Lurching from crisis to crisis and assailed even by allies for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the United States has rarely seemed more absent from the international stage, or more urgently in need of defining its role in world affairs. This may be a good time, therefore, to look back at a book from another era when fundamental questions about foreign policy were being asked — and answered.
At the start of the Cold War, America found itself in a position of leadership for which it was intellectually unprepared. The approach that became the guiding principle of foreign policy over the next four decades was, as devised by George F. Kennan, known as containment. But the man who provided the intellectual scaffolding for it was Hans J. Morgenthau, a Jewish escapee from Nazi Germany. Morgenthau set out his ideas most fully in his 1948 masterwork, “Politics Among Nations,” a book that bears returning to today for the lessons it offers a contemporary America struggling once again to clarify its stance toward a volatile world.
Virtually as soon as it was published, “Politics Among Nations” became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Nearly 100 colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton, adopted it for classes, and within five years it apparently was being assigned on the nation’s campuses more often than all of the competing textbooks on foreign policy combined. The first of five editions published during Morgenthau’s lifetime went through eight printings, the second through six. And it wasn’t only college undergraduates who were reading it. The book’s admirers constituted a Who’s Who of the period’s leading thinkers on foreign policy: Kennan, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Raymond Aron and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Probably no one took more from “Politics Among Nations” than Henry Kissinger. “We shared almost identical premises,” Kissinger said at the time of Morgenthau’s death in 1980. “I never ceased admiring him or remembering the profound intellectual debt I owed him.”
Morgenthau’s book so revolutionized thinking that its author has been called the founding father of the entire modern study of international affairs. Some have compared his status to that of Freud in psychology. In its intellectual range and the density of its arguments, “Politics Among Nations” is hardly light reading. Morgenthau shifted around, sometimes on the same page, from political science to history to psychology to philosophy (he largely ignored economics), and with awe-inspiring erudition, he could turn the early-18th-century War of the Spanish Succession into an issue of contemporary relevance.
Yet despite its formidable learning and elaborate structure, “Politics Among Nations” rested on a simple foundation. There were two schools of thought in foreign affairs, Morgenthau taught. One adhered to a belief in abstract, universal values, common to people everywhere. (For Americans, these principles were democracy and freedom.) According to this view, global peace would be achieved when everyone accepted the “correct” values. Woodrow Wilson embodied this way of thinking; Morgenthau wrote disapprovingly that he took the country into World War I “for the purpose of making one moral system, held by one group, prevail in the rest of the world.”
The other school denied such universals in favor of what it saw as a distasteful truth: People in all places and at all times strive for power. This was the essential idea behind Morgenthau’s thinking. Human nature, he insisted, “has not changed since the classical philosophies of China, India and Greece,” and the job of the statesman was to preserve his country’s security in the face of this unending struggle. Good intentions by themselves, without power behind them, could do nothing, and might make matters worse. The British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, Morgenthau said, went to Munich with the best of intentions to negotiate with Adolf Hitler.
Morgenthau urged policymakers to look at the world as it was — in all its tragic ugliness — and not how they wished it to be. An effective statesman, he said, had to make “a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible — between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place.” Morgenthau’s idea of a statesman who was not misled by idealism, who kept his eye on the realities of power, was Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill. He “committed fewer errors in international affairs than any of his contemporaries.”
Contrary to what Americans nurtured in the Wilsonian school might wish to believe, it was not true that people everywhere yearned for freedom; their culture, their history, their values, their traditions determined their desires and their politics and, given the choice, they might easily opt for order over liberty. For this reason, Morgenthau emphasized the importance of national interest over universal ideals in the conduct of foreign policy: “It is exactly the concept of interest defined in terms of power that saves us” from both “moral excess” and “political folly.” Anyone who speaks of the centrality of national interest in foreign affairs is probably a disciple, knowingly or unknowingly, of Morgenthau’s.
From the moment “Politics Among Nations” appeared, Morgenthau was accused (like Kissinger at a later time) of amorality and militarism, and of being too accepting of dictators and other international miscreants. Some called him “Germanic.” Frank Tannenbaum, a prominent Austrian-American professor at Columbia, complained that he was trying to import immorality into American foreign policy and change the wholesome United States into a cynical country practicing European power politics.
The charge was unfair. Morgenthau may have been an exponent of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by many of his disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military force, which was a very different thing. In a telling statement, Morgenthau declared, “The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relations between two minds, which is of the essence of political power, the physical relation between two bodies.” He wrote that “all foreign policy is the struggle for the minds of men.” Genuine political power couldn’t be forced on people. It was complex, organic, unquantifiable. Elsewhere, Morgenthau compared it to love.
Still, the idealists offered the promise of global peace, however distant. What did Morgenthau, with his gloomy prescriptions, offer except unrelenting hostility and conflict as each nation pursued its national interest? World government, according to Morgenthau, was an impossibility under the present arrangement of sovereign nation-states, which meant that peaceful conditions could be maintained only by accepting the existence of rivals on the international stage and balancing national power against national power, strength against strength. Leaders who understood this also understood that the national interests of adversaries had to be respected if war was to be avoided. What other possibility was there? True statesmen shunned goals like democracy promotion and looked for areas of compromise and accommodation, however unsatisfying to the idealists. As Richard Nixon, channeling Morgenthau, once explained, “The only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power.” To put this another way: One had to learn to live with one’s enemies — to live with tragedy and evil.
In fact, Morgenthau’s emphasis on national interest was a call for restraint in foreign policy, an understanding of the real meaning of power and the limits of force. He was one of the earliest and most incisive opponents of the Vietnam War. (Morgenthau said that those who were surprised at his dovish stance hadn’t been reading him very carefully.) “Prudence” was one of his favorite words. He objected to the idealists, because in their self-righteousness and absolutism they were ready to disrupt peace for their particular sense of morality. “A man who was nothing but ‘moral man,’” Morgenthau said, “would be a fool.”
At the dawn of the Cold War, “Politics Among Nations” tried to steer a path between isolationists who were suspicious of any foreign entanglements and idealists who believed that America had a mission to convert the world to democracy. Locating that middle ground was the key to its success in 1948. It’s an outlook that still has relevance today.
"book" - Google News
May 09, 2020 at 04:09PM
https://ift.tt/3cj0M5g
The Book That Shaped Foreign Policy for a Generation Has More to Say - The New York Times
"book" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Yv0xQn
https://ift.tt/2zJxCxA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Book That Shaped Foreign Policy for a Generation Has More to Say - The New York Times"
Post a Comment