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“Do the principal counterrevolutionary leaders realize that a belligerent foreign policy has multiple attractions for their subordinate associates? Who are the ones to argue that a flight into diplomatic brinkmanship and war is the most expedient way to bridge over internal contradictions and, in the bargain, to maintain or strengthen their political rule in state and party? In other words, the fragile consortium is to be held together not only by a common fear of renewed internal disorders but also by the shared belief in an external mission.

Needless to say, this prescription to use foreign policy for purposes of domestic stabilization is contingent upon military and diplomatic possibilities. For it to be seriously advanced and considered within the consortium, it must not be out of line with the nation's warmaking capabilities and potentials. However, the international constellation of power must not foreclose the success of the first forays of this externalization of counterrevolution.

Much depends on developments within the major powers, as well as within the countries that are singled out as victims of diversionary assault. External counterrevolutionary probes take place in a time of universal unrest that makes cabinet diplomacy singularly difficult. Each government's foreign policy is subjected to intensely conflicting internal pressures. The advocates of the diversionary strategy do not create the internal political battles that buffet the major powers external policies. But they do propose to exploit them for their own purposes. In particular, they mean to strengthen the hand of sympathetic political forces that recognize the international nature of the double-edged crisis.

At home, the specter of revolution frightens reactionaries and conservatives into condoning the white terror. That same specter is now manipulated to intimidate favorably disposed conservative and reactionary forces in other countries to appease diversionary foreign policy maneuvers. It is this cross-national dimension of the dynamics of foreign policy in an era of international civil war that still needs study. Each country gets caught up in a situation, both national and international, in which issues of foreign policy become first and foremost issues of domestic politics.” - Arno J. Mayer, ‘Dynamics of Counterrevolution In Europe, 1870-1956 An Analytic Framework’ (1971) [pp. 132, 133]