Jan Marco Müller, the European Commission official who drafted the EU’s new science diplomacy framework, just said the quiet part out loud: “Science diplomacy is not about being nice to each other.”
Yes, it is, dumbass. That was the whole point.
For centuries, science diplomacy worked precisely because it allowed ordinary human beings to humanize one another on neutral ground while governments were busy failing.
My good friend, Norman Neureiter, former science advisor to the Secretary of State, defined science diplomacy as “an intentional effort to engage with other countries where the relationship is not good otherwise. The science allows you to deal with non-sensitive issues that both sides can work on together for the good of all.”
That was true for science. It was true for sports. It was true for music, academia, medicine, and cultural exchange more broadly. These were spaces where ordinary people from hostile societies could interact as human beings rather than abstractions, propaganda categories, or geopolitical chess pieces.
During the Peloponnesian War, Greek city-states suspended hostilities during the Olympic truce (ἐκεχειρία) so athletes could compete together despite ongoing conflict. During the Cold War, Soviet and American scientists collaborated through the WHO to eradicate smallpox because viruses, unlike diplomats, do not care about ideology. Apollo-Soyuz demonstrated that rival superpowers could cooperate in space even while pointing nuclear weapons at each other on Earth. The 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union became more than hockey. Millions of ordinary people on both sides suddenly saw the “enemy” as talented, emotional, funny, proud, exhausted, flawed, and recognizably human.
Even music mattered. In 1987, while the Cold War was still very real, my undergrad’s Peabody Conservatory Symphony Orchestra went to Moscow and Leningrad. The orchestra did not solve geopolitics, but simply engaged with Soviet music students, argued about phrasing, drank together, traded jokes, and discovered that the terrifying enemy looked remarkably like us.
In the 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism and Stalinism, Soviet scholars were welcomed at Columbia University. One of them was Alexander Yakovlev, who later became one of the principal intellectual architects of glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev – a transformation I wrote about in my earlier piece, “The Marketplace of Ideas Works Only If We Leave the Doors Open.”
Today we do the opposite. We close Confucius Institutes, crack down on foreign funding, and impose severe student visa restrictions out of fear of foreign government influence. Yet at the very same time, we are dramatically expanding U.S. government control over science and education, allowing political appointees to override peer review, giving agencies the power to terminate grants at any time if they no longer serve current political priorities, and restricting collaborations and publishing with foreign scientists.
All of it reflects the same underlying assumption: that American students and scholars are apparently too naive or too fragile to encounter foreign propaganda without immediately succumbing to it.
We are terrified that foreigners might propagandize our students, while perfectly comfortable letting our own government dictate what science gets funded and who American researchers are allowed to work with. That is not confidence. It is insecurity masquerading as patriotism.
Governments distrust each other. People often do not – unless they are taught to.
Science is universal because reality is universal. The laws of physics do not recognize borders, sanctions regimes, diplomatic talking points, or government narratives. Gravity works the same way in Moscow, Pyongyang, Brussels, Tehran, Beijing, Doha, and Washington.
Music works the same way. Harmony, rhythm, resonance, breath, and acoustics are governed by physical laws no government controls. A brass quintet in Pyongyang tunes the same B-flat chord just as one does in New York. A trombonist in Vladivostok still argues about intonation exactly like one in Chicago.
Even hockey, despite endless arguments over rules, rink size, and fighting, still works because Canadians, Russians, Finns, Americans, Swedes, and Czechs all understand the same basic game the moment the puck drops.
These activities remind us that there are truths, standards, and forms of human connection that exist independently of politics.
Governments are deeply uncomfortable with that.
Now look at what governments have done to the same tools.
Europe terminated all science and research collaborations with Russia even before it closed its airspace or imposed economic sanctions in 2022. Russia and Belarus are now banned from the Olympics and IIHF hockey tournaments. Joint lunar missions were canceled the moment the invasion of Ukraine began. In 2017 the Trump administration banned all travel by U.S. passport holders to the DPRK — shutting down an academic exchange program between Columbia University and Kim Il Sung University, killing a music exchange program that took American musicians to Pyongyang to perform and teach masterclasses, and ending humanitarian aid programs aimed at addressing health and food insecurity problems. Broad sanctions and travel bans have strangled our Maracaibo Aging Project and other health and civil-society work that once survived societal collapse in Venezuela.
Washington elites enthusiastically cheer for Putin’s friend Alexander Ovechkin, the NHL’s all-time leading scorer, as long as he wears a Capitals jersey. Yet a team of Russian NHL all-stars is banned from the World Cup of Hockey because Finland and Sweden threaten to boycott if Russia is allowed to participate.
And the crackdown continues. The NIH continues to issue new notices treating any collaboration likely to produce foreign co-authorship as a reportable “foreign component.”
The Office of Management and Budget is finalizing sweeping rules that would prohibit federal funds from being used for collaborations with “covered foreign countries,” allow political appointees to override peer review, and give agencies the power to terminate grants at any time if they no longer align with current political priorities. The latest Federal Register proposal and the White House’s August 2025 action on federal grant-making make the direction unmistakable.
The ideology changes from country to country. The underlying assumption does not.
Whether the pressure comes from Brussels, Washington, Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang, the message is remarkably similar: science, education, culture, and human exchange must ultimately serve political priorities.
But that was never their purpose.
This is small-mindedness on a grand scale. They took the universality of science, sports, and music, the very activities that let ordinary people humanize each other when governments were at each other’s throats, and turned them into instruments of short-term foreign policy. In doing so, they negated the entire value of science diplomacy, sports diplomacy, music diplomacy, and academic exchange.
This linguistic sleight-of-hand is straight out of Orwell. They have literally Humpty-Dumpty’d the very word “science diplomacy.” As he wrote in “Politics and the English Language”: “Words like ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘justice’… have several different meanings which cannot be reconciled. It is almost universally felt that when we call something by one of these names we are praising it… The person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” That’s exactly what’s happening to “science diplomacy.”
The deeper truth is uglier: governments are deeply uncomfortable when ordinary people begin seeing designated adversaries as fully human rather than as abstractions, propaganda categories, or geopolitical threats.
Dennis Rodman playing basketball with Kim Jong Un didn’t “legitimize” the regime. Accordion diplomacy and orchestral performances of DPRK music didn’t erase North Korea’s human rights record. They simply created tiny, human cracks in the wall.
I’m not against governments holding each other accountable when their actions warrant it. But when governments decide that the neutral commons of human connection must be subordinated to the latest diplomatic objective, they destroy the one mechanism that repeatedly worked better than any “strategic tool” ever could.
Governments are supposed to serve society. Increasingly, however, they behave as though society exists to serve government.
Scientists become strategic assets. Athletes become propaganda tools. Musicians become messaging platforms. Students become security risks. Human beings become instruments.
That is a profound inversion of the proper relationship between citizen and state.
Scientists and universities must resist the growing demand that all research, collaboration, and intellectual exchange subordinate themselves to shifting political priorities.
As my colleague, Nobel Laureate Peter Agre of Johns Hopkins University, provocatively asked in the title of his recent memoir, “Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail?” Agre describes how he sat down for many hours of conversation about science with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, much as NBA legend Dennis Rodman and I conversed about sports with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. That is the power of science and culture to build bridges to people and even leaders of rival nations, even when our governments seem constitutively unable to even pick up the phone and talk to each other.
Enough. Scientists, athletes, musicians, doctors, and everyone who values the neutral commons of human connection must actively refuse this attempt to nationalize science as a tool of foreign policy. We are not human bombs and bullets. Our work is not a weapon. Our job is to keep the bridges open, to keep humanizing each other, even – especially – when governments fail.
The sidewalk doesn’t have to be completely mined. We can still clear it. And we must.
They can keep their “strategic” science diplomacy. The rest of us will stick with the old-fashioned kind that actually worked – the kind that was, yes, about being nice to each other.
Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, where his research focuses on natural experiments in human genetic epidemiology. He is also active in science and sports diplomacy, having taught genetics at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, and accompanied Dennis Rodman on six “basketball diplomacy” trips to Asia since 2013.
