Anti-Diplomacy 2.0: Populism, Performance, and the Transformation of Diplomatic Practice

In recent years, diplomacy has increasingly become a presidential performance. Foreign policy is no longer articulated primarily through institutional channels, but through the voices, emotions, and gestures of individual leaders who speak directly to domestic and global audiences. This paper revisits James Der Derian’s concept of anti-diplomacy to understand how presidential politics, populism, and digital media are transforming diplomatic practice in ways that carry profound implications for international affairs and geopolitical tension. Originally conceptualized as a late-modern condition of estrangement shaped by secrecy and mediation, anti-diplomacy today operates through visibility, emotional intensity, and personalization of foreign policy making. Populist presidents do not merely violate diplomatic norms; they actively unlearn them. Ritualized civility gives way to confrontation, institutional continuity to personal charisma, and professional diplomacy to informal networks built around loyalty, kinship, and business ties. Diplomacy becomes an extension of presidential politics, staged in real time and oriented as much toward domestic legitimacy as toward international negotiation. The paper asks a central research question: how does populist presidential politics transform diplomacy into a performative and affectively charged practice, and what does this mean for democratic accountability and geopolitical tensions? Rather than treating these transformations as diplomatic failure or erosion alone, the paper approaches them as politically meaningful practices that reshape how authority, legitimacy, and leadership are performed on the global stage. Empirically, the paper develops a comparative qualitative analysis of three cases: the United States under Donald Trump, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Russia under Vladimir Putin. These cases illuminate different configurations of presidential power and anti-diplomatic style. Trump’s transactional and business-oriented diplomacy, Erdoğan’s kinship-based and heritage-inflected foreign policy networks, and Putin’s securitized, intelligence-driven diplomatic habitus demonstrate how personalization and emotional performance reconfigure foreign policy conduct. Across cases, diplomacy increasingly functions as a spectacle of strength, authenticity, and moral positioning, blurring the boundaries between domestic political performance and international engagement. Methodologically, the paper relies on interpretive discourse analysis of presidential speeches, social media communication, symbolic diplomatic acts, and the public roles of informal diplomatic actors. It focuses on how emotions such as outrage, grievance, humiliation, and authenticity are mobilized to produce geopolitical meaning and presidential authority. This approach foregrounds diplomacy as a practice embedded in democratic politics rather than a purely technocratic domain. By linking populist presidential leadership to the transformation of diplomatic practice, the paper offers a lens for understanding how contemporary geopolitical tensions are produced, managed, and dramatized through the figure of the president.