Posted by Bob on April 4, 2006 at 2:53 pm

One of the basic premises of international relations is what I refer to as “The A-C Rule.”

Country A, let’s say France, has a country that borders on it, say Germany. France is A, Germany is B.

So since they share a border, it is for sure that A and B, Germany and France, will be most likely to go to war with each other and to be in competition with each other.

Then there is a Country C. Country C is on the OTHER side of Country B. In 1939, it was Poland that bordered on Germany on the opposite side from France. France is A, Germany on its border is B and the country on Germany’s OTHER border is C.

The enemy of my enemy is my natural ally. So France and Poland were likely to beunited bymutual hostility to Germany, Country B.

Graduate professors in International Relations love to point out that the oldest treaty of alliance in existence was ona clay tablet in cunieform script.

That clay tablet recorded an alliance of Countries A and C against the country which bordered on them both, Country C.

Which explains why his British cousins left Czar Nicholas to die at the hands of the Bolshevike. They were LITERALLY his cousins.

But by the time the Czar fell in 1917 Britain and France had made the war into a crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.”

The reason France and Britain made common cause with Russia was because, in 1914 when the war began, France was on one side of Germany and Russia, which held the half of Poland Germany did not hold, was GEOGRAPHICALLY in position C, bordering Germany on the other side from France.

Britain, due to power of the British Fleet and English Channel in 1914, did not feel that it bordered on anybody.

But Russia was also on the other side from Britain and France POLITICALLY. It was an unapologetic Czarist despotism.

POLITICALLY as well as geographically, Germany was between the Western Allies and Russia. It had a despotism, but nowhere near the despotism Russia had.

This often happens. Country C is often further away from Country A politically than each is from Country B.

The Allies, in their “War to save democracy” with their new American ally, could not afford to accept the Czar as a refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution which threatened his life in Novermber of 1917.

So the A-C Rule is very, very, VERY practical. More often than not, it is a matter of life and death.