Mediation is the message. Whenever a conflict arises, politicians seeking the tag of statesmen rush in and claim credit. When Donald Trump boomed into the headlines in June 2025 claiming to have brokered a ceasefire between India and Pakistan, the only thing louder than his announcement was the silence from New Delhi—until it was shattered by a phone call.
Narendra Modi, with the practised precision of a man who has heard it all before, reportedly spent 35 minutes dismantling Trump’s fantasy. The prime minister made it clear that the ceasefire was a result of direct military-to-military understanding rooted in the 1972 Simla Agreement. “India has never accepted third-party mediation, nor will it ever,” Modi declared, according to sources familiar with the call. His disdain was unmistakable. This sharp exchange exposes a deeper crisis—that in a world fractured by wars like Iran-Israel, Israel-Hamas, Russia-Ukraine and India-Pakistan, there is total absence of credible, universally-accepted mediators. This has paralysed diplomacy, leaving violence unchecked.
Going back to the 1970s, Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomacy with Mao Zedong during the Cold War to check the Soviet Union exemplified the kind of strategic mediation absent in today’s conflicts. Unlike today’s self-promoting dealmakers, Kissinger operated with Cold War gravitas, using realpolitik to reshape global alliance. It’s a stark contrast to the opportunistic mediation attempts plaguing 2025’s fractured world order.
If Trump fancied himself a reincarnation of Kissinger, Modi responded like a man unwilling to share the stage with a meddler playing diplomat in his own campaign circus. But behind this diplomatic snub lies a more troubling truth: we live in an age without credible mediators. The global landscape of June 2025 is a tinderbox of conflicts, each defying resolution due to the lack of a trusted peacemaker. The era of diplomatic giants like Franklin Roosevelt, who shaped post-World War II peace, or Jimmy Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David Accords, is a distant memory.
The world in mid-2025 resembles a geopolitical powder-keg, with Israel and Iran exchanging missiles, Ukraine and Russia locked in a trench war stretching over a decade, Hamas and Israel in a perpetual loop of bloodshed, and India-Pakistan tensions now simmering dangerously post-Sindoor. What’s missing isn’t just resolution. It’s trust. Gone are the days of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy or handshakes of détente like that between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin.
Today’s so-called peacemakers are dealmakers in disguise. Trump’s mediation record is a hall of mirrors: a Serbia-Kosovo photo op that collapsed weeks later, a North Korea summit that led nowhere, and now, a claim over a South Asian ceasefire that India flatly rejects. Even Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whose 2025 Moscow-Tehran pact attempts to position him as a broker in West Asia, is too busy supplying drones and tactical advisors to Iran to be taken seriously by Israel. China, that other self-styled stabiliser, selectively intervenes only where its ‘Belt and Road’ assets are at stake. Its silence on Kashmir, coupled with military aid to Pakistan for Operation Bunyan Marsoos, reveals its priorities: profit, not peace.
Europe, meanwhile, is a ghost of its former diplomatic self. Leaders like Britain’s David Lammy or the EU’s Josep Borrell issue calls for “de-escalation”, but lack the authority of a Konrad Adenauer or Charles de Gaulle. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal, once hailed as a European diplomatic high point, was shredded by Trump’s first term and never recovered. Borrell’s briefings have all the gravitas of a lukewarm press release. The United Nations, born to prevent such global conflagrations, is paralysed by veto politics. Its Gaza resolutions of 2023 fell apart under the weight of American and Russian obstruction.
Turkey and Qatar have tried their hand at shuttle diplomacy—Qatar’s January 2025 Hamas-Israel ceasefire lasted barely 11 days. It reignited again because it lacked the muscle to enforce a lasting peace. The Iran-Israel conflict, escalating in June 2025 with Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks on Tel Aviv, exemplifies this impasse. Neither side trusts the other’s ideological cores for direct talks. Israel’s ‘self-defence’ claims and Iran’s theocratic anti-Western stance are irreconcilable without external intervention. Trump’s pro-Israel rhetoric and threats against Iran renders him an unacceptable mediator, while Putin’s alliance with Tehran taints his neutrality.
The result? A geopolitical marketplace where arms, oil and optics matter more than mediation. Global defence spending reached a record $2.2 trillion in 2024. As missiles rained on Tel Aviv and Ukrainian towns vanished under artillery shells, the stocks of military suppliers like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon surged. China and Russia fuel Pakistan and Iran’s militaries. Every crisis is a ledger entry—loss of life for profit gained. In this market-driven madness, the real tragedy is that diplomacy has become theatre. Peacemaking today is a photo opportunity, not a philosophy. Trump’s desire to insert himself into Indo-Pak hostilities is not about Kashmir. It’s about his image as global fixer. Modi’s withering dismissal was not just nationalist posturing. It was a statement: we don’t need your drama.
India’s foreign policy, once derided as fence-sitting ‘hugplomacy’, has evolved. Modi’s refusal to allow third-party intrusion, even from powerful allies, signals a larger shift among rising powers towards strategic autonomy. Gone are the days when South Block waited for Washington or London to broker peace. Today’s India makes and breaks terms on its own soil, in its own voice. Yet, the vacuum remains.
The world desperately needs a peacemaker, not a populist, not a power-hungry opportunist, but a statesman with the moral authority of a Carter and the geopolitical savvy of a Kissinger. Until such a figure arises, the world will continue to haemorrhage lives, displace millions and feed an arms industry thriving on destruction. Modi’s slapdown of Trump may have been personal. But it also captured a global mood: enough with the charades. Mediation, once the high art of diplomacy, is now just a meme waiting to be fact-checked. Until diplomacy rediscovers credibility, conflict will remain our lingua franca, and peace an empty headline. Without impartial mediators or neutral umpires, diplomacy is a hollow exercise.
Who benefits from this failure of self-appointed referees? The arms industry, oil conglomerates and reconstruction firms. Geopolitically, Russia and China gain by weakening Western unity, while America maintains influence through arms sales and alliances. Corporate greed, reflected by a $200-billion arms trade, soaring oil revenues and lucrative reconstruction deals, thrives on this vacuum. Diplomacy must overcome greed and opportunism, or global bloodbaths will persist, leaving humanity to pay the price of failed mediation. In this diplomatic air devoid of the ozone of credibility, India has a chance to tweak the decade-old Modiplomacy and hugplomacy to be a global mediator that matters.
Read all columns by Prabhu chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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