Geopolitics and national interest: pervasive, seductive - but not a real thing

Geopolitics is everywhere, you can't get away from it, and it is nigh impossible to escape falling into engaging in it. 

People do geopolitical analyses and offer geopolitical explanations, every day many times a day; in politics, media, academia, and conversations; relating to all kinds of things from wars to other types of inter-national conflict. 

Yet, I have said elsewhere, geopolitics is intrinsically evil; but I would add here that it is gratuitously evil. It is not necessary: we don't need to do it. 

I have come to the conclusion that geopolitics isn't a real thing; and probably never has been a real thing.

Geopolitics is an artificial abstraction that treats nations as agents - as purposive "beings" that interact, inter-relate, cooperate or compete - and the like. 

But everything I have discovered on these subjects, or at least everything about which I am confident, goes against this way of reasoning.

To be more exact, I don't think that things ever happen because such a course of action is "good for the national interests" of a country. 

There may be a lot of other possible reasons why things happen - but not the "good for national interest" reason: this seems always to be a false (and usually incoherent) excuse for something much smaller scale and specific than the nation - something personal, clannish or tribal.

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Furthermore, "promoting the national interest" is a positive motivation - something intended to improve. 

But I have come to believe that the real reasons of inter-national events and policies are nearly always negative. 

In other words; the real reason for actions, policies, and wars is not to promote positive benefit, but instead to cause negative harm. 

What I mean is that the primary motivation in geopolitics is almost-always something like hatred, disgust, or resentment, a desire to cause suffering, destruction, death - rather than any genuine and strong idea of "doing good".  

And these negative motivations are best understood as operating at a level much closer to the personal (e.g. individual, clan, tribe) than to the national. 

Such negative motivations seem to be almost invisible to analysis (certainly on "our side"), partly because positive motivations are much more positively regarded; but also because the possibility of primarily negative motivation is seldom entertained*. 

We deny the strength and dominance of negative motivations inter-nationally, ultimately because we deny this in our-selves.  

There is a genuine reluctance to interpret international affairs in terms of hatred, disgust, resentment, and the desire to harm - yet such motivations may be openly-acknowledged, or expressed frequently in casual speech and writing, inter-personally or inside groups, and off-the-official-record. 

We may do, we almost certainly do, exactly this ourselves! 

But furthermore, aside from open admissions; primarily negative motivations may easily be inferred from consistent long-term patterns - so long as we actually look at these.   

Of course; negative motivations are operative in many inter-personal and intra-national affairs as well  as globally - fuelling all sorts of conflicts and violence from that between sexes, classes, jobs, regions, races, religions, ideologies... 

Indeed, anything about which people have strong preferences and convictions is potential ground for the operation of negative motivations - the desire to harm; being masked by false explanations and excuses concerning an alleged desire to protect or promote some larger values and entities. 

In a nutshell; I am saying that spitefulness - which I regarded as the worst of all sins - is a much bigger influence on life in this mortal world than is commonly acknowledged. 

And furthermore; the frequency and strength of that extreme evil of the sin of spite needs first to be recognized in ourselves; before it can be recognized, and taken account of, in others.  

We need to be honest about the microcosm that we know from primary personal experience, before we can understand the macrocosm that we know by inference from secondhand reports and reasoning. 

*NOTE ADDED: Because of this reluctance to consider the primacy of negative motivations; the way that negations usually operate in current Western geopolitics, is by the most powerful people and groups successfully convincing the less powerful that policies and strategies which are in truth motivated by hatred, revenge and sheer spitefulness; are instead going to benefit those persons and groups whose cooperation is needed. This pattern of negative masquearding as positive is transparently evident in the current warmongering - if one can entertain the possibility: evident from the incoherence and inconsistency of positive "national interest" justifications. But it can also be observed in the oppositional nature of all modern politics. Since positive intent became inconceivable (due to the denial of God and cosmic personal purpose) and opposition by default became core to public discourse, negative evil has had open season.