Ian Bremmer

It’s often said that kinship runs deeper than friendship. Lately, when it comes to chumminess among world leaders and their colleagues in neighboring countries, friendship has trumped citizenship.

Until recently, it was rare to find leaders willing to forge friendships with candidates across borders or to find would-be leaders campaigning inside foreign countries. There are good reasons for that: Candidates who cross these lines can find it harder to win elections or to govern once the electoral test is passed. Their foreign friends can pay a price for backing the wrong horse and for forfeiting a bit of diplomatic leverage once they find themselves sitting across the bargaining table from the man or woman they campaigned against. Consider three current examples.

Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s support for the re-election bid of French President Nicolas Sarkozy is especially startling. It’s hardly surprising that Merkel wants Sarkozy to win. The two leaders have forged a durable personal relationship as they navigated their way through Europe’s ongoing crisis of confidence. The French and German leaders deserve considerable praise for their well-coordinated bid to bolster the euro zone.

But for Merkel, there’s a big difference between privately willing Sarkozy on and campaigning at his side across France – particularly at a time when Sarkozy trails Socialist Party challenger François Hollande significantly in opinion polls. Given the populist mood in France, Merkel’s stated reasons for supporting Sarkozy – that he is a conservative candidate whose party is philosophically aligned with her own Christian Democratic Union – sounds less like a boost for his campaign than a nail in his coffin.

And in the end, Merkel will have important work to do with France’s next president, whoever that turns out to be.

We can’t afford to throw him out.

Last week, likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney caused a tempest in a teapot when he told CNN that he thought the top U.S. geopolitical foe is Russia. President Obama’s White House seized on the comment, rebutting that al Qaeda is actually our top foe abroad. But if we look at the way American foreign policy has been enacted since the beginnings of the global crisis, it’s clear that America’s biggest opponent on the world stage is really itself.

Take what’s going on in Syria as the most recent example. That country’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, continues to tease the world’s diplomats by claiming to want peace for his people, yet he cracks down with unfettered abandon on their protests against his oppressive regime. Having just agreed to yet another peace plan, a troop withdrawal by Apr. 10, it’s clear he’ll find some way around his latest bargain, as he always has. What’s even more shocking is that the peace deal, negotiated by Kofi Annan, did not even call for Assad to leave power, which to outside eyes seems like a precondition for any sort of success. And the absence of the demand that Assad go is squarely due to the U.S.’s refusal to back it up with the sort of severe consequences it used to dole out: military strikes, preemptive wars and overwhelming use of force. For the U.S., at least for now, those days are over. And Washington won’t make foreign policy promises it can’t or doesn’t intend to keep.

After all, consider the fall of Gaddafi in Libya. Here was a decades-long enemy of the U.S. whose people rose up against him in a huge insurgency. His people lived in a backward state while he enriched himself with billions of stolen dollars. To borrow a phrase, the case for his deposal was a slam-dunk. Yet even this most climactic act of the Arab Spring did not draw out a single ground-troop commitment from the Obama administration. The U.S., in fact, only ran about 10 percent of the total NATO bombing runs over Libya – not exactly the type of campaign the U.S. military is used to making against brutal dictators with bad reputations who antagonize it.