Washington Examiner
· collected 2026-10-06 · by Meda Parameswara Reddy
I was 15 when I first noticed something that took me 50 years to fully understand.
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that → notice → years
My older brother, then about 25, was a young physician working through his fellowship on a stipend that barely covered his own expenses.
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that → work → expenses
A few times a week, we would join one of his friends, also a doctor, for breakfast.
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we → join → breakfast
The friend had skipped the fellowship route and gone straight into private practice, earning something like three times what my brother made.
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brother → skip → what
And yet, when the bill arrived, it was almost always my brother who reached for it first.
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who → arrive → it
I noticed it.
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I → notice → it
I did not understand it.
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I → 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.
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I → file → century
The North Atlantic puzzle
The memory resurfaced when I started paying closer attention to the long-running argument over NATO burden-sharing.
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I → resurface → sharing
For decades, member nations had agreed, at least on paper, to spend roughly 2% of their GDP on defense.
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nations → agree → defense
For most of that time, only the United States and a small handful of others actually did it.
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States → do → it
What struck me as genuinely strange, once I thought it through, was the geography.
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I → strike → it
Russia sits on Europe’s doorstep.
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Russia → sit → 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.
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Pole → have → 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.
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exposure → produce → 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.
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allies → expose → one
That is my brother at the breakfast table, scaled up to the size of a continent.
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That → scale → continent
The China ledger
I found a version of the same pattern in trade.
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I → find → 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.
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businesses → enter → 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.
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that → happen → workers
Millions of jobs moved overseas, and the trade deficit ballooned into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
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deficit → move → dollars
Ask yourself whether this amounts to a betrayal.
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this → ask → betrayal
I don’t think it helps to see it that way.
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it → think → it
American corporations behaved exactly as transactional actors behave — they optimized for their own interest, transparently.
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they → behave → interest
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.
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that → sit → China
None of this is new, even if it feels newly urgent.
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it → feel → this
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.
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that → tell → allies
He was describing, without apology, a transactional theory of statecraft, and it has aged better than most of the sentimental alternatives offered since.
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it → describe → alternatives
Consider how quickly the great alliances of the 20th century rearranged themselves once circumstances changed.
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circumstances → consider → themselves
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.
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Italy → abandon → 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.
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Union → sign → partner
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.
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necessity → forge → War
They were successes of interest, honestly followed and only afterward dressed up in whatever moral language the winners preferred.
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winners → follow → language
The arrangements that lasted, by contrast, tended to be transactional from the start.
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that → last → 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.
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they → produce → what
The one real exception
I want to be clear about where this argument stops.
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argument → want → exception
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.
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it → extend → it
A transactional foreign policy does not require a stingy one.
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policy → require → one
What fairness buys you
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fairness → buy → 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.
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it → split → border
…and 11 more, not listed.
The Aporia
