Tact: Is the ability to communicate, navigate delicate situations, or handle difficult people gracefully without causing offense or making anyone angry. It combines emotional intelligence, social awareness, and verbal skill to preserve trust and minimize conflict while still expressing the truth. WOW! What if we all had schooling in learning the art of being tactful from an early age? Of course, as we have discussed, the earliest syllabus of western education from the Greeks was the Trivium: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. And many of us remember Grammar School which is now addressed as Elementary School. Therefore, proper communication and the development of those skills has been the initial goal of formal education for close to 3,000 years. However, as far as I can remember, the art of being tactful was never seriously put forward. In any case, tact would obviously be intrinsic to diplomacy which has the ultimate goals of avoiding military conflict. Unfortunately, the world is witnessing the virtual collapse of diplomacy and continual rise of military conflicts since the beginning of the 21st century. A simple internet search will verify that military conflicts have more than doubled since the year 2,000. One primary cause is the underlying differences between diplomacy and so-called democracy. While democracy aims to foster freedom and equality, diplomacy’s primary goal is to advance a nation’s interests through peaceful means. When the Cold War officially ended in 1991 it appeared that the United States would set the standard for the so-called ‘Rules Based Order’ and as the President George Bush publicly stated, ‘A New World Order’. This was supposedly a world in which Liberal Democracy on a global level would eventually be the objective. Liberal Democracy is defined as that political situation where First Principles are protected for everyone including but not limited to minorities. So what appears on the surface is that the United States, the emerging global power after 1991, would set the standard for and proceed to enforce their principles globally. On the deepest philosophical level the question is whether one believes in and supports a top-down political order or a pluralistic view that there are a multitude of sovereign states which decide their own political arrangements?