Evenhandedness toward friends and enemies is a self-defeating foreign policy

Evidence

But such charges are, in a profound sense, irrelevant. If “evenhandedness” means treating all alike, it would be a manifestly suicidal policy for any kind of government, American or other, to pursue. In the Middle East as in most other places, one is expected to help one’s friends and to harm one’s enemies. This is well understood, and was classically formulated, a thousand years ago, by the Arab moralist Ibn Hazm: “He who treats friends and enemies alike will arouse distaste for his friendship and contempt for his enmity.” The occasional American tendency to harry friends and court enemies causes understandable bewilderment, and, for lack of a more rational explanation, arouses fear of deep-laid, far-reaching plots. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1675

Categorization

• XREF: This connects to the reader’s interest in reciprocity and trust: evenhandedness undermines the trust-bond logic of alliances, paralleling how both over- and under-constraining agents destabilizes functional relationships.