Henry Kissinger is supposed to have written that “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” He didn’t; it was actually Dinesh D’Souza channeling his inner Kissinger. But even that inner Kissinger turns out to have been Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, who really did say about England: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
As a statement of foreign-policy realism, that seems conclusive. At least until you hear what Palmerston thought those interests were. Scroll back a few sentences in his 25,000 word speech to Parliament on March 1, 1848, and you find the answer: “I hold that the real policy of England … is to be the champion of justice and right.” If a cause was just, Palmerston was convinced, allies could always be found to support it.
