Beyond Trending: What is coercive diplomacy?
3 min readNew DelhiUpdated: Jun 5, 2026 05:13 PM IST US President Donald Trump’s effort to forge a peace deal with Iran does not seem to yield a desired result, as Israeli attacks continued across Lebanon despite a US-brokered ceasefire announced after talks in Washington, DC. Iran has made a ceasefire in Lebanon a condition for any peace deal with the US. At the same time, the two sides traded attacks in the Gulf on Wednesday (June 3, 2026) in one of the most intense bouts of fighting since early April, when a ceasefire halted large-scale hostilities, reported Reuters. What explains the prevailing situation in the US-Israel war on Iran, where a combination of military pressure and diplomatic negotiations fails to yield a desired result? The concept of coercive diplomacy, in part, helps understand this. Coercive diplomacy The notion of coercive diplomacy, which became popular during the Cold War era, denotes the calculated use of threats and force to influence an opponent’s decision. Thomas Schelling and Alexander George, two noted scholars of international relations, are …
