Did you ever wonder how the rules for everyday life don’t seem to apply when policy is made state-to-state. I mean a government’s foreign policy doesn’t much look like how we interact person-to-person. Why is this?
Let’s be careful not to mix the ‘should’ with the ‘is’ here. If looking just at the ‘is’ – by this I mean what is actual existing government policy and actions, then perhaps government foreign policy is not so different from how people interact. One just must consider the range of human interactions that actually occur people-to-people. One must realize there are some very different types of personalities in the world ranging from the kind and altruistic to the bullying and sociopathic. We are not talking about how we, personally, interact with others but how some people, those very different from us, interact day-to-day. What we are considering here is the differences in people-to-people ‘policies’ if you will, from the broad spectrum of people within our human population.
So how does this apply to government policy and the potential for conflict? In a human population we have powerful people that know they are powerful. Physically or otherwise weak people that know they are less powerful than many others. But we also have powerful people that believe they are weak and weaker people that believe they are powerful. We have narcissists and megalomaniacs, we have bullies and good samaritans, those that come from a wealthy and poor backgrounds, those that become wealthy or poor due to luck or their hard-workoing diligence. Indeed in real life there exist people with a wide variety of personalities, personal situations and background experiences. Each might approach the same situation differently with a variety of different inclinations and approaches. So if government ‘personalities’ are similar to human personalities then one would expect different governments to have different policies reflecting their own governmental personality.
In this way the foreign policy of governments we’d expect to be somewhat varied particularly when leaders of different governments have more or less power in setting that government’s foreign policy. Selfish leaders might set, for instance, a more ‘America First’ type of foreign policy versus a more generous leader might set a more generous policy – for instance attempting to solve a refugee problem by allowing more refugees into her country. Nothing seems too controversial here. This is one potential explanation for how different governments develop different foreign policies. When one considers the time evolution of policy and policy ‘inertia’ (to be discussed later) then we have a framework for understanding how policy differences might occur.
But let’s look at one particularly interesting example of policy differences between governments – the idea of hypocrisy in foreign policy. This is the idea of having the government policy of one government demand that other countries act in a way ‘opposite’ (we need to define this) to the way they themselves act. When mixing this with a self-serving tendency – where one government is always seeking the upper hand in setting rules such that it obtains advantages over the others then we have the basis for government-to-government conflict. When adding into the mix the physical power of certain countries (or the presumption of their being powerful which may differ from their actual power) compared with that of other countries then government-government conflict can lead to war.