The international organisation is above all a tool of national government, an instrument for the pursuit of national interest by other means. This elementary perception of old-fashioned realists is obscured – probably unconsciously – by most of the rather extensive literature on international regimes. Too often, a regime is represented as merely the consequence of a harmonising process, through which governments have coordinated their common interests. The power element is underplayed. Yet in reality, many international regimes have not so much been the result of a coming-together of equals, but the end-result of a strategy developed by a dominant state, or sometimes by a small group of dominant states.