The time Antony Blinken went to bed with Sergey Lavrov
Once upon a time the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken booked a nice hotel room with a Queen bed and invited Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to share it with him. They went there to launch a diplomatic initiative to try to end the war in Ukraine and to put to bed, so to speak, the idea of violent confrontation between the two superpowers.
Why not? The Americans had done well with Ping Pong diplomacy with China in the 1970s, Henry Kissinger had used Shuttle Diplomacy following the Israeli-Arab Yom Kippur War. There was Doveryai, No Proveryai (Trust but Verify) diplomacy in the Reagan-Gorbachev years. Over recent times, however, US-Russian diplomacy has largely consisted in blowing people and things up – and Antony Blinken realised this was hurting too many people’s feelings. So he called Sergey and proposed, not marriage, but a bed-in. The two decided they would go to bed together and, waited on by servants and lavished with excellent room service, would not de-camp until they had sorted out the root problem.
Several weeks later the two men emerged, both transformed, not just by bed sores but by deep personal insight. What the world needs now, one of them said, was less bombast and bomb blasts and more sensitivity to each other’s strategic needs. Holding hands they read in one voice the communiqué they had penned together. It was the shortest but most sensible communiqué in the history of international diplomacy:
“All we are saying is give peace a chance”.
Now that may sound twee, naive, woke or whatever, but it is no less gullible and far less destructive than the path the two behemoths are on right now. Sending more bombs to Ukraine will just end up with more dead Russians and Ukrainians. It could drag other nations directly into the conflict; it might even start a nuclear war. The conflict is unlikely to be won on the battlefield; both sides have too much skin in the game. Peace will require diplomacy; diplomacy means talking. This childish refusal to talk to each other must end; they must grow up and go to bed with each other.
In 1969 Yoko Ono and John Lennon played their part in mobilising people to oppose the madness of the US war in Vietnam and promote peace and humanity. Yoko and John did their famous Bed-Ins for Peace and booked into the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. They invited friends to Room 1742 where they recorded the now-famous anthem Give Peace a Chance.
Eugene Doyle
9 July 2024
