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........

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