My View

My View

This my view is a general talking point about the way we conduct international relations. International relations should be a matter of defining self interest then defining what you’re willing to do and what you’re willing to forego to achieve that self interested goal. What you’re willing to forego should not be more than what you will achieve by foregoing that aspect of power.

But unfortunately leaders of the democratized world seem either unable to place a numeric value beside what they want and what there are willing to give up, or they seem un willing to grasp this very simple equation. For example Iran, we( us in the west) want Iran not to go nuclear, yet what we are willing to give up seems far to much to obtain this objective. By this I mean we are willing to be very slack with verification over Iran’s nuclear program, we are willing to bring Iran into the “respected nations” bracket, we are willing to water down our relationships with Saudi and Israel, we are willing to accept and legitimize Iran’s role in the world and her proxies in the world, in short we are almost willing to cede everything to Iran and in return Iran can remain at the nuclear threshold until what ever time suits Iran in the future to go nuclear. This appears to me just to be plain bad international relations. Another example of this is over EU integration, many nation states are willing to give up many sovereign powers for the sake of the EU running “ more efficiently”, when plainly the EU will run efficiently when hell freezes over. In other words European nation states are giving up sovereignty for a goal that can not and will not ever be achieved, it’s a perversion of the simple equation I outlined in the first paragraph,

By not adhering to this simple equation two major side effects become apparent one external and one internal. The first is by not adhering to this equation countries can be played very easily. It becomes easy to manipulate and control countries (as Iran is doing to the west) to achieve an even better outcome than initially envisioned. The second issue is internal populations become frustrated and very distrustful of there politicians and move closer to the inclination of isolationism. The logic goes “ if we can not trust our leaders to peruse our even most basic self interest abroad then me might as well just not do international relations” This has profound consequences on the domestic structures of a country internally but also it means a country slowly withdraws and withdraws from the international relations arena leaving a vacuum.