Since return­ing to office in Janu­ary, U.S. Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump has sparked an intense debate about the role of dip­lomacy in Amer­ican for­eign policy. In less than three months, he ini­ti­ated bold dip­lo­matic over­tures to all three of Wash­ing­ton’s main adversar­ies. He opened talks with Rus­sian Pres­id­ent Vladi­mir Putin about end­ing the war in Ukraine, is com­mu­nic­at­ing with Chinese leader Xi Jin­ping about hold­ing a sum­mit, and sent a let­ter to Ira­nian Supreme Leader Ali Khame­nei about bring­ing that coun­try’s nuc­lear pro­gram to an end. In par­al­lel, his admin­is­tra­tion has made it plain that it intends to rene­go­ti­ate the bal­ance of bene­fits and bur­dens in Wash­ing­ton’s alli­ances to ensure greater reci­procity.

Great-power rivalry is back, and sys­temic war is a very real pos­sib­il­ity.

Trump’s open­ing moves have drawn howls of protest and promp­ted accus­a­tions of appease­ment. But the fact is that Wash­ing­ton was in dire need of a new kind of dip­lomacy. After the end of the Cold War, the United States moved away from using nego­ti­ations to pro­mote the national interest. Con­vinced that his­tory had ended and that they could remake the world in Amer­ica’s image, suc­cess­ive U.S. pres­id­ents came to rely on mil­it­ary and eco­nomic force as the primary tools of for­eign policy. When they did use dip­lomacy, it was usu­ally not to enhance U.S. power but to try to build a global para­dise in which mul­ti­lat­eral insti­tu­tions would sup­plant coun­tries and ban­ish war entirely.

For a time, the United States could get away with such neg­li­gence. In the 1990s and the early years of this cen­tury, Wash­ing­ton was so power­ful that it could achieve its aims without old-fash­ioned dip­lomacy. But those days are gone. The United States no longer pos­sesses a mil­it­ary that is cap­able of fight­ing and defeat­ing all its foes sim­ul­tan­eously. It can­not drive another great power to ruin through sanc­tions. Instead, it lives in a world of con­tin­ent-size rivals with for­mid­able eco­nom­ies and mil­it­ar­ies. Great-power war, absent for dec­ades, is again a real pos­sib­il­ity.

In this dan­ger­ous set­ting, the United States will need to redis­cover dip­lomacy in its clas­sical form—not as a bag car­rier for an all-power­ful mil­it­ary or as a pur­veyor of global norms, but as a hard-nosed instru­ment of strategy. For mil­len­nia, great powers have used dip­lomacy in this way to fore­stall con­flict, recruit new part­ners, and splinter enemy coali­tions. The United States must take a sim­ilar path, using talks and deals to limit its own bur­dens, con­strain its enemies, and recal­ib­rate regional bal­ances of power. And that requires enga­ging with rivals and rework­ing alli­ances so that Wash­ing­ton does not need to take the lead in con­front­ing Beijing and Moscow sim­ul­tan­eously.

Talk­ing with China and Rus­sia and insist­ing on reci­procity from friends is there­fore neces­sary. If done right, it could help man­age the gaps between the United States’ finite means and the vir­tu­ally infin­ite threats arrayed against it, something many other great powers have used dip­lomacy to accom­plish. Indeed, the essence of dip­lomacy in strategy is to rearrange power in space and time so that coun­tries avoid tests of strength bey­ond their abil­ity. There is no magic for­mula for how to get this right, and there is no guar­an­tee that Trump’s approach will suc­ceed. But the altern­at­ive—attempt­ing to over­power every­body—is not viable,

ANCIENT WISDOM

In the sum­mer of 432 BC, the lead­ers of Sparta gathered to con­sider whether to go to war with Athens. For months, ten­sions had been build­ing between the two city-states as the Atheni­ans clashed with Sparta’s friends and the Spartans sat idly by. Now a group of hawks, egged on by the allies, were eager for action.

But Archida­mus II, Sparta’s aging king, sug­ges­ted something dif­fer­ent: dip­lomacy. Talks, Archida­mus told the assembly, could fore­stall con­flict while Sparta worked to make new allies and strengthen its hand domest­ic­ally.

I do bid you not to take up arms at once, but to send and remon­strate with [the Atheni­ans] in a tone not too sug­gest­ive of war, nor again too sug­gest­ive of sub­mis­sion, and to employ the inter­val in per­fect­ing our own pre­par­a­tions. The means will be, first, the acquis­i­tion of allies, Hel­lenic or bar­bar­ian it mat­ters not . . . [,] and secondly, the devel­op­ment of our home resources. If they listen to our embassy, so much the bet­ter; but if not, after the lapse of two or three years our pos­i­tion will have become mater­i­ally strengthened . . . . Per­haps by that time the sight of our pre­par­a­tions, backed by lan­guage equally sig­ni­fic­ant will have dis­posed [the Atheni­ans] to sub­mis­sion, while their land is still untouched, and while their coun­sels may be dir­ec­ted to the reten­tion of advant­ages as yet undes­troyed.

At first, Archida­mus’s address did not sway the assembly; the Spartans voted for war. But in the weeks that fol­lowed, the city real­ized it was unready for battle, and the old man’s wis­dom sank in. Sparta sent envoys far and wide to slow the rush to war and pull other city-states to its side. When war came a year later, Sparta was in a bet­ter pos­i­tion to wage it. And when Sparta tri­umphed two dec­ades later, it was not because it had the bet­ter army but because it had assembled a big­ger and bet­ter array of allies—includ­ing an old archenemy, Per­sia—than did Athens.

Archida­mus’s sug­ges­tions have worked for count­less other great powers over the cen­tur­ies. Con­sider, first, using dip­lomacy to buy time and pre­pare for war. When new bar­bar­ian tribes appeared, the Romans, the Byz­antines, and the Song dyn­asty all made it a prac­tice to send envoys in an effort to buy time for replen­ish­ing armor­ies and granar­ies. The Roman Emperor Dom­itian struck a truce with the Dacians that allowed Rome to recol­lect its strengths until a new emperor, Tra­jan, was ready for war a dec­ade later. Venice brokered a long peace with the Otto­mans after the fall of Con­stantinople to beef up its fleets and fort­resses. And the French chief min­is­ter Car­dinal Riche­lieu used dip­lomacy to stall with Spain for nearly a dec­ade so that France could mobil­ize.

Archida­mus’s next sug­ges­tion—form alli­ances to con­strain the enemy’s options—has been sim­il­arly endur­ing. The French kings allied with the heretic Luther­ans and infi­del Otto­mans to restrict their fel­low Cath­olic Habs­burgs. The Habs­burgs allied with the Bour­bons to con­strain the Prus­si­ans. Edwar­d­ian Bri­tain cooper­ated with its colo­nial rivals France and Rus­sia to join forces against imper­ial Ger­many.

In each of these cases, suc­cess meant cul­tiv­at­ing favor­able bal­ances of power in crit­ical regions.This is per­haps the core pur­pose of stra­tegic dip­lomacy—and what allows coun­tries to project power far bey­ond their mater­ial cap­ab­il­it­ies. The Vienna sys­tem engin­eered by Aus­trian For­eign Min­is­ter (and later Chan­cel­lor) Kle­mens von Met­ter­nich used the bal­ance of power to extend his empire’s pos­i­tion as a great power well bey­ond its nat­ural lifespan. Ger­man Chan­cel­lor Otto von Bis­marck pulled off a sim­ilar feat in the late nine­teenth cen­tury. By cut­ting deals with Aus­tria, Rus­sia, and the United King­dom, he was able to isol­ate France and avoid a two-front war that might have strangled the Ger­man empire in its infancy.

These lead­ers never tried to forge part­ner­ships based on any­thing other than shared interests. They did not believe they could trans­form hos­tile coun­tries into friendly ones through logic and reason. They cer­tainly never believed that dip­lomacy could over­come irre­con­cil­able vis­ions of how the world should be. Their goal was to limit rivals’ options, not seek to remove the sources of con­flict. Depart­ing from that logic can lead to cata­strophe, as occurred when Brit­ish Prime Min­is­ter Neville Cham­ber­lain met with Ger­man leader Adolf Hitler in 1938. Rather than use dip­lomacy to amp­lify the domestic and inter­na­tional con­straints on Hitler, Cham­ber­lain weakened them by giv­ing him what he wanted in hopes that Ger­man expan­sion­ism would then cease. Doing so emboldened Ber­lin and paved the way for World War II.

The United States made a sim­ilar mis­take in the 1990s. Instead of try­ing to con­strain a rising Beijing after the Soviet Union fell, Wash­ing­ton used com­mer­cial dip­lomacy to remove the bar­ri­ers con­strain­ing Chinese eco­nomic expan­sion. U.S. offi­cials nego­ti­ated Beijing’s acces­sion to the World Trade Organ­iz­a­tion and opened U.S. mar­kets to…..

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