Realpolitik Is Usually a Cover Story, and We Have No Way to Check

Realpolitik has a respectable case behind it, and I want to state that case properly before I say what is wrong with how it is used.

The case runs like this. The world contains regimes we find repugnant. We cannot remove them all, and trying to has a poor record. Refusing to deal with them punishes their populations more than their rulers, drives them into the arms of our rivals, and forfeits whatever influence engagement might have bought. So a mature foreign policy trades with dictators, sells to them, hosts them, and accepts the discomfort as the price of living in the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be.

That is a serious argument. I do not think it is wrong in every case. The problem is not the argument. The problem is that we can never tell when it is being made honestly.

The Unverifiable Excuse

Suppose a government sells weapons to a brutal regime. Two explanations are available. One is realpolitik: the sale buys influence, denies a rival the contract, and stabilises a region in ways the public cannot see. The other is that arms manufacturers wanted the sale, the manufacturers fund campaigns and employ constituents, and the officials who approved it will work for those manufacturers when they leave office.

Both explanations predict exactly the same behaviour. The sale happens either way. The speech justifying it is the same speech either way, because the realpolitik speech is the only one that can be given in public, and it is available to the cynic as freely as to the statesman.

So the citizen is asked to accept a justification that cannot be distinguished from its own counterfeit. That is not a small defect. An excuse that would be offered whether or not it were true is not evidence of anything, and I have argued before that an argument which applies everywhere discriminates nowhere.

Why Nobody Will Ever Confirm It

Could we not simply ask? Could an honest official not, at some point, say: this deal was about the money?

No, and the reason is structural rather than moral. A politician with the disposition to admit that publicly would not have survived the selection process that produces politicians. The system rewards those who can deliver the respectable account fluently and without visible discomfort, and it removes those who cannot, long before they reach a position where the admission would matter. The people in a position to tell us are precisely the people the system has filtered for not telling us.

The decision-making process protects itself the same way. Deliberations are classified, minutes are sealed for decades, the reasons given to the public are prepared by people whose profession is preparing reasons. None of this requires a conspiracy. It is what any institution does with the parts of itself that would not survive daylight.

The Track Record

If we cannot check individual cases, we can look at the aggregate, and the aggregate is not encouraging.

Representative regimes have supported dictators throughout the last century. Some of those dictators were later removed at enormous cost, by the same regimes that had armed them. Some turned the weapons on their own populations. Some turned them on us. The strategic benefits that realpolitik promised were, in case after case, hard to locate afterwards.

The commercial benefits were not hard to locate at all. The arms were sold. The contracts were fulfilled. The companies involved did well, and the officials who arranged the deals did well, regardless of how the strategy turned out. When one party to a bet wins whether or not the bet pays off, you should ask whether the bet was the point.

I am not claiming every case was corrupt. I am claiming that when the strategic rationale fails as often as it has and the commercial rationale succeeds as reliably as it has, the reasonable inference is that the commercial rationale was doing more of the work than anyone said.

What Realpolitik Actually Requires

Here is the irony. Real realpolitik, the honest kind, requires exactly the thing our system cannot provide: a decision-maker whose only interest is the national interest, who gains nothing personally from either outcome, and who can therefore be trusted when he says the ugly deal was necessary.

A representative government is not that decision-maker. It is a collection of people with careers, donors, and futures, making decisions in private about matters where the private interest and the public one point in different directions. The realpolitik justification asks us to trust their judgement precisely where their judgement is least trustworthy.

The remedy is not to abandon the argument. It is to move the decision to a body that has no stake in the sale. A public voting directly on whether to arm a regime would sometimes decide badly. It would not decide for the reasons that make the current process indistinguishable from corruption, because it would not have those reasons. That is a lower bar than wisdom, and it is the bar that realpolitik, taken seriously, actually needs.