"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" might be one of the most common and yet painfully misguided pillars of statecraft.
To wit: this is a natural outcome of a belief that there are Good Guys and Bad Guys because in that case "good == !!good".
But the world is much more in thrall to Interests, which have higher dimensionality than a singular axis of Goodness, and besides, very few people (and fewer states) self-identify as "evil".
To wit: this is a natural outcome of a belief that there are Good Guys and Bad Guys because in that case "good == !!good".
But the world is much more in thrall to Interests, which have higher dimensionality than a singular axis of Goodness, and besides, very few people (and fewer states) self-identify as "evil".
See also: "Are We The Baddies?"