"In the first-ever episode of The Twilight Zone, from 1959, a man finds himself in a small town where everything looks normal, but all the people have vanished, that’s what the world feels like now: on the surface, everything looks the same, yet everything has changed. While the protagonist of the first Twilight Zone episode ultimately went berserk, I’m confident that diplomats—just like everyone else—can and will adjust to the new normal.

It’s been a challenge to practice the diplomatic arts without meeting people. Now that it’s clear that the pandemic isn’t just a blip but an ongoing phenomenon, we must reimagine everything. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: sometimes we do things a certain way just because they’ve always been done that way, not because it’s necessarily the best."

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