International Politics

A British prime minister once remarked that countries don’t have permanent friends or permanent enemies, but only permanent interests. Sadly, this insight has all but vanished from the popular imagination, with expectations about inter-state relations being some function of the present amity or enmity between a set of countries. This naïve view is little different to that described in the dystopia 1984, where the protagonist’s government claims to have always been an ally of one country and enemy of another, just to switch the two labels whenever it decided to change its warring partner.

This line of reasoning has two ramifications: countries that are considered to be enemies are judged to be incapable of reason and therefore should not be negotiated with, and countries thought to be friends are expected to follow in lockstep on every policy regardless of the cost involved. The former topic has been dealt with elsewhere. The latter is the focal point of the present piece.

A recent news story, seen here, about Pakistan simultaneously providing assistance to the US and the Taliban led to outrage from the part of the American public that’s aware of Pakistan’s existence. How dare a putative American ally provide assistance to the enemy? Are we not paying billions to keep Pakistan on our side in the war on terror? The reaction from the US government is telling: it reaffirmed its strategic relationship with Pakistan and refused to be drawn into a public condemnation of the country. The rationale for this is two-fold: publicly criticizing Pakistan is unlikely to go over well with the central Pakistani players, but also because the US realizes that Pakistan believes it needs to have a significant degree of control over Afghanistan once the US withdraws.

Whether Pakistan actually needs a puppet state in Afghanistan is open for debate. After all, the main argument having such a puppet is that it creates strategic depth for Pakistan in case of a war with India. The reality is that India’s breakneck economic growth for the last several decades has left Pakistan incapable of competing economically or militarily. Regardless, the key Pakistani actors, most notably its intelligence services, believe leverage over Afghanistan is a major national interest, and there’s little the US can do to change that belief. The US can, of course, try to play hardball and revoke some or all of its aid to Pakistan until the latter stops providing assistance to the Taliban and other militant groups in Afghanistan. But that would risk undermining whatever assistance the US currently receives. Push comes to shove, the Pakistanis are unlikely to change their behavior unless they’re threatened with the use of force, which everyone realizes would not be a credible threat.

What is lacking from the current outrage over Pakistan, or the heated intra-NATO squabbling in the lead up to the second Gulf War, are the instances when the "double-dealing" is encouraged or at least ignored. For instance, the US has no qualms with Switzerland having an embassy in Iran, as it represents American interests in the country. Similarly, the US has done nothing to dissuade Georgia, a close ally, from doing business from Iran, one of its main trading partners. In both instances, the desire to isolate Iran takes a backseat to pragmatism about the needs of allies.

In sum, we should be neither outraged nor surprised that our allies also have friendly relations with our enemies or have negative relations with our other allies, as is the case for Saudi Arabia and Israel, for example. This doesn’t mean we should do nothing to prevent actions that jeopardize key American interests, such as when Israel was selling sensitive military material to China, but it does mean understanding that countries and their leaders have their own interests, and those interests rarely dictate acting in concern on every issue of importance to the US.