Virus throws spanner in the works of global diplomacy
washington — Entire countries are on lockdown, state visits cancelled, travel curtailed, key meetings postponed or moved online.
The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered international diplomacy. While the interruptions may seem to many like trivial inconveniences for a well-heeled jet set, they may have significant implications for matters of war and peace, arms control and human rights.
Already the United States has cancelled at least two leaders’ summits it planned to host this year and moved a Group of Seven foreign ministers online. As the global crisis threatens to alter the world balance of power, Nato’s top diplomats abandoned plans to meet in person this past week, the European Union has scaled back its schedule, a major international conference on climate change in Scotland was called off, and many lower-level UN gatherings have been scrapped
entirely. If the pandemic isn’t brought under control by summer, it could jeopardise the diplomatic granddaddy of the post-World War II era, the annual highlevel UN General Assembly meeting in virus-stricken New York, which this year is set to commemorate the organization’s 75th anniversary. The General Assembly may have only a fraction of the audience as an global sporting event like the already postponed Summer Olympics in Japan, but it is the diplomatic equivalent of the games. The president of the General Assembly said the 193-member world body will make a decision “in the coming month” on whether to delay the gathering, set to begin on September 22.
If there is a global center of diplomacy, it’s the sprawling UN headquarters complex in New York, considered to be a top diplomatic post, if not the top, for almost all countries.
It hosts many formal and informal meetings but much of the business of diplomacy takes place over coffee and drinks in the Delegates Lounge, and at lunches, dinners and the numerous nightly receptions.
The arrival of Covid-19, which has turned New York into the US epicentre of the pandemic, suddenly ended this diplomatic lifestyle that has existed for decades. As the world fights what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calls “a war against a virus,” —
I don’t think it will stop things from getting done that people want to get done but the epidemic is likely to be an excuse rather than a cause Ronald Neumann, a former US ambassador