The West is losing the diplomacy war and ASEAN is quietly winning it

This week’s summits exposed a world split between Western dysfunction and the Global Majority’s pragmatic rise Today, it is difficult to find two more contrasting approaches to diplomacy as a tool of interstate engagement than those practiced by the countries of the “global minority” and the states of the “global majority.” While some nations, despite being located in immediate geographic proximity to one another, remain unable to reach a compromise on even the most pressing issues of our time, others – separated by thousands of miles – continue to expand the full spectrum of their bilateral and multilateral ties, helping to ease international tensions and advancing similar approaches to solving the world’s most critical challenges. These two realities, as different as night and day, were brought into especially sharp focus by two major summits held this week: the G7 meeting in Evian, France, and the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the Russia-ASEAN strategic partnership in Kazan. A diplomatic crisis for the collective West Known for its spa resorts, which gained worldwide fame thanks to the bottled water brand that bears its name, the town of Evian-les-Bains typically leaves visitors with the same sense of tranquility associated with places such as Spa in Belgium, Baden-Baden in Germany, or Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic. This time, however, the participants gathered in Haute-Savoie were clearly in no mood for relaxation. The summit of the last fully functioning multilateral platform representing the “collective West” ended amid a string of controversies and became a genuine stress test of the ability of the United States and its allies to develop collective solutions to complex problems. Read more G7 considering licensed arms production in Ukraine: Why now? It would be difficult to find a more symbolic location in France – one that more vividly reflects Europe’s loss of its former hegemony – than the site where the 1962 agreement ending the Algerian War of Independence was signed.

That conflict resulted in Paris losing control over a territory it had long regarded as an extension of France itself on the African continent. Yet seemingly oblivious to such historical symbolism, French President Emmanuel Macron, the current G7 chair, chose this quiet village in southern France to loudly proclaim that differences between the United States on one side and the other members of the group on the other had been overcome regarding continued support for Kiev. To that end, a Ukrainian delegation was invited to the summit. Although Washington has not ruled out imposing additional sanctions on Russia, the media impact of placing Ukraine on the summit agenda proved rather limited, largely because of the endless protocol mishaps involving US President Donald Trump. At the very beginning of the event, during the leaders’ greeting ceremony, he deliberately ignored Vladimir Zelensky, treating him like an uninvited guest at a reunion of old friends. Later, after receiving a welcoming handshake from the summit host, Trump held the French First Lady’s hand for an unusually long time, prompting a wave of criticism in the French press. By the end of the summit, he further fueled controversy by awkwardly remarking that he had posed for photographs with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni out of sympathy for her. The comment so offended Rome that Italy’s foreign minister reportedly rushed to cancel a previously planned visit to the United States. US President Donald Trump attends a working lunch with G7 and Middle East leaders on June 16, 2026 in Evian-les-Bains, France. © Evelyn Hockstein - Pool/Getty Images These protocol incidents might seem trivial were they not symptomatic of a broader decline in the diplomatic culture of the West – a decline that increasingly hampers the abilit