One year ago, I offered a Valentine’s Day post on "IR Theory
for Lovers," a tongue-in-cheek summary of the lessons that international
relations theory could offer to anyone in a romantic relationship. There’s no need to update it (i.e., the IR
field hasn’t changed that much in a year), so this year I present instead my Valentine’s
Day Guide to International Relations(hips): a typology of inter-state pairings
suitable for pondering with your partner.
(Word of warning: this is international relations we’re talking
about here, so what follows isn’t very romantic, schmaltzy, or even
encouraging).
1. Odd Couples and
Strange Bedfellows. International
politics can be a rough business, and the necessities of statecraft often bring
unlikely partners together (See
under: Realism 101). Remember the Grand Alliance in World War II: a
ménage-a-trois between England (a constitutional monarchy), the United States
(a liberal republic) and Soviet Russia (a communist dictatorship)? Americans may have been sold the
wartime image of Stalin as the benevolent "Uncle Joe," but Roosevelt and
Churchill knew it was a marriage of convenience all along. FDR told the U.S. Ambassador to the USSR
that "I can’t take communism nor can you, but to cross this bridge I would hold
hands with the devil," and Churchill famously remarked that "if Hitler invaded
hell I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of
Commons." Now that’s sweet love
talk for you. Other odd couples
include U.S. support for Tito’s Yugoslavia, the U.S. tilt to Saddam Hussein
during the Iran-Iraq War, and its close ties to a bevy of Third World dictators
like Zaire’s Joseph Mobutu. And
let’s not forget the "axis of evil" — a trio of dangerous enemies whose unity existed
only in the overheated mind of a White House speechmaker and included two
states, Iran and Iraq, whose leaders detested each other. (BTW: the topic even
seems to have inspired a conference at Oxford last year; see here.)
2. Failed
Marriages: Sometimes states
get so besotted that they decide to try living together, or even decide to get
hitched. This sort of experiment seems to be even harder for modern states than
it is for people. The United Arab
Republic (a marriage between Egypt and Syria) lasted but three years
(1958-1961) and ended with a bitter divorce; a subsequent attempt in 1963 (the
so-called "Tripartite Unity Agreement" between Egypt, Iraq, and Syria) never
got past the first date. And then
there’s the Sino-Soviet split, a nasty schism that put paid to the idea that
the communist world was tightly unified monolith of like-minded and mutually
supportive partners. One could add
the long Soviet alliance with Egypt, which ended when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat got a better
offer from Uncle Sam.
[[BREAK]]
3. Polyamory: Sometimes states don’t try for an
exclusive marriage, but go for some sort of formalized polygamy. Multilateral alliances and collective
security arrangements are an obvious example, but the most successful experiment
of this sort is clearly the European Union, though it seems to be showing
certain signs of strain at the moment. Some of you might want to nominate NATO as an even more successful
example, but NATO is more of a harem, which is why the United States always
seems surprised when its European partners do not immediately do its
bidding. The history of other regional
union schemes suggests this sort of thing is pretty hard to pull off, because
some members usually feel like others are getting the benefits while they are
bearing the costs.
4. "Special
Relationships": Then there are
those cases where two states form long and lasting bonds, usually buoyed by
repeated (and possibly insincere) professions of devotion and reinforced by domestic politics and elite connections. The United States and the United Kingdom
are perhaps the longest-running example these days — even if England tends to
play the role of the neglected and taken-for-granted spouse — and of course there’s
America’s "special relationship" with Israel. But these aren’t the only examples one can think of: Russia
has had a "special relationship" of sorts with Serbia since the 19th
century, and former colonial powers like Britain and France retain lingering
connections to their former colonies. Given that no two states interests are ever identical,
however, an excessively intimate relationship may even be bad for both parties. If the illusion of unanimity prevents
either party from a) doing what is in its own interest, b) convincing its
partner to do what is actually in theirs,
or c) pursuing other valuable friendships, then maybe it’s time for separate
vacations.
5. Casanovas, Don
Juans, and other Con Artists: Single-minded
seducers often try to lure unsuspecting innocents to into ill-advised
couplings, and not just in the bedroom.
Thucydides recounts how envoys from Egesta convinced Athens to aid them
against the Selinuntines, based on "a report as attractive as it was untrue." Among other things, they duped the
Athenians into believing that Egesta possessed great wealth to contribute to
the Athenian cause. It was all a pack
of lies, however, and helped lead Athens to disaster. Similarly, Machiavelli warned about the
tall tales that exiles routinely tell to convince their foreign hosts to back
their efforts to regain power, and the blandishments of a diplomatic Don Juan
like Ahmed Chalabi offer an obvious contemporary illustration. A charming but notoriously unreliable
figure, Chalabi sought to seduce a gullible White House into backing the ouster
of Saddam Hussein. Fortunately, as
we all know, the United States is much too smart and sophisticated to fall for
anything like that. . .
5. "Failed Courtships": Seduction doesn’t always work, of
course, and there are plenty of sad cases where one country goes to great
lengths to court another but find its professions of devotion falling on deaf
ears. One suspects that Georgia
felt like a bit of a wallflower in the summer of 2007, especially given all the
efforts it had made to win over Washington in the preceding years. The Kennedy administration made a
serious effort to court a number of Third World leaders-such as Egypt’s Gamal
Abdel Nasser-during the early 1960s, and most of these efforts didn’t pay off either. One wonders if Barack Obama is
feeling like a spurned Romeo in his efforts to win over Iran. He’s tried a videotaped message, direct
talks, a deal on low-enriched uranium; at least he hasn’t sent them a cake
and a Bible. Of course, he hasn’t tried making an offer they are likely to accept, but that’s another matter.
But what about True
Love? Where does it fit in my
typology? I’m sorry, but this is the
world of international politics and no self-respecting realist would put much
weight on the power of love in world affairs. But I do prize it in other contexts, and I hope that all of
you find a generous portion in your own lives this weekend. And now it’s time to go kiss my
wife.
Happy Valentine’s Day!