On: Allies

the ones you hold closest, may not be who you think

Very few lines in a movie make me stop and rewind. This one did.

I was watching Nuremberg this week, the film about the trials of the Nazi officers after World War II, when someone on screen said: “Just because a man is your ally, doesn’t mean he’s on your side.”

I paused it. Sat with it. And I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.

Part of why it landed is because of the week we’re having. NATO has been all over the news. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said plainly that the allies “were tested, and they failed the test.” President Trump posted on Truth Social that “NATO wasn’t there when we needed them, and they won’t be there if we need them again.” You can agree or disagree with the politics. That’s not what caught me. What caught me is the feeling underneath it, the specific disappointment of counting on someone and watching them offer words instead of weight. Housing troops wasn’t enough. Letting missions take off from their runways wasn’t enough. Taking in the wounded wasn’t enough. At some point support that never costs the supporter anything stops feeling like support at all.

And imagine how that sits. Imagine Trump finding out Macron was having tea with the Ayatollah every night. Would you still call that an ally? The word starts to bend under the weight of the question.

Because allies are everywhere. Workplaces, organizations, friend groups, families. And once you start paying attention, you notice they’re not all the same kind.

Some people are what I’d call all-in allies. When you move, they move. When it costs them something, they pay it. They don’t disappear when the room gets harder.

And then there’s the other kind, permeable allies. Warm when you’re in front of them. Quiet when you’re not. Supportive in private, strategically sympathetic in public. They’re not lying, exactly. They just want to keep their options open. They’d rather be liked by everyone in the room than stand next to you when standing next to you has a price. Even if it means cozying up to people who consider you their “enemy” .

Most people, if I’m honest, are the second kind. And most of them don’t know it about themselves.

Which brings me to the part I’ve been avoiding writing.

I have those people in my life. Not hypothetically. Right now. People I work with, people I care about, people who have been genuinely good to me — and who I also know, somewhere underneath, would go quiet if I ever became inconvenient to be associated with. It’s the adult version of that high school question that never really goes away: is this person actually my friend?

I don’t have a clean answer for what to do with that. I’ve gone back and forth. Cut them off? That feels dramatic, and it punishes people for being human. Accept the terms and stop expecting more? That works until the day you need more and remember why you were hoping. What I’ve landed on, at least for now, is something smaller: stop calling them the wrong thing. A permeable ally isn’t an enemy. But he isn’t on your side either. And mistaking one for the other is how you end up hurt in a way you didn’t see coming.

That’s the warning in the Nuremberg line, I think. Not that allies betray you. That the word ally is doing more work than it should. It describes a posture, not a loyalty. And the gap between those two things is where most of the real disappointments in a life get made.

So this isn’t an argument. It’s a note to myself, mostly. Be grateful for the all-in ones, they are rarer than the word suggests. Be clear-eyed about the rest. And stop being surprised when someone who called themselves an ally turns out to have only ever been standing near you, not with you.

Choose wisely isn’t quite right.

See clearly.

Talk soon,

Tyreke