Two more forces round out the basic factors that shape how states deal with one another: the weight of their shared history, and the character of their governments. Neither is as tangible as geography or natural resources, but both leave marks on international relations that can last for generations.
History Doesn’t Stay in the Past
Old grievances have a habit of outliving the circumstances that created them. A colonial-era decision made decades or even a century earlier can still be shaping hostility between peoples long after the colonial power itself has left the scene – the Palestine question traces a meaningful part of its origins to exactly this kind of lingering colonial-era decision-making, and the discomfort it produced has never fully faded. Old imperial fault lines – the legacies of Ottoman collapse and the political currents that followed the Russian revolution – still generate friction between states today, simply because both sides remember the history differently and neither has fully let go of it.
But history cuts both ways. Centuries of French, British, and German rivalry stand as some of the bitterest and longest-running hostilities in European history – and yet France and Germany, the two countries with arguably the deepest historical wounds between them, went on to become founding partners in the same European economic and political project. Old enmity, in other words, doesn’t have to be permanent. The reverse holds too: fresh partnerships built on shared interest, like the friendship that developed between the United States, China, and Pakistan in more recent decades, show that history is a powerful influence on international relations but never an unbreakable one. States can, and regularly do, choose to write a new chapter.
Why Governments of a Feather Flock Together
The internal character of a state’s government – its structure and the political philosophy it’s built on – also shapes its foreign relationships, often quite directly. States with broadly similar political systems and outlooks tend to gravitate toward one another; it’s part of why, in the wake of the Second World War, so many of the world’s newly independent nations adopted some form of republican government, following one another’s example almost as much as following their own domestic logic.
Revolutionary change in government tends to produce the sharpest version of this pattern. The French Revolution of 1789 reshaped alliances across Europe almost overnight. The Russian Revolution of 1917 did something similar on a larger scale: wherever communist governments later took power, they found a natural, ideologically driven partner in revolutionary Russia, while non-communist states responded by trying to build a protective ring – a kind of political quarantine – around revolutionary regimes, hoping to contain rather than confront them directly. Revolutionary movements, for their part, worked hard to win sympathy among oppressed and disadvantaged people well beyond their own borders, promising rapid development and land redistribution as part of a broader appeal that treated ideology as something worth exporting.
That standoff between revolutionary and status-quo powers hardened, over time, into the Iron Curtain and the wider Cold War – a rivalry so deep it pushed the world repeatedly toward the edge of catastrophic war. It took real, sustained effort in the years that followed to pull back from that edge and build something closer to a genuine policy of peaceful coexistence: political leadership willing to accept that different societies and different systems of government could exist side by side without needing to destroy one another. That effort is also the reason arms reduction has remained such a persistent priority in international diplomacy ever since – not simply as a technical goal, but as a necessary step toward ending war as a tool of policy altogether, and building something like a lasting peace in its place.
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