Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca West

International diplomacy, Rebecca West suggests, is less a chess match than a bad first date conducted through fogged glass. “Preordained” is doing sharp work here: the clumsiness isn’t a failure of skill or goodwill, it’s baked into the enterprise. States don’t meet as people do; they meet as abstractions wearing costumes - flags, treaties, protocol - trying to turn self-interest into something that passes for mutual understanding.

The phrase “clumsy gestures” cuts against the romantic story nations like to tell about themselves. A “gesture” is symbolic, legible, often performed for an audience. West implies that international relationships are theater as much as strategy: summits staged for domestic voters, condemnations calibrated for headlines, aid packages doubled as moral branding. The clumsiness comes from translation problems - not just language, but culture, history, internal politics, and the constant incentive to misread the other side in ways that flatter your own narrative.

Then she lands the real diagnosis: “imperfect knowledge.” Diplomatic decisions are made under conditions closer to rumor than certainty, with intelligence that’s partial, biased, and time-sensitive. In West’s lifetime - two world wars, the churn of empires, the propaganda engines of mass media - leaders repeatedly acted on confident assumptions that were wrong in consequential ways. Her intent isn’t to excuse blunders; it’s to puncture the fantasy that foreign policy can be clean, rational, or fully informed. What works in the line is its sober cynicism: it names the structural limits of knowing another nation, and the damage done when we pretend those limits don’t exist.