A review of How Enemies Become Friends

Countries, not individuals, are the enemies and friends that Charles Kupchan has in mind in How Enemies Become Friends, and beginning with the book's title, he sets himself against the most influential school of thought in international relations.

Nations as friends? The redoubtable British foreign secretary Viscount Palmerston announced to the House of Commons in 1848: "As to the romantic notion that nations or Governments are much or permanently influenced by friendships, . . . I say that those who maintain those romantic notions, and apply the intercourse of individuals to the intercourse of nations, are indulging in a vain dream." Palmerston's statement belongs squarely in the tradition of political realism, exemplified by thinkers from St. Augustine to Reinhold Niebuhr. For realists, politics is always tragic. Countries cannot be loyal to one another like personal friends can be. Sound statecraft requires flexibility and hence, at times, betrayal.

Kupchan, a prominent academic and policy analyst who has published major works on the vulnerability of empire and the future of American power, considers this no-friends principle self-evidently false. If friendship is understood as trust so deep that armed hostility is inconceivable, then Palmerston's own Britain has been friends with onetime adversary the United States for more than a century and indeed is a member of the most impressive international friendship success story of all, the European Union. These friendships did not come about from conquest; they were and remain voluntary.