Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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I think an alliance more-or-less entails long-term mutual support, which in practice usually requires some distance. Britain and Portugal have been allies for 900 years, Britain and Japan have usually got on pretty well. Likewise Britain and Australia. It is fundamentally different from vassalage (support from a superior power in exchange for obedience from a lesser one) and mutual cooperation (countries who pursue their own competing interests but cooperate on occasion).
Almost no countries in the EU are allies, except of convenience, and I find the constant desire to pretend otherwise tiresome. Britain's politicians fawn over every foreign connection they can find, our newspaper write stirring paeans to the bravery of Ukranian troops who we basically treat as meat-shields and who would in turn butcher us all if they thought it would help against Russia, and we just tank knife after knife in the back with a smile on our face.
Allies of convenience are still allies, and expecting others to pretend otherwise based on one's own unique definitions of what an alliance is / is not is certainly a position one can take, but it's also one that will be continually doomed to disappointment. Particularly if the criticism comes from a position dripping with historical irony- there are reasons Perfidious Albion is and has been an international relations meme for centuries. (Centuries longer than the last British-Japanese war even, which makes that appeal an interesting example of alliance-compatible behavior.)
If common understanding of alliances breaks with your convictions of what an alliance fundamentally should be... swell! Such a standard also means there is no moral injury deserving sympathy over the violation of a standard that never applied. If long-term mutual support on the time frame of centuries is required for there to be an alliance, then countries that have not existed as independent polities in their current form for even 50 years will never be able to be bad allies. Being a bad ally is conditional on being an ally, after all.
But it does undercut the earlier criticism of Ukraine's actions as being those of a bad ally, as the new standards of alliance and allies puts even less onus on the Ukrainians of having committed any sort of immoral action for you to be aghast over. After all, what was targeted was not 'our' infrastructure, but the infrastructure of non-allies by not-allies that was being leveraged against the interests of other not-allies, both in the immediate context and for years/decades prior.
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