The President of Slovenia recently wrote: “Do wars solve problems? No, they only deepen them and create new ones. Can dialogue solve problems? It can.”
It's an appealing sentiment, almost uplifting in its simplicity. But the world we actually inhabit isn't quite so generous. Plenty of leaders and regimes talk up dialogue in public while privately treating it as little more than a stall tactic or a way to mask what they're really after.
That kind of rhetoric has an obvious appeal: it boils messy, high-stakes realities down to neat, feel-good slogans. The trouble is, once you treat dialogue as some kind of cure-all, you can sidestep the harder questions - what do you do when the talking gets nowhere?
Does anyone honestly think quiet negotiations alone will get a regime to reverse a ban on educating half its population, or persuade a dictator to free political prisoners he's determined to keep locked up? History doesn't offer much encouragement.
Thucydides put it bluntly centuries ago: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. International politics has never been just a debating society; it's shaped by raw balances of power. From that follows a less comforting truth: not every peace is worth having, and not every war is unjust.
Look back at the twentieth century for proof. In 1938 the Munich Agreement was hailed as diplomacy's finest hour - peace secured through patient talk. Instead it bought Hitler time, let him rearm further, and paved the way for a much bigger catastrophe. The Allies eventually realized that no amount of reasonable discussion could tame a regime whose goals made genuine compromise impossible. The war ended only when Nazi Germany was defeated on the battlefield.
Closer to home, the 1990s in the Balkans taught a similar lesson. Even as fighting raged in Croatia, many in Bosnia clung to the hope that restraint and endless dialogue would keep the violence away. They hesitated to arm themselves properly or prepare seriously for what might come. That trust in words over weapons ended with the long siege of Sarajevo and the horror at Srebrenica.
Real diplomatic success has almost always depended on pairing talk with credible strength - the classic carrot and stick. Dialogue by itself turns into empty posturing; raw power without any attempt at negotiation just becomes thuggery. Talks only matter when everyone knows there's muscle behind them.
The same goes for faith in international law as a standalone solution. Without enforcement, law is mostly aspiration. Hobbes warned that in the absence of a common authority strong enough to make rules stick, you're left with a war of all against all. Inside states we have courts, police, armies to back up the law. Globally? Not much of the sort exists.
The United Nations gathers democracies, autocracies, theocracies, socialist systems. These societies have wildly different ideas about authority, religion, rights. Getting real agreement on shared values in that room is next to impossible. So international law often settles for the lowest common denominator: don't interfere in anyone else's house.
At the level of entire civilizations, the challenge is even steeper than what tore apart Yugoslavia or what Europe wrestles with today. When societies hold fundamentally opposing views, building any common normative framework becomes a fantasy. Without some basic shared ground, law turns hollow.
That's why it's wishful to think the international order can rest on declarations, resolutions, and repeated calls for more dialogue. Rules last only where there's a community prepared to defend them—and the power to do so.
Yet too much of our own diplomacy acts as if those hard realities don't apply - as though well-crafted statements and moral appeals will somehow carry the day on their own. It's sugar-coated: looks nice, tastes sweet in the moment, but the first real storm washes it away exactly when you need it to hold.
