Politics & Power Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce turns the respectable word "alliance" into a pickpocketing stunt, and the insult lands because it’s mechanically precise. Two thieves, hands sunk in each other’s pockets, can’t move independently; their intimacy is literal and degrading. He’s not just calling states immoral. He’s saying alliances are designed constraints: mutual entanglement masquerading as mutual aid. The image implies dependency, collusion, and a kind of enforced loyalty that has less to do with shared ideals than with shared leverage.

The joke is also a theory of international politics in miniature. Alliances don’t eliminate predation; they professionalize it. The goal isn’t peace but efficiency: coordinate the heist so a third party can be “plundered.” Bierce’s twist is that the thieves’ closeness is so extreme it becomes paralysis. That’s the subtext of many treaties: once you’ve traded autonomy for protection, you inherit your partner’s enemies, appetites, and scandals. You can’t walk away clean because your hand is still in the pocket.

Context matters. Bierce wrote as a journalist steeped in post-Civil War disillusionment and the Gilded Age’s transactional politics, and he watched the U.S. edge into overseas power plays culminating in the Spanish-American War. His cynicism matches an era when diplomacy was often sold as principle but operated as bargain and threat. The definition’s bite comes from collapsing high-minded rhetoric into street crime, revealing the moral continuity Bierce thinks governments prefer not to name.