War & Peace Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky is smuggling a theory of international relations into a deceptively plain sentence: stop treating “peace” as a deal you can purchase with the right concessions, and start treating it as a byproduct of political structure. The hook is his narrowing of the word “peace” into “a genuine peace,” a qualifier that quietly accuses dictatorships of performing détente the way they perform elections: as theater. If peace is real, it carries obligations - transparency, restraint, the possibility of being held to an agreement. Those are exactly the habits an unaccountable regime can’t afford.

The intent is polemical but disciplined. Sharansky wants the reader to reject the comforting separation between domestic governance and foreign policy. He’s targeting a familiar diplomatic reflex: interpret authoritarian aggression as a misunderstanding, an insecurity, a bargaining position. His counterclaim is moral and strategic at once: repression at home trains a state to lie, intimidate, and treat opponents as enemies, so “making peace” becomes less a choice than a threat to the regime’s survival. A dictator who truly normalizes relations also normalizes exposure - trade, travel, information, comparison. That’s contagion.

Context matters: Sharansky is not a detached theorist. As a Soviet dissident and prisoner who later became an Israeli politician and writer, he speaks from lived experience of a system that signed accords while sustaining coercion. The subtext is a warning to liberal democracies: if you want durable peace, stop pretending you can negotiate your way around legitimacy. You can pause a conflict; you can’t bargain someone into becoming accountable.