I love the way Steven Den Beste addresses realpolitik in Asymmetric Diplomacy:
We’ve been running into a conceptual problem in the last few years, where a lot of people have been trying to extrapolate concepts and experiences from their normal peace-time lives into realms where they make no sense. There has been, for instance, the attempt to extrapolate the concept of national law into the larger realm of “international law”. There has been the idea that international terrorists should be treated as if they were criminals, and pursued and ultimately tried as we would normal criminals without our own nations. (Among other interesting ramifications of that would be that we could only arrest terrorists for attacks they had already made, not for attacks they were planning, and that we could only imprison them if we could prove their complicity “beyond a reasonable doubt”.)In some cases these things are deliberate obfuscations by people with an agenda, but in other cases it’s confusion, where they don’t really understand how those things work in one context and thus why they would not work in another. For instance, the reason citizens of western nations (for instance, we Americans in the US) can make contracts with one another and willingly submit our differences to adjudication in civil court is because we rely on the US government to use force if necessary to enforce the decision of the court. We therefore do not ourselves have to use force to ensure the other guy fulfills his commitments under the contract. If we had no faith that the government would indeed use force for us if we prevailed in court, few would rely on the courts and more would use violence directly.
Drug traffickers and other members of organized crime enforce their own deals that way, since they can’t use legal contracts or the courts. And in parts of the world where the legal system is corrupt or the government is toothless, agreements are largely enforced with direct violence.
That’s why the utopian idea of an international version of civil court is unrealistic. If two nations take their disagreements to such a court, even assuming they believe that the court would be disinterested and competent, how could they be sure that the other side would yield if it lost? There’s no enforcement mechanism.
The utopian belief behind this is to assume that everyone would act in good faith. No enforcement mechanism would be needed because the loser of the case would willingly comply with court orders. The best that can be said about that idea is that there’s no historical justification for believing it would work out that way.
Another area where many have completely unrealistic expectations is the entire subject of international diplomacy. There will be disagreements between nations, about small things or big things, and many of those disagreements end up being settled without war through agreement or treaty. So doesn’t it make sense that the agreement should be just? Shouldn’t the party which is in the wrong give in to the other and make amends?
It’s a nice idea, I guess. But it’s another for which there’s no historical justification.
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My engineering pragmatism forces me to deal with things as they are, not with how they should be if I lived in an ideal world. Even if negotiations should include justice and a feeling of responsibility to higher principles, that isn’t how things actually are.