Entire countries are on lockdown. State visits have been canceled, travel curtailed and key meetings postponed or moved online. The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered international diplomacy.
WASHINGTON — Entire countries are on lockdown, state visits canceled, travel curtailed, key meetings postponed or moved online.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.
If there is a global center of diplomacy, it’s the sprawling U.N. 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.
In the absence or severe cutback of in-person diplomatic discussions, some fear countries such as Russia and China may seek to exploit the crisis to further weaken international institutions already stressed by the Trump administration’s hostility to them.“It’s making a lot of things harder,” said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador who is president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
“Here at the U.N. in New York we must turn our attention to the tools we have. We must make them work better for the situation we face. And in the process, we might learn something about both what is truly important as well as the wonders of video conferences,” Norway’s U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, told The Associated Press.
Uncertainty is clouding the prospects for two big Geneva-hosted diplomatic meetings in May and June: the annual assembly in May of the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency that has had a front-line role in fighting coronavirus, and the top annual gathering of the International Labor Organization in June.
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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