Consistent opposition to imperial expansion punished statesmen with moderation and confusion.

Evidence

Moderation and confusion were the only rewards of any statesman’s consistent opposition to imperialist expansion. Thus Bismarck, in 1871, rejected the offer of French possessions in Africa in exchange for Alsace-Lorraine, and twenty years later acquired Heligoland from Great Britain in return for Uganda, Zanzibar, and Vitu—two kingdoms for a bathtub, as the German imperialists told him, not without justice. Thus in the eighties Clemenceau opposed the imperialist party in France when they wanted to send an expeditionary force to Egypt against the British, and thirty years later he surrendered the Mosul oil fields to England for the sake of a French-British alliance. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 342

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘moderation gets punished’ dynamic resonates with the reader’s scaffold on hegemony — Gramscian common sense where the ‘reasonable’ position is structurally the losing one.