2020 in review: top 10 moments in digital diplomacy
By: Andreas Sandre
Tags: Digital Diplomacy, Technology, Social Media, Tech, Government

3. Zoom diplomacy

On April 16, 2020, the White House’s DAILY GUIDANCE AND PRESS SCHEDULE, which highlights all official events to be hosted or attended by US President Donald Trump, read:

8:30AM — THE PRESIDENT participates in a G7 Leaders’ video teleconference on coordinated action in response to COVID-19 [Situation Room; Closed Press]

It was not the first time President Trump, chair of the G7 for 2020, and his fellow colleagues — CanadianPM Justin Trudeau; French president Emmanuel Macron; German chancellor Angela Merkel; Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy; Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s prime minister; UK prime minister Boris Johnson (Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab sat in for him as Johnson was still recovering from coronavirus); in addition to European Council president Charles Michel and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen — held a virtual meeting of the G7.

One month earlier, on March 16, President Trump presided over the first-ever G7 meeting hosted in a video format for an extraordinary summit to discuss the coronavirus pandemic.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic many international and diplomatic meetings were moved online and many world leaders posted photos of computer screens to their social media rather than selfies or handshake photos.

The G20 — Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, UK, US, and the European Union — is another good example.

“Like much else in the time of coronavirus, governing as a global leader attending high-level summitry has been unceremoniously upended,” wrote Tamer Fakahany of the Associated Press. He added how the G20 virtual meeting of the G20, “with more than a dozen heads of state participating, was less a global summit and more of a high-powered conference call.”

“It lasted about 90 minutes — the same as a standard soccer match — instead of the usual, more languid two days,” Fakahany noted.

The annual UN General Assembly was also held virtually with hundreds of Heads of State and Government around the world sending their videos instead of participating in person.

In 2020, virtual meetings have become so popular that many have coined the term Zoom Diplomacy, referring to the pervasive use of Zoom or other video platforms in diplomacy.

Zoom has also become a new tool for former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who now teaches at Georgetown SFS. Her America’s National Security Tool Box class investigates the tools available to today’s foreign policy practitioners and, toward the end of the semester, her students put their knowledge to the test in an all-day simulation where they develop a US response to a foreign policy crisis. This year the simulation was about the coronavirus pandemic and it took place online via Zoom.

“Having students contend with the world ‘as is,’ much like real world leaders are having to adjust to the new reality of the pandemic, was a top priority for Professor Albright,” her teaching assistant Christian Allen said in a blog.

“We are in a very, very different era and I think, in many ways, they have the tools to be able to think through what the next phases are,” Madeleine Albright commented. “People my age have been critical of the younger generation for spending too much time online…but they are now the ones who have the skills to make technology useful for the next phases of the world. It’s a cliche, but they can take a crisis and make an opportunity out of it.”

“In many ways, they are on the cutting-edge of what is going to have to happen in the coming years,” she added. “I want them to be resilient, optimistic, and to work together.”

So, what is the new normal for diplomacy going to be?

Verity Coyle of the Stimson Center explains: “Those of us working outside of government are comfortable with tools like Zoom, Hangouts, Slack — or God forbid Skype — to communicate and organize with colleagues around the world. But for many diplomats and government experts, these virtual tools are truly foreign. Many have not been allowed to use them before, as internal security concerns often block access to open platforms.”

Ashok Mirpuri, Singapore’s ambassador in Washington DC, is convinced that “operating online is not real diplomacy,” according to Politico.

“The reason you send diplomats out to foreign capitals is to engage personally and share confidences and confidential assessments,“ Mirpuri told Ryan Heath. Building and acting on trust is “about the cues and nuances,” that aren’t available online, he said. “You can reach a much wider audience [when on video], but you can’t get to that next stage of diplomacy.”

Professor Paul Sullivan at the US National Defense University disagrees. Commenting about the recent virtual G20 meeting, he told Edward Yeranian of Voice of America that the so-called virtual diplomacy can work well going forward, given the “need for the world’s leaders to talk things through.”



“My sense,” Sullivan said, “is that a large part of the diplomacy of the future … will increasingly be done at virtual levels and online.” “Online,” he added, “is not really virtual if it is done in real time,” and in a “synchronous” fashion.

“The hard work of diplomacy is done face-to-face,” explained Ivo Daalder, a former US ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) during the Obama administration and current president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, to the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Michaels, Laurence Norman, and Dion Nissenbaum. “It’s about schmoozing, cajoling, and also about building confidence and trust. That’s hard to do over Skype, and impossible to do if you need to build a relationship from scratch or after it has soured.”

Ambassador Daalder continued: “Diplomacy without meetings would be more an exchange of views than an ability to work through differences. You’d still try to do it through video and telephone conversations…but it would lose some of its essence and effectiveness.”

Indeed, the face-to-face, traditional side of diplomacy, in particular when it comes to large multilateral gatherings, is a key factor in how diplomacy is still conducted today, in what we now call the digital era of globalization.

In a post for the CFR, Nick Ashton-Hart, who led the team that designed and implemented remote participation in ICANN’s meetings, explains that “diplomats have very little experience working online in a negotiating capacity, as intergovernmental meetings often don’t allow anything beyond webcasting, which is a one-way view.”

Ashton-Hart points put that “The biggest challenges to this transition will not be technical.” Instead, the absence or limited access to your counterparts’ body language limits negotiations, already impaired by being on video rather then being able to interact in person.

“Much of the hard work of reaching agreements takes place in smaller, off-the-record gatherings,” Ashton-Hart writes. “It is possible to facilitate online equivalents of these processes, but it is more complex than simply walking down the aisle and having a quick word or running into people in hallways.”

“Diplomacy never stops.”

— Ambassador Nicholas Burns

“Diplomacy never stops, and in some ways diplomacy is more important than before,” retired senior US diplomat Nicholas Burns told the paper.

Let’s see what 2021 will bring in terms of Zoom Diplomacy!