There are and always have been just two basic objectives of all national governments: to secure the defence of the realm and the value of the currency. The kind and form of domestic order and justice is a matter of choice and therefore of wide variety. The standard of welfare which the government feels able and willing to provide for its citizens is a matter of individual choice within the state. But where foreign and economic policies are concerned, only military security and monetary stability are universally sought and pursued by states above all other aims. The wider international goals about which political speeches are endlessly written – the establishment of peace, the reduction of armaments, the increase of economic development, the pursuit of human rights and a fair deal for the poor, the black, the religious and racial minorities, the under-regarded of all kinds – are so far beyond the reach of individual governments and their policies that they are, by comparison with the two basic aims, mostly either rhetoric or dreams. We enact, as Conor Cruise O’Brien says, our sacred dramas on the international stage but they amount to a ritual and a prayer. They express our deepest longings; they do not necessarily bear very much upon our realistic ambitions in the world of everyday politics.