There is something almost touchingly archaic about the conviction, clung to with desperate tenacity in Brussels and Washington, that if one simply convenes enough well-tailored officials in an air-conditioned Gulf capital, the intractable brutalities of the world will dissolve into the margins of a joint communiqué. The latest iteration of this secular liturgy finds European envoys packing their linen suits for Abu Dhabi, where they intend to join American-brokered talks regarding Ukraine’s future, proudly announcing their defiance of Kremlin objections. It is a splendid gesture, rendered entirely hollow by the inconvenient fact that wars, unlike international trade treaties, cannot be settled in absentia by people who agree with one another.
The theater of it all would be comical were the stakes not measured in Ukrainian lives and European solvency. To hold a summit on the settlement of an existential land war whilst excluding, by design or petulance, the primary aggressor is rather like staging Hamlet without the Prince and declaring the play a triumph because the stagehands remained sober. It reflects the prevailing Western delusion that diplomatic posture can serve as a substitute for geopolitical leverage, and that convening an audience of sympathetic bystanders somehow compensates for an acute shortage of artillery shells.
One would think the venue alone might have injected a drop of sobriety into the proceedings. Just across the desert sands, an Aramco tower in the heart of Riyadh has recently been kissed by a Houthi drone, an impolite reminder from the region’s realists that cheap, mass-produced violence can punch through the most lavishly funded security architecture with insulting ease. While Western diplomats prepare to debate normative frameworks in Emirati banquet halls, the skies overhead belong to those who understand that power is not negotiated in conference rooms, but imposed through kinetic fact.
Indeed, the world seems presently overrun by institutions eager to perform moral righteousness precisely where it accomplishes the least. In Buenos Aires, President Milei’s frantic, chainsaw-wielding attempt to rescue a ruined economy from decades of state-sponsored insolvency has earned him a stinging papal rebuke, delivered with all the fiscal wisdom one expects from a sovereign whose own city-state relies on Peter’s Pence and celestial providence. In Paris, the Musee D'Orsay has mounted an exhibition of art looted by the Nazis, finally displaying the stolen canvases in the hope of finding their rightful owners—an impeccably noble gesture that would have been vastly more impressive had it not required eighty years of bureaucratic slumber to contemplate.
Everywhere, the pattern holds: the performance of virtue replaces the grim, unglamorous mechanics of execution. The Europeans heading to Abu Dhabi will return to their respective capitals to announce a consensus on sovereignty, a shared vision of international law, and perhaps even a roadmap for post-war reconstruction that assumes a victory they have not yet managed to fund. They will congratulate themselves on having defied Moscow’s disapproval, as though Vladimir Putin were weeping into his tea over an American-orchestrated symposium in the Emirates.
Real peace, as any student of history outside the European External Action Service knows, is a filthy, transactional business. It is negotiated between adversaries who detest one another, concluded only when the cost of continued combat outweighs the pain of compromise, and signed in rooms where the smoke has not yet cleared. It will not be conceived over cardamom coffee in a Gulf petro-monarchy by diplomats whose primary achievement is avoiding the gaze of the combatants.
Until the West understands that diplomatic capital is merely the interest drawn on the principal of hard military power, these summits remain nothing more than diplomatic tourism with a security escort. The tragedy is that while our envoys rack up frequent-flyer miles pretending to settle the world, the real world—unforgiving, brutal, and entirely indifferent to Abu Dhabi—is being shaped by the men firing the drones and stocking the magazines.
Rupert Halloway