Why so serious? The case for a cheerfully pessimistic foreign policy.

Wendell P. Hazeltine: How is the situation here in Berlin?

Otto Ludwig Piffl: It shouldn't happen to a dog! Uh, I — I mean, it's a draw! Actually, the situation is hopeless, but not serious.

Wendell P. Hazeltine: Hopeless but not...say! The boy's got a head on his shoulders! — One, Two Three (1961)

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Once upon a time, Berlin was where the world was most likely to end, the point where the armies of freedom and of tyranny — or, if you prefer, the armies of progress and of reaction — stood eyeball to eyeball, wondering who would blink first.

At the height of superpower tension, right as the Berlin Wall was being constructed, Billy Wilder directed the film One, Two, Three, about the divided city and continent — and one Coca Cola executive's schemes to conquer both sides of the Iron Curtain. The film's satire was wide-ranging, encompassing conniving American executives, spoiled Southern belles, inadequately de-Nazified German workers. And our great superpower rival — against which America stood ready to incinerate half the world, and against which we were enjoined by our new president to "bear any burden, pay any price" — was portrayed as poor and incompetent, its officials petty, lustful, backstabbing, and clownish. In other words: not much different from the folks at Coca Cola.

It is unfortunately difficult to imagine a similar film being made today. And that's a shame. It would be helpful if we could remember that our rivals and enemies share with us a full respective measure of human stupidity and vice. It would be even more helpful if we could remember just how extraordinarily weak our current enemies are, relative to ourselves and relative to those we've faced in the past.

I say this not because I believe knowledge of our common humanity will enable us to see past our differences, nor because if we realized how weak our opponents are we would be bolder in confronting them. On the contrary: every single war fought by humanity was fought between groups of human beings, and most of the time both sides recognized that fact. And substantially weaker opponents are frequently able to deny their would-be conquerors victory — just ask George III. Or, for that matter, George W. Bush.

But if we had a more realistic view of our opponents, then we would realize that our conflicts with them are far less existential than we are often led to believe. Which would be comforting, because many of them are also far less likely to be resolvable than we would like to believe, either by diplomacy or by force.

The U.S. and its allies are at the end stages of negotiations with Iran on an accord to limit the latter country's nuclear program. The latest reports indicate that significant compromises are being considered that will undoubtedly be portrayed by opponents as a surrender. Defenders of the deal will argue that it imposes sufficiently meaningful limits on the Iranian nuclear program that we can feel “safe” from the Iranian threat. But suppose the opponents are right, and a deal leaves open the realistic possibility of a nuclear Iran in a decade. Is that a reason to scuttle it? Is it a reason to prefer a more confrontational policy that could lead to war?

It all depends on how big of a threat a nuclear Iran really is.

Or take Russia's intervention into Ukraine. President Putin's actions would set very dangerous precedent if they come to be accepted internationally. Nobody thinks it's a good idea to retrospectively endorse the forcible re-drawing of settled borders. But how important a foreign policy priority is it for America to try to halt or reverse those Russian moves? Turkish North Cyprus is recognized only by Turkey itself, and the perpetually unsettled status of the island has been a handy excuse never to seriously consider inviting Turkey into the European Union. Should Russian intervention in Ukraine be treated as more serious than that?

The answer depends on how big of a threat a revanchist Russia really is.

Advocates of a less belligerent foreign policy generally do a good job of delineating the many ways in which the use of force can go wrong. But they also sometimes portray a more peaceful policy as one that will pay its own dividends internationally, an optimism that is often and rightly received with suspicion, particularly when it seems tainted by sympathy for our opponents' positions.

We don't need an unrealistically optimistic case for peace that matches the unrealistically optimistic neoconservative case for war. We need a cheerfully pessimistic case for peace, one that accepts the inevitability of conflict, the inherent untrustworthiness of all actors on the international stage, and the basic cussedness of humanity in general. But we should also recognize that, while there's often very little good we can do, there's also usually very little harm that can be done to us, even by such top-drawer lunatics as ISIS. And that the pursuit of perfect security only leads to endless war.

In many corners of the globe, the situation may in fact be hopeless. But that doesn't mean it's serious.