Monday delivered a tidy case study in diplomacy as theater. The US delegation walked out of a UN Security Council meeting, mid-remarks, because France’s ambassador had compared Washington’s recent voting record on human rights to that of North Korea and Russia. Fair thing to bristle at, except last week the US did vote alongside North Korea and Russia, against extending the term of the UN’s human rights chief, a man who has criticized both Russia’s war in Ukraine and Israel’s conduct in Gaza. So the coalition that wanted him out was, functionally, a coalition of the criticized.

The US ambassador didn’t dispute any of that. He said France was “cozying up to the world’s worst oppressors,” without naming which ones, and then his delegation left the room mid-sentence. I keep turning that over, because it isn’t an argument, it’s the performance of having one: you don’t finish the sentence, you make sure everyone clocks you standing up and walking out instead. Landing “the world’s worst oppressors” fresh off voting alongside two of them takes a specific kind of nerve, or a specific kind of not reading the room.

Compare that to Durán, Ecuador, where a police captain running raids against a gang called Los Aguilas told the BBC, unprompted, who he trusts least: his own colleagues. “We have many, many bad people inside our unit, inside the state, inside politics.” Same underlying claim, an institution compromised from within, made with no audience and no exit line, because for him it isn’t rhetoric. It’s just what he has to work around before sundown.

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