The two wars they have launched Israel y USA contra Iran They began right in the middle of two rounds of negotiations. The call ““12 day war” It started on June 13, 2025, just three days before a scheduled meeting in Oman between the diplomatic delegations from Washington and Tehran to review the proposal of the ayatollah regime about its nuclear program. The new war now underway began on February 28, just two days after envoys from the American president, Donald Trumpthey met in Ginebra and proclaim that there had been “significant” progress and set themselves up for the next round.
Diplomacy is based on a certain mutual trust. But, if one country decides to bomb another and kill your head of state, As they did with the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and part of his family, just a few hours after exchanging conversations and documents, what hope is left of the negotiations being of any use?
“We are in a global diplomacy crisisbut not because diplomacy does not work, but because everything possible is being done to prevent it from doing so. It is the castration of diplomacy”thinks for EL PERIÓDICO Arancha González Layaformer Foreign Minister and now dean of the Paris School of International Affairs. “Diplomacy requires dialogue, commitments and time. What we have now with this US Administration is the need to seek quick results and to impose those results also quickly.
The former Foreign Minister also abounds in the same idea. José Manuel García Margallo: “Diplomacy, consensus and dialogue are replaced by force.” The Spanish politician remembers the emblematic speech given by the new pope Leo XIV before the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. “We are not in a time of change, but in a change of era. Peace is no longer a public good in itselfbut something that is conquered by weapons,” underlines Margallo. In this context, the techniques and processes of diplomacy seem like wet gunpowder.
Dynamiting the State Department
Shortly after arriving at the White House, Trump ordered dismantle some of the instruments of diplomacy and soft power who had helped make the United States the global hegemon. It ended the bulk of the cooperation and development programs of the state agency USAID, which for decades had been a source of influence in half the world (some suggest that it was also a source of intelligence and espionage information). More than 80% of its projects have been canceled.
Then, his then squire, magnate Elon Musk, dedicated himself to making cuts and layoffs throughout the State structure. Musk’s “chainsaw” also reached the State Department, his Foreign Ministry. The workforce was reduced by 3,500 positions and it More than a hundred offices closedsuch as those following war crimes and conflicts, refugee crises or climate policy crises.
What was the epicenter of the most sophisticated and advanced international diplomacy in the world, with thousands of diplomats and expert advisors on the most complicated dossiers, a accumulation of geopolitical wisdom, is being dismantled. The place near the Potomac River and the White House where the State Department building is located, known as Foggy Bottom (foggy background) due to the historical fog of the area, it is now an even more inhospitable place.
“In mid-afternoon, the gray, windowless hallways of the building Harry S. Truman, headquarters of the State Departmentfeel less like the nerve center of the world’s most consequential foreign policy institution and more like a catacombs for diplomacy”writes Vivian Salama in ‘The Atlantic’. “A disconcerting and discouraging silence has settled in after last year’s drastic cuts to the State Department and its sister agency, USAID. Today, decisions that previously went through interagency meetings, political planning teams y regional bureaus They seem to fall ready-made from a small circle of advisors around President Trump. The traditional – and famously bureaucratic – step-by-step process has been replaced by after-the-fact briefings for the country’s diplomatic corps, and even those are sporadic.” US foreign policy is now not thought about, it is executed.
Trump has replaced the US diplomatic machinery with a club of men sympathetic to the president without experience in the sector. The most important dossiers in the world (such as the peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine or the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas) are resolved by a strange couple: his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and a billionaire businessman friend, Steve Witkoff. None is trained in international diplomacy or geopolitics and yet they are the spearhead of Trump’s foreign policy, along with the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
At large bilateral meetings, sometimes there is not a single diplomat present in the room. This is what happened in Trump’s meetings with the presidents of China, Xi Jinping, and from South Korea, Lee Jae-myung, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
The alternative to Trump diplomacy
Donald Trump has peppered his new approach to foreign policy with a total disregard for the United Nationsthe multilateral forum par excellence promoted by Washington and its allies after the victory in World War II. The United States has withdrawn from several of its main agencies, and Trump has presented his new Peace Board as an alternative, a cabal which he presides over and which for the moment only includes the heads of State or Government of second-tier countries.
Donald Trump in the White House / Europa Press/Contact/Aaron Schwartz – Pool via CN
Trump shows signs of believing more in coercion that in the diplomacy. Threat with duty or with bombs to achieve their political objectives, avoiding long and thoughtful summits, meetings and negotiations. It is a frenzy in which what matters most is the immediate result, the big headline versus the stable and effective agreement. And it has achieved several: the decapitation of the regimes of Venezuela and Iran, the acquiescence of the former, and an unstable ceasefire in Gaza.
Order in the new global disorder
The rest of the world, meanwhile, is trying to find its place in this new global disorder.
In a celebrated speech, the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, proposed that the middle powers would look for alternative forums. The Canadian liberal invited a kind of alliance of those who still trust in dialogue, free trade, rules and diplomacy.
“International diplomacy has reached agreements without the United States. For example, last year, the World Health Organization closed the Pandemic Treatya kind of international commitment to cooperate when we have to face the next pandemic. The United States tried to emasculate the negotiation and finally left the agreement, but the others decided not to leave the table,” recalls Arancha González Laya. “Another example is treaty to protect the oceansled by France and Costa Rica last year, which designates certain maritime areas as protected spaces.
There are many more examples. The European Union has closed the agreement with the Mercosur countries, after years of stagnation, and another with India, the most populous country in the world. Japan leads a group of countries such as Korea, Canada, Mexico or the United Kingdom in the CPTPP trans-Pacific free trade agreement that moved forward despite the departure of the United States.
The European solution
“The solution has to be gain strength with a coalition of European countriesand with the complicity of other countries, such as Brazil, India or China, which may have an interest in opening avenues for negotiation,” concludes Laya.
José Manuel García Margallo insists on the same idea, who is now working on a book regarding how to face the new global situation, titled ‘Carnivores and herbivores, a new world order’. Europe would be the herbivore and the United States, China or Russia, the carnivores.
The former minister describes a deterioration of the international order in which the standards accepted by all y administered by international institutions are replaced by what the Russian president, Vladimir Putincalls the “civilizational states”, an equivalent to the ancient empires with their zones of influence. “And firefighters do not step on the hose. For example, Russia and China do not intervene more than formally in the Iran conflict, despite the fact that they have bilateral agreements and a trilateral one,” describes Margallo. “The map of the world is being redefined without us. If the EU does not want to fall into irrelevance, it must become a political unionthe United States of Europe,” he suggests. How long do we have left? One year, five years? “We have to do it sooner. “We don’t have time.”
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