Diplomacy by tweet: The politics of chaos

To resist performance politics, characterised by shock-and-awe tactics on social media, we must use the spaces differently, rather than being reduced to counter-performers

- Vashna Jagarnath

On 14 March 2025, in what has become the de facto method of governance for right-wing populism, US Senator Marco Rubio declared on X that South Africa's ambassador to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, was "no longer welcome" in the country.

Rubio's pronouncement devoid of diplomatic process or official sanction was as sudden as it was arbitrary, another dispatch from the Trump administration that now operates primarily through shockand-awe tactics rather than any structured institutional process.

Rubio's statement raises fundamental questions: can a tweet dictate foreign relations? Has the democratic machinery of the US now been entirely supplanted by the all too astute exploitation of social media algorithms? And, crucially, what does this spectacle mean for the rest of the world, particularly those nations caught in the crossfire of Washington's increasingly erratic, reckless and dangerous pronouncements?

Guy Debord, a 20th-century French philosopher and Marxist theorist, one of the most influential critics of modern media and capitalism, described contemporary political life as a spectacle, where governance is above the endless production of images, performances, and distractions rather than substantive processes of deliberative decision-making.

His seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle, argued that modern life had been transformed into a series of mediated images that distort reality, pacify the public and reinforce existing power structures.

The removal of an ambassador by tweet is not about diplomacy; it is about political theatre. It is a crude assertion of dominance, an attention-grabbing headline that feeds into an already over-saturated media landscape, designed to provoke outrage, not engagement.