Covid-19 and the changing face of international politics

The coronavirus has changed the way we relate to each other and our environment.
All told, it has forced us to regroup, rethink and recapture an innocence lost.
Before we all became jaded and cynical, we used to be child-like in how we observed practices like washing hands and the social distancing that comes with mutual respect.
But as we grew older, we childishly thought we could cut corners set in stone for our benefit. Coronavirus has changed all this. The last time I went to a supermarket, there were lines of two persons stretched to the length of 50 persons!

Yes, social distancing was in the building. And making sure nobody jumped the cue or placed ‘nuts against butts’ due to being impatiently lined up behind somebody else. Everyone was clean. It was like a national out of body experience!
John F Kennedy once said: “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
So we should use this crisis to seek out opportunity, when it comes to diplomacy and bringing the world closer together.
This is a long shot. But it might just work.

A few years ago, I went to visit a friend. He sells foods and beverages. And so, I pulled up a chair and bought a beverage, non-alcoholic (seriously).
Anyway, while my friend and I were there shooting the breeze, a couple of North Korean military personnel joined us. These guys, the North Koreans, are an insular group that were always seen but rarely heard.
Until then.
My friend was smoking and the two North Koreans asked for a drag of his smoke. My friend accepted.
Before long, we all sat there like long lost friends. Our words lost in translation, but our camaraderie flowing like North Korean crocodile tears when Kim Jong Il died a few years ago.

That’s when it hit me.
Anyone who has ever smoked a cigarette can attest to this: smokers the world over share an unbreakable kinship. Almost like a fellowship of the damned.
So I am thinking, beyond North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling, maybe what they need is a cigarette break. Thus, in the name of world peace, the world should risk its health, only symbolically, and share a cigarette with the pariah state.
We could call it cigarette diplomacy.
After a few drags of a cigarette, knee-slapping laughter would replace hard-faced standoffs and childish staring duels. And some kind of civility will preface civilised engagement.

This will lead to a safer world, more global democracy and better North Korean movies.
Before coronavirus hit us like a stiff jab from iron Mike Tyson’s left fist, diplomacy took on a more ostensibly serious posture.
President Museveni forged a marriage of convenience with Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame in the furnace of the Rwanda genocide and other theatres set for the song and dance of gunboat diplomacy.
Appearances were important, realties were side-stepped.
Today, we can reverse this circumstance by having world leaders meet while enjoying their guilty pleasures.

We could serve a bottle of Jack Daniels for Donald Trump, bearing in mind that he likes it ‘Stormy’. And an expansionist helping of pie-bald machismo for Vladimir Putin. The idea is to fish for human moments in impersonal settings.
This way, we can change the lexicon used in diplomacy to warmer words which tease out smiles with less soft-soap, and more sincerity. Meetings will then grow into bilateral agreements which reflect a genuine willingness to get to know each other.
In an age of spin and political insincerity, we need grand gestures which speak to the basics: how we used to do things before we all grew so angry and disillusioned.
You remember the time when Michael Jackson and all of us fell in love? Not with his music, although that helped, but with the notions attached to a spade being called a spade.

There was no room for deception. Over and above the glad-handing and back-slapping that goes with modern diplomacy, there was a civility and down-to-earthiness which could never soil a pact or armistice.
Today, beneath the official eloquence and polish, lies a bare-knuckled realism about the need for Darwinian showdowns in the conduct of international affairs.
This is why we always seem to find ourselves on the brink, guided by a one-upmanship that has led us, by a short route, to chaos.
Courtesy of coronavirus, we must wash our hands of this past which has no sanitised future.

Mr Matogo is a digital marketing
manager with City Surprises Ltd
[email protected]