Last Tuesday, I was trying to explain to my nephew why his video game kept crashing every time he tried to launch seventeen applications simultaneously. "You can't just attack everything at once," I told him, watching his character repeatedly fail the same mission. "Strategy requires focus." He looked at me like I was speaking ancient Greek, which, given recent international events, makes perfect sense.

What this made me realize was that we've completely forgotten how to have a proper international incident. In my years covering global affairs, I've witnessed the steady decline of what I call "conflict etiquette" – the unspoken understanding that tensions should escalate in measured, predictable ways that allow everyone to save face.

What we're really talking about here is the death of strategic patience. Research has shown that the average duration of international standoffs has decreased by 73% since 2010, while the number of targets claimed per incident has increased exponentially. Experts increasingly agree that this scattershot approach to international relations reflects our broader cultural inability to focus on one thing at a time. When everything is a crisis, nothing is a crisis.

Some will say I'm romanticizing the past, that international relations were never actually civilized. Those people have clearly never studied the careful choreography of Cold War brinksmanship, where adversaries understood the importance of dramatic pauses and clearly defined red lines. Today's conflicts read like my nephew's gaming strategy: hit everything that moves and see what happens.

If we want to restore sanity to international relations, we need to start by teaching diplomats the lost art of the single, well-chosen target. I'm launching a newsletter next month exploring this crisis of strategic focus – subscribe now, because understanding proportional response has never been more urgent.