Andrey Gromyko (USSR Minister of Foreign Affairs 1957-1985): - “10 years of negotiations are better than one year of war”.

Henry Kissinger (US Secretary of State 1973-1977): - “Diplomacy is the art of restraining power”

Sergey Lavrov (acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation): - “morons”, “don't pinch yourself”, “go listen to peacocks” and finally “Hitler has Jewish blood and the most ardent anti-Semites are Jews”

Did you feel the difference?

Is the minister as good as it has been claimed in Putin's entourage all these years? Is he as educated and well-read as his predecessors? The successes on the world stage of Russia in recent decades cause bewilderment in the Western world. His work, the overt and secret activities of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - a complete fiasco, obvious even to the naked eye. There are fewer and fewer flags of Europe at the negotiating table, more and more “muddy” representatives of tapes, clans, terrorist organizations. The Minister's flight map is more like a “random” route. Ce d'Orsay and Washington, Berlin and Westminster have been gone for a long time...

What should a foreign minister be like? The country's chief diplomat, a negotiator who knows how to convince, reach an agreement. Seek consensus. Deftly insert with a British colleague, quotes from Wodehouse, and with an American, favorite jokes O Henry. Person who went through fire and water but did not burn and drown.

It looks like the Russian minister broke down on the copper pipes, rusted himself and allowed the entire ministry to corrode. Another strict suit, but without a handshake, more briefings, but already skirmishes with journalists, more statements, but already with an empty hall and deliberately turned backs.
And it is not at all that Lavrov is Putin's representative, by appointment and behavior forced to be rude, insult, quarrel and break off relations.

Gromyko was also from the opposite side and relations with America were not the warmest. However, no one ever questioned the scale of the personality, the professionalism of the diplomat. HERE, here is the key phrase that explains a lot about Lavrov's behavior, his terrible mistakes as foreign minister. Diplomacy is a subtle, quiet science, at the table of a small room. It is like a chess game, where there is an opening, a gambit, an endgame, and where there must necessarily be castling and, of course, sacrifices, for the sake of preserving the game, for the sake of winning. Lavrov's activities in the ministry are more like a game where there is no second move, where there is no science. More and more often we see that the chess board of the Russian diplomat is not a grandmaster. Apparently, Lavrov does not have a partner with whom to hone his skills, with whom he can play smart moves.
Checkmate in three moves. That is all the simple science of Lavrov, and then...



The retinue makes the king, and the minister has big problems with the retinue. He can write swear words on Instagram, dance Kalinka, threaten journalists with Chechens. Or maybe this is not a mistake of a resident diplomat, maybe this is how he sees the diplomacy of the 21st century, brazen, rollicking obscenely disrespectful.

Just a month ago, a Czech diplomat admitted to me that communication with the Russian Foreign Ministry is not at all similar to the European level of relations.
“We have been treated worse in recent years than a door handle” (this is a literal quote). All this apparently accumulated for many years, and the UN and the minister himself lost their “diplomatic sense” when colleagues from other countries were not perceived as equals. Europe has endured for a long time, and at some point, it just got tired of the “gangster slang of the minister”, from the “rural speech of assistants”, from the lack of education of official speakers from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The result for Russia is deplorable, Eritrea and the Taliban, a couple from the Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republic with appointed pseudo-ambassadors, that is all the simple belongings of the current Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Flights to Central Asia on planes without maintenance, clearly a “place in the crowd” in negotiations with Ukraine. There is no actual work, there is nothing to get paid for.

Lavrov, as it turned out, does not know how to be friends, does not cause respect among colleagues who have become prime ministers, there is nothing to brag about in front of history and Wikipedia...

It looks like Lavrov has a full-fledged zugzwang, and it's time to hand over the party.

AUTHOR: RODION TUNINSKYI

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