President Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un again, saying he hopes to arrange a meeting later this year. The two leaders held their first historic summit in Singapore in 2018, a second in…
Page B1From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 September 2026
Ambassador broke every rule of diplomacy; Kim Jong Un's silence is working too.
As it ran on the front
Diplomatic Protocol, a set of customs believed to be older than the republic itself, died this week after a long illness, survived by an ambassador in Warsaw who is credited, according to his own alliance's accounting, with breaking every rule in its book, and by a silence out of Pyongyang that a dictator has apparently found more useful than a phone call.
Protocol was born sometime before anyone alive can properly date it, out of the plain observation that countries which do not talk to each other tend, eventually, to shoot at each other instead. It grew up slow and unglamorous: cables, cocktail parties, the correct fork, the correct form of address, the specific, boring genius of making sure nobody loses face in a room where everybody is armed. It was never exciting. That was rather the point.…
…(cont) It is survived by the alliance it built, which -- its own members note, almost with surprise -- held anyway, the way a house sometimes stands a season past the day the load-bearing wall came out. It is survived also by Kim Jong Un, who has discovered that not answering carries more weight than any cable Protocol ever taught anyone to draft, and by a White House that appears to regard both the breaking and the ghosting as, on balance, working.
Protocol is preceded in death by a great many smaller norms -- the ones about returning calls, about not saying the quiet part on background, about pretending, at minimum, to be listening. It leaves behind no successor, only a working theory, untested outside this administration, that alliances are load-bearing enough to hold themselves up now, whippersnapper notions and all.
This paper does not know if that theory is correct. It knows only that the man who broke every rule kept his post, and the man who broke off contact is described, by people paid to notice such things, as winning. Neither of those is a definition of diplomacy this desk was ever taught. It is, at best, a kind of hogwash dressed up as strategy, and it will be tested the next time silence is the wrong answer.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners return a phone call today -- any call, to any office -- before the habit of answering goes the way of the thing we're burying.
“One guy trashes every rule in the diplomacy book and the alliance holds, the other guy just stops picking up the phone and that's apparently a win too. When breaking the rules and ignoring the rules both count as strategy, there weren't any rules, there was just a guy who used to answer and doesn't anymore.”
“Unconventional diplomacy gets results, that's the throughline here, disruption is a strategy, not a -- well, 'the alliance held' is doing a lot of work in that sentence, held despite, not because, I suppose. Let's just say results speak for themselves, whatever they turn out to be.”
The receipts
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This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.