The World Is Not Short of Power. It Is Short of Leaders.
From Churchill and Nehru to Trump and Modi — what happened to serious leadership?
Dear Reader,
I woke up this morning thinking about a joke. Not a funny one.
On March 19, US President Donald Trump sat beside Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in the Oval Office and made a Pearl Harbor quip to explain why America did not warn its allies before bombing Iran. The American side of the room laughed. The Japanese side went silent.
It got me thinking about what leadership used to look like. Churchill and Roosevelt aboard a warship in 1941, deciding the shape of the post-war world. Nehru at Bandung in 1955, giving voice to a billion people the great powers had ignored. Leaders who understood that the moment demanded everything they had.
Compare that to today. Trump’s Pearl Harbor joke. Modi’s legendary bear hugs, photographed and shared across a hundred government social media accounts before the bilateral meeting is even over. Boris Johnson, cultivating deliberate chaos until two former Prime Ministers from his own side accused him of shaming the country.
The world in 2026 faces challenges
as serious as anything since 1945 — climate, AI, nuclear risk, a war in the Middle East that nobody planned for and nobody knows how to end. These are not problems that yield to performance. They require the kind of sustained, serious, trust-based diplomacy that comes from leaders who can be taken seriously.
Credibility, once lost, is not easily rebuilt. That is the argument I make in my latest essay on DiploPolis.
Read The Dignity Deficit here: The Dignity Deficit: When Leaders Stopped Being Serious
— Sunny