MANIFESTO
We Will Not Look Away While War Is Chosen
Non-use of force as a horizon, not a description of existing law. Five Middle Eastern conflicts show that diplomacy, when applied, works · 2026
Manifesto — We Will Not Look Away While War Is Chosen
There is a moment, in every conflict that degenerates into open war, when the diplomatic path is still open and someone decides to close it. This manifesto exists to name that choice.
A craft as old as humanity
Diplomacy is not a recent invention or a laboratory utopia: it is humanity's oldest political technology. The oldest peace treaty we know of — between the Egypt of Ramesses II and the Hittite Empire, sealed around 1259 BC after the Battle of Kadesh — was not a ceasefire imposed by the stronger side, but an agreement between equals: both parties address each other as “brothers,” and the pact held for generations. Since then the art of negotiation has been refined for over three thousand years, through the congresses that redrew Europe after the Napoleonic wars, all the way to the UN architecture born from the rubble of the Second World War precisely to institutionalize that same art on a global scale. It is not a naive invention: it is a craft built, tested and passed down longer than any weapon in use today.
The point of balance
The heart of this craft is not one side's victory over the other. It is the search for a point of balance that all parties involved can accept as fair enough to prefer it to conflict — not a compromise on the cheap, but the very condition for an agreement to hold over time: a treaty perceived as imposed by one side alone, as the history recounted in this manifesto shows, tends to collapse at the first opportunity.
The opposite choice
Yet today we are witnessing the opposite path. In 2025 the US State Department made public a plan to close ten embassies and seventeen consulates worldwide, part of a cut to the diplomatic budget from $54.4 billion to $28.4 billion within a single year; in the same period roughly 700 State Department employees, including 450 career diplomats, resigned in the new administration's first two months. This is not an isolated case: it is the visible tip of a broader trend of disinvestment from the permanent structures of negotiation, precisely while the conflicts recounted in this manifesto show how necessary those structures remain. We do not investigate here the causes of this disinvestment — including the hypothesis, still to be verified with real data and not to be assumed, of the weight that the interests of the arms industry carry on governments' spending choices. That is a question deserving its own analysis, with verified sources and the same rigor applied in this manifesto — not an answer we grant ourselves here.
Israel and Palestine
Negotiation has never been an abstract utopia: in 1988 the PLO accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 as a basis, opening the way to the 1991 Madrid Conference and the Oslo Accords, signed in Washington on 13 September 1993 before the whole world. For a few years the process produced real Palestinian self-government. Then it stalled: Camp David in July 2000 failed over the status of Jerusalem, Taba in January 2001 tried to salvage what could be saved and was cut short by an Israeli political transition, and in 2002 the Arab League offered full normalization in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 borders — an offer never accepted as a basis for negotiation. It was not the conflict that became unsolvable: it was the choice, repeated by more than one side at different moments, not to complete what had been put on the table.
Iran
The memory of this dossier begins before the nuclear issue. The Iran-Iraq war, triggered by the Iraqi invasion of September 1980, lasted eight years and cost, by some estimates, up to a million lives; Iran refused UN Resolution 598 of July 1987 for a full year before accepting it in August 1988. Decades later, a different agreement showed that the negotiated path works when it is maintained: the 2015 JCPOA, verified by the IAEA as effective in blocking the technical paths to a nuclear weapon. The unilateral US withdrawal of 8 May 2018 did not produce a more contained Iran, but an Iran that resumed accumulating enriched material up to alarming thresholds. The crisis we live through today is not proof that diplomacy on Iran's nuclear program does not work: it is, in no small part, the cost of its abandonment.
Lebanon
Here too the history is longer than the headlines. The 1975-1990 civil war grew out of sectarian tensions and the armed Palestinian presence, and was aggravated by Israeli and Syrian intervention — it was in the Lebanon invaded in 1982 that Hezbollah was born — and it ended only with the Taif Agreement of October 1989, an imperfect but real compromise. In 2006, after a new conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, UN Resolution 1701 called for the disarmament of militias north of the Litani. It was written under Chapter VI of the Charter, not Chapter VII: a technical detail that denied peacekeepers the mandate to enforce it by force. Disarmament never happened. Eighteen years later, another war was fought along the same border line that resolution was meant to make stable.
Yemen
Even the war that today seems furthest from diplomacy has its own history of successful negotiation. After the Houthis took the capital Sanaa in September 2014 and Saudi Arabia launched its military intervention in March 2015, the conflict seemed unsolvable for years. Yet in December 2018 the Stockholm Agreement halted an imminent battle for the port of Hodeidah, averting a famine that was feared to be imminent. In April 2022 a UN-mediated truce produced the most substantial reduction in violence since the war began. In March 2023 the Saudi-Iran detente, brokered by China after talks that had begun in Iraq back in 2021, helped further soften the front. This is not a conflict diplomacy never touched: it is one in which diplomacy, when applied, worked — and where its working remains partial, not impossible.
Deeper roots
The origins recalled here — Oslo, the Iran-Iraq war, Taif, the fall of Sanaa — already stretch further back than recent headlines. But they are still a starting point, not the origin. Each of these conflicts has deeper roots: the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 and the Palestinian Nakba of the same year for the first; the 1979 Iranian revolution for the second; the Ottoman and mandate-era fractures of the early twentieth century for the third and fourth. This manifesto sets out a direction of principle; the historical analyses that will trace those origins will be published as standalone content, verified and dated like every other piece on this site, and linked here as soon as they are available.
Not the absence of law, a direction
We are not describing here the state of existing international law — which recognizes, under Article 51 of the UN Charter, the right of states to self-defense. We are pointing to a direction: a horizon toward which international practice should move, not a snapshot of how it already works. Our dogma is that armed force and economic coercion should stop being the first instrument of relations between states, and remain — when they remain — the last resort, not the first choice.
The limit of this manifesto
It is not this site's task to resolve every verbal or armed conflict on the planet. The purpose of this manifesto is more modest and more ambitious at once: to demand that, before any choice of force, it be shown that the negotiated path had truly been exhausted — not simply abandoned halfway, as has happened more than once in the history just recounted.
The same test for everyone
The test we apply is the same for every actor involved, with no exceptions based on identity: whoever launches missiles at civilian populations, whoever arms militias beyond their own borders, whoever blocks vital shipping routes, whoever imposes embargoes that hit civilians harder than governments — chooses the same path, whatever flag they do it under.
The victims of this choice are not abstract. They are the families under the rubble in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Yemen. It is an entire continent paying the energy price spike triggered by wars that history, more than once, has shown can be stopped with a table and a signature.
We will not look away while someone chooses war when they could choose otherwise.