Shrewdness without a moral anchor isn’t diplomacy. It isn’t even strategy. It’s just mammon with a better press agent.
“Recovering the Lost Art of Diplomacy” by A. Wess Mitchell in Imprimis February 2026 makes the case – or attempts to make the case – for using diplomacy. He defines diplomacy as “the use of negotiations to reconcile conflicting interests on matters of war and peace…best defined by its outcomes rather than by its processes.” He notes that of all “forms of diplomacy between great powers, the most important concerns itself with limiting, avoiding, or preparing for war.”
Machiavelli might agree. “A PRINCE should therefore have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study, but war and its organization and discipline, for that is the only art that is necessary to one who commands, and it is of such virtue that it not only maintains those who are born princes, but often enables men of private fortune to attain to that rank.”
But is diplomacy really the issue? Is it a lost “art?”
Actually, the word Mitchell should have used is simply NEGOTIATIONS. Defining diplomacy as the use of negotiations is confusing: it’s really all about negotiation, period. It’s always about negotiations. HOW you do negotiating is what Mitchell is aiming at, and frankly, that’s not as important as what you are negotiating for.
Diplomacy is as Google defines it: “the art of dealing with people in a sensitive and effective way.” Substitute negotiating for “dealing” and you have what Mitchell probably means by diplomacy.
But negotiations don’t have to be “sensitive.” Or artful. In fact, some negotiations are the exact opposite. You can be a bully in a negotiation.
Mitchell points out two “erroneous conceptions of diplomacy, one left and one right.” He says that the left’s mistake is thinking diplomacy’s purpose is to build rule-making institutions that “transcend nation-states and that will eventually expunge war from the human experience.”
Good luck with that.
If you read Sun Tzu, you realize that war will always be here. It’s inevitable. Which is why Machiavelli encouraged his Prince to study it. Carl von Clausewitz played an important role in Prussian military and political history during the Napoleonic Wars. He is best known as a leading modern philosopher of war. His most famous work, On War, defines war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”
In other words, nations will always be trying to force enemies to do their will. People do that to each other, don’t they? Despite negotiations. Or in spite of them.
The right’s error, on the other hand, is: thinking that human societies can only find “true safety and honor in a preponderance of military power, and that diplomacy is more often than not a form of surrender.”
Both points of view leave a lot to be desired. Because these are extremes, so it’s easy to point fingers at Neville Chamberlain as the ultimate failed diplomat. But he’s not: he’s a failed negotiator. He was negotiating with evil without being willing to negotiate within the terms of evil himself.
If you define negotiation as “a discussion aimed at reaching an agreement,” the question is always HOW you reach that agreement. When you can’t reach an agreement, you either give in, or you force the other person to give in. Fight or flight.
Because you only have to negotiate when there is a conflict. Without a conflict, there is no reason for a negotiation to exist. Think about that.
Conflicts don’t have to exist just in states like Machiavelli was talking about, or countries either. They exist within families, don’t they? Arguments, fighting, violence. The fact is, conflicts are, have been and will be ALWAYS around…and in between the force that is used to resolve the conflict one way or another is NEGOTIATION. And yes, the definition of a negotiation is “a discussion between two or more parties to reach an agreement or resolve a conflict.”
Take the Rubber Band
Think about a rubber band. If two people pull at the ends of a rubber band, and keep on pulling, eventually that rubber will snap and break. But if those same two people start pulling and one lets the other side pull, nothing will happen. The rubber band for all intensive purposes will remain in its original form.
My rubber band example is a way to understand what we’re talking about: power, force, conflict. Negotiations. Conflict is when the two sides are pulling on the rubber band. The rubber band can be anything, any issue, any idea.
Force is how much “pull” one side can exert; they can pull slowly, tension rises slowly as the other side also pulls, but pull quickly, and tension rises quickly. Tension can be defined as “the state of being stretched tight.”
You can be “diplomatic” when you are pulling, asking the person nicely to stop pulling so hard. Or you can pull harder and snap the rubber band. Or you can let yourself be pulled.
It’s all negotiable. Or it isn’t.
Power is being able to pick up the rubber band to begin with. You have the power to pick it up, or you can decide not to pick up the rubber band. And when you do pick it up, you decide if you pull, or you let yourself be pulled. Sometimes back and forth. But here is the question: if you know you are being pulled, and you let yourself be pulled, who is actually in control of the issue, the idea? The negotiation?
This simple analogy runs underneath any negotiation. It is the give and take of power, conflict resolution, and force.
The Unjust Steward
Which brings us to when Mitchell brings up the parable of the unjust steward and says, “we have to be shrewd in the ways of this world in order to preserve what is good.”
Machiavelli said the same thing.
A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.
But what about this unjust steward…have you read Luke 16:1-13?
I have always had a problem the UNJUST steward story. First, those debts the steward was going around to forgive were not his debts, but the debts to his boss by these other people. No one gave the steward the “right” do forgive those debts.
The steward was doing the forgiving of debt to make sure that the people would “welcome” him into their homes when his boss fired him (read the reference for yourself at the end of this essay). It was a negotiation in the strict sense of the word: I forgive your debt, you like me.
He eventually gets praised by the boss. Which is strange…unless you realize something.
I think his boss was a crook and liked that the steward was cheating. That’s the only explanation for the boss “liking” what the steward did.
If you are negotiating with a crook, you have to negotiate like a crook.
And here is where Mitchell, Machiavelli, and the unjust steward all arrive at the same silent place. They are shrewd about the means to the end. Mitchell tells us how to negotiate — constrain your adversary, build coalitions, buy time — but not what we are ultimately trying to preserve.
Machiavelli’s Prince studies war but never asks whether the principality is worth saving.
The steward negotiates his way back into comfort but has no loyalty to anything beyond his own survival.
Shrewdness without a moral anchor isn’t diplomacy. It isn’t even strategy. It’s just mammon with a better PR agent.
The steward’s boss – the rich man – was never identified as a good man or how he got his wealth (mammon). In fact, we only know the steward was “accused unto him (the rich man) that he (the steward) had wasted his goods.”
So the boss fires him. The steward, realizing he doesn’t have a lot of skill or is actually not that ambitious, does a selfish thing: he hatches up the scheme playing further with the wealth of the boss. Afterwards, when the boss hears what he did, he commends the steward for “doing wisely.”
What did the steward do? He forgave the debts of the people who owed the boss so that they would think he was a good guy and after the boss fired him, take him in. In other words, he negotiated his way back into the good graces of his boss by continuing to steal from his boss.
The story rests on why the boss thought this was OK.
And that answer is, the story can only make sense if the boss is a crook too. They are both dealing with riches–mammon. And in this case, unrighteousness mammon. If the boss liked his thinking it can only be they left God out of the equation and are dealing straight with mammon – which actually is the only thing you can negotiate. While it might look good that the steward is “forgiving” debts, he doesn’t have that power: the boss does. And the boss was already angry that the steward was wasting his “goods.”
In the Gospel, Jesus takes over the narration at that point and says to everyone to make friends with “the mammon of unrighteousness” so that when you fail, “they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” In other words, when you become friends with the mammon of unrighteousness (money) you will go to the everlasting habitations: hell.
It is like Jesus is saying “Go ahead. Be a friend to Mammon. Forget about God. Make my day.”
What this parable has to do with diplomacy beats me. Or does it?
Negotiations can only work when you have compromise. What Mitchell calls the “lost art of diplomacy” is trying to get people to do what you want them to do without force.
The real problem I think is that you have to know what you want in order to get into a negotiation. Maybe that’s why there is no more art to diplomacy: it’s difficult to say these days what any of us – much less our country – wants.