I was 15 when I first noticed something that took me 50 years to fully understand. My older brother, then about 25, was a young physician working through his fellowship on a stipend that barely covered his own expenses. A few times a week, we would join one of his friends, also a doctor, for breakfast. The friend had skipped the fellowship route and gone straight into private practice, earning something like three times what my brother made. And yet, when the bill arrived, it was almost always my brother who reached for it first.
I noticed it. I did not understand it. At 15, you file such things away without a theory to explain them, and I filed this one away for half a century.
The North Atlantic puzzle
The memory resurfaced when I started paying closer attention to the long-running argument over NATO burden-sharing.
For decades, member nations had agreed, at least on paper, to spend roughly 2% of their GDP on defense. For most of that time, only the United States and a small handful of others actually did it.
What struck me as genuinely strange, once I thought it through, was the geography.
Russia sits on Europe’s doorstep. An American has to imagine a war that crosses an entire ocean before it becomes real; a Pole, a German, or a Balt does not have that luxury. If anything, the disproportionate exposure to risk should have produced disproportionate investment from the countries closest to the threat, not the country farthest from it. Instead, the nation least exposed carried the heaviest share of the bill, year after year, while everyone insisted this was simply what allies do for one another. That is my brother at the breakfast table, scaled up to the size of a continent.
The China ledger
I found a version of the same pattern in trade. When China entered the global trading system, the operating theory in Washington was that opening markets would liberalize the country, and that American businesses, pursuing their own self-interest, would somehow also serve the national interest.
What actually happened was that American corporations pursued profit with total clarity of purpose, often looking past violations of American patents along the way, and in doing so helped build the manufacturing base that would later compete against American workers. Millions of jobs moved overseas, and the trade deficit ballooned into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Ask yourself whether this amounts to a betrayal. I don’t think it helps to see it that way. American corporations behaved exactly as transactional actors behave — they optimized for their own interest, transparently. The real failure sat on the other side of the negotiating table, where nobody insisted on an arrangement with China that was equally clear-eyed and equally enforced.
A colder, older wisdom
None of this is new, even if it feels newly urgent. In 1848, Lord Palmerston told the House of Commons that England had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interests that were eternal and perpetual. He was describing, without apology, a transactional theory of statecraft, and it has aged better than most of the sentimental alternatives offered since.
Consider how quickly the great alliances of the 20th century rearranged themselves once circumstances changed. Italy abandoned its alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary to fight the First World War alongside Britain, France, and Russia, and sided with Germany again two decades later, then switched sides once more in 1943. The Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, only to be invaded by that same partner two years later.
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, forged by the shared necessity of defeating Hitler, dissolved into four decades of Cold War the moment that necessity disappeared. None of these were failures of loyalty. They were successes of interest, honestly followed and only afterward dressed up in whatever moral language the winners preferred.
The arrangements that lasted, by contrast, tended to be transactional from the start. The 1945 meeting between Franklin Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud aboard a U.S. Navy cruiser produced an understanding, security guarantees in exchange for reliable oil, that has held, in one form or another, for eighty years, precisely because both sides always knew what they were getting and what they owed.
The one real exception
I want to be clear about where this argument stops. When a wealthy nation extends help to a poorer one, famine relief, disease eradication, disaster response, that is charity, not partnership, and it should be judged by a different standard: transparency, effectiveness, and respect for the dignity of the people receiving it. A transactional foreign policy does not require a stingy one.
SKY STABBINGS AND CAPITOL PLOTS: THE VIOLENT REALITY BEHIND ‘PEACE ABROAD’
What fairness buys you
The appeal of a transactional relationship, whether between two doctors splitting a breakfast bill or two nations sharing a border, is not that it is cold. It is that it is legible. Everyone can see what they are contributing and what they are owed, which means disagreements get negotiated in the open rather than accumulating for decades as quiet resentment. Skin in the game concentrates the mind. It makes the strong more careful and the weak more honest, and a decision made under those terms tends to be a more objective decision than one made under the comfortable haze of assumed loyalty.
My brother never once complained about picking up that check. Maybe he simply valued the friendship more than the money. But a teenager watching from across the table wondered even then whether an arrangement that depends entirely on one person’s quiet generosity is really an arrangement at all, or just a debt that never gets called. Nations, unlike brothers, rarely have the grace to let it go unspoken forever. Eventually, someone asks for the bill, and it is better for everyone if the terms were written down before that day arrived.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D., is the Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he specializes in interdisciplinary research and public policy analysis. His writing has appeared in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (PNAS), RealClear platforms, Washington Examiner, The Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, and South Asia Monitor, where he serves on the editorial board. He also hosts the interview show “SAM Dialogues with Dr. M. P. Reddy.”
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
