No Eternal Allies

On 1 March 1848, Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons that Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, and that its interests alone were eternal and perpetual.

It is the founding sentence of realist thinking about states, and the reason to start with it is practical rather than reverent. It tells you where to look. When a government announces a policy, the announcement is addressed to an audience: voters, a rival, a market, a coalition partner. What the state needs is not addressed to anybody, which is precisely why it is more stable and more useful for prediction.

Run it on the four cases in the next book and it earns its place. Iran nationalised an oil company. Guatemala expropriated uncultivated land held by an American corporation. Chile elected a government that proposed to restructure ownership. In all three, the public argument was about communism and the documented argument was about assets.

Now the objection, because a tool this convenient needs one.

The rule explains everything, and a rule that explains everything forecasts nothing. Any action a state takes can be described afterwards as an interest: prestige is an interest, credibility is an interest, the domestic standing of the government is an interest. Once the category has expanded that far, you are no longer predicting behaviour, you are naming it in a more sophisticated vocabulary.

The test is simple and worth applying honestly. Can you state a country's interests in advance, in a form specific enough that you would be surprised if it acted otherwise? If you are never surprised, the framework is not working. It is decorating.

There is a second account that does better than its reputation, and the documents tend to support it.

Domestic politics explains a great deal that national interest does not. An election is coming. A lobby has money and access. A president has been called weak in the press for a fortnight and cannot afford a third week of it. An agency needs a success to protect a budget line. These are not noble motives and they are not mysterious ones, and they turn up in the minutes far more often than a calm weighing of national advantage does.

That is the last thing to carry out of this chapter, and it is the least dramatic.

Very few of the decisions in this book were made by the actor that international relations theory describes. They were made by tired people, with partial information, under time pressure, in the presence of colleagues whose opinion they cared about, with a meeting the next morning. The interests rule remains the best first guess about what a state will do. It is a considerably worse guess about why any particular person in it did what they did, and the four cases ahead are full of particular people.