How Sovereign Nations Can Practice Vulnerability With Each Other

The dominant tradition in international relations theory — from Thucydides through Machiavelli to Kissinger and Mearsheimer — holds that nations are fundamentally rational self-interested actors in an anarchic system. Without a world government capable of enforcing agreements, nations cannot afford to trust each other except where interests align. Vulnerability in this system is strategic liability. Transparency about weakness invites exploitation.

This tradition contains real truth. International relations does involve genuine power dynamics, genuine conflicts of interest, and genuine risks in projecting weakness to adversaries. The question is whether it describes the full reality — and whether the assumptions it builds into the international system are self-fulfilling prophecies.

There is growing scholarship arguing that they are. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth's research on nonviolent resistance movements found that they succeed at roughly twice the rate of violent ones — partly because they invite coalition-building across lines that violence closes. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt's work on moral psychology shows that human beings have moral intuitions around reciprocity and fairness that operate even in competitive environments. Behavioral economists in international contexts have documented that trust — even when costly to extend — tends to produce better outcomes than pure defection strategies over time.

The tragedy of realpolitik is that it creates the world it assumes. Nations that treat every relationship as fundamentally competitive construct adversarial international systems in which vulnerability genuinely is exploited — and then cite that exploitation as evidence for the realpolitik premise.

Germany's reckoning with its Nazi past is the most studied case of national vulnerability in modern history, and it is instructive in its specificity.

The process was not immediate or complete. The early Federal Republic was full of former Nazis in positions of authority — judges, professors, civil servants — and there was substantial pressure to close the chapter, move forward, focus on reconstruction. What prevented this from being the final word was a combination of forces: the external pressure of the Nuremberg trials, the internal moral force of a Protestant cultural tradition that took concepts like guilt and repentance seriously, and a generation of young Germans in the 1960s who refused the amnesia their parents preferred.

The Willy Brandt moment in Warsaw in 1970 is often cited as the symbolic turning point. Brandt himself — who was not a Nazi but a resistance fighter — spontaneously knelt at the memorial to Polish Jews massacred in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He had not planned the gesture. His aides were shocked. He later wrote: "I did what people do when words fail them." The photograph became one of the most reproduced images in postwar European history.

What followed was a sustained, institutionalized culture of Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) — mandatory Holocaust education, the Stolpersteine (small brass plaques embedded in sidewalks in front of homes where Jewish residents had lived), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and the explicit legal and constitutional prohibitions on Holocaust denial.

The result, measured in terms of Germany's international relationships, is remarkable. Germany is trusted by its European neighbors in ways that would have been inconceivable in 1950. It has been the primary financial supporter of the EU project — an act of economic generosity that is only possible on a foundation of political trust. Its relationship with Israel, while complex, is the most extraordinary diplomatic reconciliation between perpetrator and victim nations in history.

This does not mean the process is complete. German society continues to struggle with how to integrate the reckoning with Nazi history into its identity without that identity becoming defined solely by the atrocity. But the reckoning itself — the willingness to look, name, pay, remember — has been the foundation of Germany's restored international standing.

Japan's relationship to its World War II conduct provides an instructive contrast. The Japanese government has offered various apologies for its wartime atrocities — the Murayama Statement of 1995, various prime ministerial statements — but these have consistently been undermined by subsequent government actions: visits by senior officials to the Yasukuni Shrine (which honors convicted war criminals among Japan's war dead), textbooks that minimize or omit the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women system, and periodic rhetorical backsliding on apologies already made.

The result is a relationship with South Korea and China that is structurally fragile in ways that Germany's relationships with France and Poland are not. The lack of genuine reckoning means that political tensions regularly reactivate historical grievances, making bilateral cooperation on pressing contemporary issues — climate, trade, security — harder than it needs to be.

The United States presents a different kind of case study. American engagement with its own history of atrocity — indigenous genocide, slavery and its century of aftermath, covert interventions in foreign governments — has been fragmentary, contested, and never institutionalized at the federal level. The occasional museum, the academic acknowledgment, the specific local gestures (North Carolina's apology for the Wilmington massacre, the movement for Tulsa Race Massacre reparations) — but no national truth and reconciliation process, no federal reparations program, no institutionalized culture of remembrance.

The international consequences are visible: the United States is trusted less across the Global South than its stated values would suggest it should be, because nations in that region remember when those stated values were overridden by Cold War calculus or economic interest. The gap between what the U.S. says it stands for and what it has done is known everywhere except, largely, within the United States.

A nation that cannot look honestly at its own history cannot be trusted to be honest about its present. The internal work and the external credibility are connected.

Norway's foreign policy has been notable for its willingness to play mediating roles in conflicts from the Oslo Accords to the Colombian peace process to Sudan — precisely because Norway is perceived as a disinterested party. Its willingness to engage with all sides, to acknowledge complexity, and to admit when processes have failed (Oslo is widely acknowledged as a failed process by Norwegian officials themselves) gives it credibility that larger powers with more imperial baggage cannot access.

New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern offers a different kind of case study: a national leader who modeled vulnerability as a political posture and found that it worked. Ardern's response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacres — wearing hijab in solidarity, sitting on the floor with bereaved community members, the "they are us" framing — was an act of political vulnerability that a different kind of leader would have avoided as too personal, too emotional, insufficiently strong. The global response to her leadership was overwhelming, and the policy response that followed (firearms legislation passed with near-unanimous parliamentary support within weeks of the attack) was more effective than that of many nations that had experienced comparable tragedies.

Ardern's vulnerability was not weakness. It was relational competence — the ability to be affected by what is affecting others, to communicate genuine solidarity across difference, to lead through connection rather than through command.

These are transferable capacities. They require political culture that makes them safe to display, and that culture is created partly by seeing them modeled.

Individual humans are more capable of vulnerability when they have enough internal security to risk disclosure — when their sense of worth is not entirely dependent on appearing strong. The same is broadly true of nations.

Nations with strong domestic institutions, stable economies, and genuine popular legitimacy can afford to acknowledge failure more easily than nations whose authority is precarious. Germany's capacity for reckoning was built on a new constitutional order, massive Marshall Plan investment, and the domestic political consensus of the early Federal Republic. Nations in genuine survival mode — economically fragile, politically contested, externally threatened — have less capacity for the kind of reflective vulnerability that trust-building requires.

This means that supporting national vulnerability internationally requires supporting the conditions that make it possible — which is an argument for stronger international economic institutions, genuine debt relief for impoverished nations (which spends enormous political energy on economic survival rather than self-reflection), and international legal frameworks that make acknowledgment of historical harm possible without opening nations to unlimited liability.

The International Criminal Court, for all its limitations, represents an attempt to create space for accountability that is not purely punitive — to allow nations and their leaders to be held to account in ways that enable rather than foreclose reconciliation. Its effectiveness has been limited by major power non-participation (the United States, Russia, and China have not ratified the Rome Statute). But the architecture exists.

The evidence from cases where national vulnerability has been practiced — Germany, South Africa's TRC process, Rwanda's gacaca courts, Norway's international mediation, New Zealand's post-Christchurch leadership — consistently shows the same thing: vulnerability, when genuine and sustained, builds the trust that makes cooperation possible on everything else.

Nations that have done the work of historical reckoning have deeper, more durable relationships with former adversaries. Nations that have acknowledged current limitations (Norway saying openly that Oslo failed; countries asking for help with COVID-19 vaccine distribution; small island nations publicly naming the existential crisis of climate change) build coalitions of genuine solidarity rather than transactional alliances.

The world's most intractable conflicts — Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, the Korean peninsula — are characterized by the inability of any party to acknowledge the legitimate grievances of the other without feeling that the acknowledgment undermines their own case. The wars are in the acknowledgment gap.

Closing those gaps requires leaders willing to be vulnerable — to say "we have caused harm," "we need help," "we were wrong." These words are the hardest in politics. They are also the words upon which peace is actually built.