By Can Öztaş
Foreign policy has always liked theater, costumes and masks. Peace conferences, state visits, summit handshakes, seating plans, flags, solemn declarations. All belong to the choreography of international life.
This, in itself, is not a problem.
Civilization depends on ceremony, ritual and symbolism. So does politics. States flatter, threaten, recognise, embrace, and occasionally perform sincerity. Even Bandung, that great anti-colonial moment of dignity and hope, had its own theatrical language. Color mattered. Posture mattered. Style mattered. The performance did not cancel the politics. It carried it.
The trouble begins later.
It begins when performance stops accompanying policy and starts replacing it.
That is one of the maladies of our age. As the movie Wag the Dog suggests, fiction and reality seem less like rivals than collaborators. Foreign policy no longer borrows the language of theater. It mistakes theater for substance. The image of strength becomes more important than judgment. A government creates a persona and then becomes trapped inside it.
The mask cannot slip because the mask has become the face.
NOT THE PEOPLE BUT THE RULER’S IMAGE
At that point diplomacy starts to curdle. It becomes simulacrum. The leader is no longer merely exercising authority. He becomes an image of authority. He is displayed as the only man in the room who can speak to all sides, outwit allies, and keep the nation safe by posture alone. Facts shift. Alliances wobble. Crises mutate. Yet the performance continues.
Contradictions are folded back into the script. Tactical compliance is dressed up as sovereign genius. Silence is sold as depth. Every photograph with a great power is presented as proof that the country is indispensable. The leader’s vanity is rebranded as national interest.
By then the nation has been demoted. It is no longer the purpose of policy. It is the stage set. Its anxieties are used as atmosphere. Its pride is recruited as lighting. Its interests are invoked, but increasingly as decoration. What is being defended, more and more, is not the people’s place in the world, but the ruler’s image of himself before it.
That is why Wag the Dog still lingers in the memory. Its brilliance was not merely that politics manipulates images. That is hardly a revelation. Its darker insight was that once the machinery of spectacle begins to move, reality itself starts taking instructions from it. War becomes useful not only for military ends, but for narrative management. Urgency flatters authority. Loyal allies shuffle into place. At home, the whole thing is sold as proof of exceptional leadership. Only he can navigate the fire. Only he can speak to everyone. Only he can turn deference into sovereignty through the magic of televised composure.
One does not have to force the analogy.
LOSING THE REPUBLIC
Recent events have shown again how easily badly planned wars are wrapped in the language of destiny. How casually improvisation presents itself as resolve. How readily regional powers, anxious not to offend the wrong capital, begin to confuse prudence with obedience. The result is a curious spectacle. A foreign policy advertised at home as fiercely independent, rich in talk of strategic depth and civilisational reach, while measuring its success by the approval of stronger men abroad.
This is the dispiriting irony of our time. People died on barricades during revolutions so that foreign policy would cease to be a nobleman's private theater. The liberal constitutional settlement and the slow expansion of suffrage were supposed to transfer that theater to accountable institutions. Governments were not elected to cultivate an aesthetic of power. They were elected to govern to uphold the public interest with prudence, restraint and compromise if needed.
A mature republic should know the difference. It should know that foreign policy, however polished its rituals, remains a public trust, not a private mirror for ambitious men. It should know that the stage is useful only while it serves the substance. Once performance becomes an end in itself, politics slips backwards, however modern the lighting, toward older and darker habits of rule.
We may accept that diplomacy requires masks. What we should not accept is the transformation of the mask into the face. The moment a government becomes more faithful to its image than to its people, foreign policy ceases to be strategy and becomes self-portrait.
And nations, unlike overambitious rulers, cannot live by flattering angles alone. When a nation is reduced to scenery for the ruler’s performance, it does not merely lose its voice. It begins to lose the republic itself.
