesses do. Families do.
One of the most consequential diplomatic institutions in the world might therefore be something that does not look like diplomacy at all.
Imagine an international Humanity Partnership, with permanent participation from the United States, China, India, Europe, Russia, Japan, the Arab states, Africa, Latin America, and other regions.
Its mission would not initially be to resolve Taiwan, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran’s nuclear program, or the South China Sea.
Those questions are too politically radioactive.
Instead, it would work on problems in which everyone’s interests overlap: climate adaptation; water; pandemic preparedness; food security; aging populations; artificial intelligence; space; ocean conservation; earthquake and disaster response; nuclear safety; energy; desertification; global scientific research; and the preservation of cultural heritage.
The principle would be simple: Countries that cannot agree about power should nevertheless be required to cooperate about survival.
Over time, those relationships could become diplomatic infrastructure.
Diplomacy needs places where enemies can be useful to one another
The great diplomatic breakthroughs of history rarely occurred because the participants suddenly became friends.
They occurred because somebody discovered an area in which enemies had a reason to behave rationally.
That insight deserves to be revived.
Consider artificial intelligence.
The United States and China may regard each other as strategic competitors. But neither has an interest in an uncontrolled AI system causing catastrophic damage.
That creates an opening. The same is true of nuclear weapons. The same is true of pandemics. The same is true of climate-driven migration. The same is true of space debris. The same is true of financial instability. The same is true of catastrophic natural disasters.
The challenge is to construct diplomatic institutions around these shared vulnerabilities before the next crisis arrives.
A new diplomacy of the cities
There is another possibility.
National governments may simply be too large and politically constrained to repair all international relationships themselves.
Cities could do it. American cities could establish permanent relationships with Chinese, Indian, Russian, Iranian, African, European, and Latin American cities.
Not symbolic “sister-city” arrangements consisting of an occasional delegation and a photograph, but permanent institutions involving universities, hospitals, museums, parks departments, environmental agencies, water authorities, transportation planners, architects, engineers, and schools.
A city in California could work with a city in China on drought. A city in Texas could work with one in the Middle East on water technology. A city in the Midwest could work with Indian cities on urban infrastructure. European and Russian universities could collaborate on Arctic science even while their governments disagree. American and Chinese laboratories could work together on AI safety even while their militaries compete.
These would not replace state diplomacy.
They would create a second diplomatic nervous system beneath it.
The most radical idea may be the simplest
Perhaps the world needs a new definition of national interest.
For seventy-five years, international relations have largely been organized around a question: How do I make my country safer?
The next century may require another question: How do I make the system in which my country exists safer?
Those are not identical questions. A country can make itself temporarily safer by weakening an adversary. But if every country follows that logic, the entire system can become more dangerous.
The alternative is not naïve pacifism. Nor is it the abandonment of alliances, deterrence, sanctions, or national defense.
A country should be capable of defending itself. But defense and diplomacy should not be treated as opposites.
The most sophisticated foreign policy would pursue both simultaneously: deterrence against aggression, engagement with adversaries, and construction of institutions that make future cooperation easier.
We should think bigger than treaties
The world does not necessarily need another trade agreement. It may not need another security pact. It certainly does not need another summit whose principal accomplishment is a photograph of leaders standing behind flags.
What it needs are institutions capable of surviving political disagreement.
A treaty can collapse when governments change. A university relationship can endure. A trade agreement can be suspended. A scientific collaboration can continue. A military alliance can deter war.
A network of human relationships can make war politically and psychologically more difficult.
This is the missing ambition.
The great diplomatic project of the twenty-first century should not be to make China more American, Russia more European, Iran more Western, or America more Chinese.
That would be both impossible and undesirable.
The goal should be more modest—and, paradoxically, more ambitious: to create a world in which countries with fundamentally different political systems can remain in continuous, structured, mutually beneficial contact without requiring agreement about everything else.
The current international system is not empty of diplomacy. Quite the opposite. It is overflowing with it.
But much of that diplomacy is defensive.
The Chinese organize themselves because they fear American power.
The Americans organize themselves because they fear Chinese and Russian power.
Russia and Iran organize themselves because they fear Western power.
India joins arrangements that give it freedom of maneuver between competing powers.
Middle powers join several organizations simultaneously because they do not want to belong exclusively to anyone’s camp.
Everyone is hedging.
Everyone is preparing.
Everyone is building walls while simultaneously insisting that the world needs cooperation.
That may be the defining contradiction of our time.
Perhaps the question is not whether diplomacy exists.
It plainly does.
The more difficult question is whether anyone is willing to invent a diplomacy whose purpose is not merely to manage the divisions of the world, but to make those divisions less consequential.
That would require thinking beyond trade.
Beyond security.
Beyond alliances.
Beyond deterrence.
It would mean treating scientific cooperation, education, culture, public health, climate, cities, technology, and human mobility not as ornaments attached to foreign policy, but as the infrastructure of peace itself.
The first step would be to stop asking whether China, Russia, Iran, America, Europe, India, or anyone else is “on our side.”
A more useful question might be: What can we build together that none of us can build alone?
That question will not end geopolitics.
It might, however, give diplomacy somewhere to go.