I'm not a foreign policy expert, nor do I intend to become one. And yet, these days, foreign policy has become part of everyday life for anyone who follows the news even casually, because the war in Ukraine inevitably affects us too — if not consciously, then at least subconsciously, including our sense of security.

That's likely why so many people have been watching the peace negotiations with bated breath, anxiously awaiting news that would confirm that the kind of backroom deals struck by great powers over the heads of smaller nations and peoples — like in the days of World War II — are truly a thing of the past.

As I've followed these negotiations and the few details that have trickled out, one conviction in me has grown stronger. Namely, that it's a major failing that semiotics is taught in so few universities — and perhaps not at all at the university level in the United States.

So, what is semiotics? It's the field that deals with meaning in texts, communication and interpretation. It examines different sign systems and codes. Different disciplines approach it differently: biosemiotics looks at and interprets systems found in nature, literary scholars examine the layers of meaning within texts and so on.

What matters in the context of this commentary is linguistic and cultural semiotics. I might be wrong, but it seems to me that communication between the different parties is happening on completely different levels.

On one side, words, texts and agreements are treated as a one-dimensional reality where the signifier and the signified align perfectly. On the other side, an entirely different sign system is in play. In that system, agreements, words and symbols are neither unambiguous nor fixed. You could also say that on one side, people are playing a murky, multi-layered game, while on the other, the world is viewed as pragmatically straightforward.

What's needed now is for negotiations with the Russian side to be seen through the lens of their own semiotic rules. That means recognizing that the other side is performing a sleight-of-hand, a captivating show whose manipulations must be seen through. But that can only happen if we take into account cultural specificities, historical background and experience and the essentially multi-meaning nature of Russian language use.

Our semiotics classic Peeter Torop once wrote:

"The ability to analyze signs, sign systems and codes does not merely manifest in knowing practical grammars or typologies. Every society, every culture has its own practices of signification, and signs and codes can only be understood by knowing the processes of signification and meaning-making."

Statements made in politics and diplomacy are often not, and cannot be, unambiguous. On the surface, they may be elegantly worded, but they can just as easily lead the gullible astray or completely hoodwink the other party.

The world as a whole is not unambiguous — and it's from this very realization that the discipline of semiotics arose in the first place. The more dismissive we are toward the humanities — fields that analyze, investigate and interpret the complex layers of human nature and cultural communication — the easier it becomes to disregard the need to understand more complex systems of thought. And the easier it becomes to fall prey to manipulation by those who have taken the time to grapple with the many meanings behind words and know how to use sign systems to their advantage.

This is a game that must be understood — because it's a game played with people's lives. Can we be sure that those currently playing with the fate of the world are sufficiently skilled in semiotics?

Or are we witnessing, instead, how the fate of the world might be determined by a lack of textual awareness and semiotic thinking?

In 1935, a few years before the start of World War II, [Estonian poet] Betti Alver wrote:

Maailma saatust alati
vaekausil määrab gramm,
kateedrist hullupalati
on ainult väike samm.

The world's fate always does hang
on scales tipped by a gram
from podium to lunacy
is but a small span.

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