Donald Trump and diplomatic privilege

Wednesday 21 January 2026

The reported decision by Donald Trump to release private messages exchanged with foreign leaders has reopened a question that is as old as diplomacy itself: whether candour between states can survive in an age of permanent publicity. The issue is not merely one of political decorum or personal temperament. It cuts to the ethical foundations of diplomatic intercourse and to the legal and customary protections often described, imprecisely but usefully, as diplomatic privilege.

Diplomacy depends upon a paradox. Publicly, states assert fixed positions, moral certainties and red lines. Privately, their representatives explore ambiguities, concessions and hypothetical compromises. It is in the private space that wars are averted, ceasefires brokered and misunderstandings defused. The ethical justification for this duality has always been that secrecy serves peace, not deception for its own sake. Confidentiality enables leaders to speak frankly without the distorting pressure of domestic audiences, media cycles and political opponents.

The disclosure of private leader-to-leader communications disrupts this equilibrium. Even if such disclosures are lawful under the releasing state’s domestic law, they raise ethical concerns grounded in trust. When a head of government communicates privately with another, there is an implied understanding that the exchange will remain confidential unless both parties consent otherwise. To violate that understanding unilaterally is to treat confidentiality as a tactical instrument rather than a shared norm. In ethical terms, it reduces diplomacy to a form of strategic exhibitionism.

The diplomatic consequences are immediate and corrosive. Leaders who believe that their words may later be published selectively will adapt their behaviour. Messages become anodyne, evasive or scripted by advisers with an eye to future headlines. Sensitive issues are avoided or displaced into indirect channels. The result is not greater transparency but diminished substance. What is lost is precisely the kind of informal candour that formal treaties and summit communiqués cannot provide.

This practice also places strain upon the concept of diplomatic privilege. Strictly speaking, diplomatic privilege in international law refers to the immunities and inviolabilities enjoyed by accredited diplomats under instruments such as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Private messages between heads of state or government fall outside that narrow legal definition. Yet diplomacy has always relied upon a broader, customary understanding of privileged communication. Leader-to-leader correspondence occupies a protected space analogous to legal professional privilege: not because secrecy is inherently virtuous, but because the system cannot function without it.

By eroding this broader conception of privilege, the releasing state invites reciprocity. Other governments may feel entitled to disclose their own private exchanges, perhaps in moments of domestic political pressure or diplomatic retaliation. The long-term effect is an arms race of disclosure, in which confidentiality is treated as conditional and revocable at will. For smaller states in particular, this is destabilising. They often rely more heavily upon private assurances and informal understandings to balance asymmetries of power. When such assurances can be exposed unilaterally, the weaker party bears the greater risk.

There is also a humanitarian dimension that should not be overlooked. Diplomatic confidentiality often underpins negotiations over prisoner exchanges, humanitarian corridors and ceasefires. If interlocutors fear exposure, they may decline to engage at all, prolonging suffering on the ground. In such contexts, the ethical cost of disclosure is measured not only in reputational damage but in human lives.

Supporters of disclosure argue that transparency strengthens democracy and exposes hypocrisy. There is force in this claim when secrecy is used to conceal wrongdoing or to mislead legislatures and publics about the substance of foreign policy. Yet transparency is not an absolute good. Democratic accountability can be served by oversight mechanisms, parliamentary scrutiny and, where necessary, delayed publication through archives. Immediate and selective release to the media serves a different purpose. It collapses the distinction between accountability and spectacle.

The episode also reflects a deeper cultural shift in international relations. The personalisation of diplomacy, amplified by social media and direct communication, blurs the boundary between statecraft and personal branding. When leaders treat private exchanges as extensions of their public persona, diplomacy becomes performative. The ethical language of trust, discretion and mutual respect is displaced by the logic of attention and narrative control.

If the international community wishes to shore up the norms at stake, several steps suggest themselves. First states can reaffirm, through joint statements or revised diplomatic protocols, the expectation that private leader communications remain confidential absent mutual consent. Secondly, legislatures can clarify domestic rules governing the classification and release of such communications, drawing a distinction between legitimate whistle-blowing and politically motivated disclosure. Finally there is a role for diplomatic culture itself. Senior officials and advisers must be prepared to resist short-term political advantage in favour of long-term institutional credibility.

Diplomacy has survived revolutions in communication before, from the telegraph to the satellite phone. It can survive the present moment as well. But this is possible only if leaders recognise that confidentiality is not a personal indulgence but a public good. When private messages are used as weapons for immediate gain, the casualty is not merely etiquette. It is the fragile architecture of trust upon which peaceful relations between states ultimately depend.