Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
That is a formula for chaos and chaos gets violent. You want to renegotiate treaties often, fine. But to have a treaty, a contract sort of, that is 'flexible' in terms and what we apply them to, to have a 'living document' is to have nothing at all. What you say ain't what you mean...except sometimes. That is international relations by what I feel like at the time, no predictability, anything may happen at any time. Good luck maintaining the peace that way.
Inflexible treaties turned an assassination of a single national leader into the senseless horror of WWI.

Today we are similarly poised where bad treaties could lead to senseless war. When war is necessary wage it to win, but when war is unnecessary avoid it like the plague that it is.

Relationships become dysfunctional over time. We must ensure that in an era of rapid change we are not caught like the powers of Europe were not so long ago into events they did not want, but could not see their way clear to escape.

Our current defense strategy calls for "permanent allies" and "building partner capacity" as a major LOO for advancing our interests into the future. I respectfully disagree.

We have no permanent allies,
we have no permanent enemies,
we only have permanent interests.

–attributed to Henry John Temple Viscount Lord Palmerston 1784-1865, Foreign Secretary and two-time Prime Minister under Queen Victoria.
What he actually said was [concerning apparent British apathy regarding Polish struggles against Russian hegemony, which Palmerston did not
believe that it met the threshold of justifiable war] “He concluded with the famous peroration that Britain had no eternal allies and no perpetual enemies, only interest that were eternal and perpetual . . .”--quoted in David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy,
1846-1855 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 82-83.

https://politicalscience.byu.edu/Syl...on_170_F08.pdf