Commentary To the great consternation of foreign policy ideologues, the U.S.-led Western world is finally coalescing around the reality that cold national interest is the primary driver of a country’s foreign policy. Like it or not, it is therefore also the effective motive force behind international relations in general. This has almost always been the case. The recent decades-long spate of general international peace has been the anomaly, not the standard. The military and economic preponderance of the United States following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 ensured over 20 years of global (European) peace, with U.S. military engagements only against ancillary nations. Even these—the story goes— were undertaken only with the noble intention of securing universal “human rights” and shepherding wayward countries into the ranks of responsible (for example, liberal democratic) state actors. The lack of a peer competitor created the illusion that the nature of international relations …