Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s longest foreign trip that took him to five countries in Europe, the Caribbean, South America and Africa was a diplomatic success of the new kind that seems to work more on personal charisma than on nation-to-nation relationships.That he returns with a clutch of the highest civilian honours the nations he visited conferred on him may principally be an index of India’s rising economic heft and its positioning as a strong voice of the Global South. But the sheer numbers of them collected in the last 10 years is an indication of the vibes he personally shares with many of the leaders.With two of the five original members of the BRICS lineup absent — Xi Jinping preoccupied with home affairs and Vladimir Putin supposedly afraid of an ICC arrest warrant — it was Mr Modi’s turn to lead the assembled to discuss matters that should interest them all, including climate change that may, however, be going out of fashion elsewhere thanks to changes at the top in the US.State visits are no more just the culmination of years of hard work behind the scenes in the foreign office of nations where career mavens chip away at the framework of international relations and came up with voluminous dossiers for leaders to study and shape their interactions with the rulers of other nations.Some of the shows may even seem orchestrated; they are nevertheless a grand display of bonhomie among leaders that is expected to spread cheer while uphold the standards expected of international optics in these days of connectivity through the images of the all-seeing TV cameras that beam pictures across continents in real time to larger audiences than ever before.It can be said that diplomacy itself is changing, certainly since January 20, 2025, a day on which not just the occupant but the entire global outlook of the White House ineradicably transformed into something of a different, if unpredictable, dimension. The US President Donald Trump inherited the mantle of not just the leader of the free world but also became the emperor they are now fawning over.It is scarcely believable that even the Canadian Prime Minister, Mike Carney, who was critical of Trump and called him out as a “bully” at a time when the US President cast eyes on Canada as a prospective 51st state, should laud his leadership of the US. That may be transactional considering tariff battles were raging then. But what could have provoked Benjamin Netanyahu to propose Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize except flattery that seems to be increasingly the currency for dealing with the head of the nation that plays the global policeman.There is an argument that since the Nobel Prize for Peace eluded Mahatma Gandhi, the ultimate apostle of peace of the 20th century, it should matter little who its recipients have been over the decades. But some on that list have been war hawks too and others like Barack Obama who went along on the same war path set by his predecessors should have earned demerit points.It is an even more of a travesty of justice that the US President, who sent his bombers flying nonstop for 16 hours one way to annihilate nuclear fuel processing sites in Iran with bunker-busting mother of all bombs, should even be nominated. Even Pakistan, with its known love for state-sponsored violence, withdrew its Nobel nomination with a mea culpa. The Peace Prize is not for bomb dropping leaders who think nothing of crimes against humanity.
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