Diplomacy’s conserving habits stem from a single state’s limited weight

Evidence

In politics, in fact, will has a far greater importance than in diplomacy. Diplomacy sanctions, and tends to conserve, situations created by the clash of policies of different States; it is only creative metaphorically, or by philosophical convention (“all human activity is creative”). International relations deal with a balance of forces in which any single State component has only a very limited weight. Florence, for instance, might have had a certain weight if it had become stronger; but such a growth of its strength, even if it had improved its position in the Italian and European balance of forces, certainly could not have been thought of as decisive for a wholesale transformation of the balance itself. Therefore diplomacy, through the very habits of the profession, tends to scepticism and to conservative narrowness of mind. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 732