Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale
January 10th, 2020
My good friend Joe Nye is correct that political scientists have not thought enough about the role of morals in international affairs. Indeed, this is true of many decision-makers and members of the concerned public as well. One reason for this is human nature and, more specifically, the propensity I have studied for people to avoid acknowledging painful trade-offs. The results are often pernicious.
Leaders often pride themselves on making hard choices. But they also are prone to believe that the world is so nicely arranged that they do not have to choose between moral and pragmatic values. All too often they say that there is no conflict between the values their countries hold dear and the requirements of the national interest. Morality then comes on the cheap. Leaders and others concerned with politics do not have to believe that they are making the country better-off by doing injustice in the world or, conversely, that by honoring the values that their country holds dear they are endangering its security or reducing its wealth.
Perhaps in a world ruled by a benign deity this happy state of affairs would prevail. Ironically, however, it would mean that morality does not play much of a role in international affairs because any policy that would be good for the country would also be moral.
As a part-time political psychologist I think that the reason why people so rarely see national morals and national interest in conflict is that it is extraordinarily painful to do so, to see that one has to pay a price in terms of moral values or a national interest. It is also likely to be politically costly to make such an acknowledgment. While Nye is correct that Truman paid a political price for restraining General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, this decision seems to be more prudential than moral because following MacArthur’s lead could easily have resulted in a wider war. But after firing the general, what continued the stalemate for two years with a high cost to American (and Korean and Chinese) lives and a great damage to the Democratic Party was Truman’s refusal to forcibly repatriate Chinese prisoners of war. While some of Truman’s statements noted the moral grounding of his policy, he did not trumpet it and explain that he was paying for morality with a great deal of blood.
To take a more recent case of even greater blindness, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the Bush administration’s program of “enhanced interrogation techniques” of prisoners of the War on Terror said that those methods not only constituted torture, but also were ineffective. To reach the latter judgment, however, the report had to engage in superficial and misleading analysis. No hard choices then need to be made. The American people and the institutions operating in its name can follow our moral dictates without putting the country in danger.
The so-called Realist approach to international politics is often criticized for urging leaders to ignore morality, but in fact the members of this camp from Thucydides through Machiavelli to George Kennan to Reinhold Niebuhr understood that the common way of thinking discussed above not only took the easy way out but would court both danger and immorality. By not recognizing the fact that international politics often called for states to behave immorally, leaders would convince themselves of the righteousness of their actions, leading to killing without compunction and over-reaching. The belief that one is fighting for a moral cause is likely to lead to the conclusion that since the cause is just and the adversary is immoral, extreme measures are not only permitted, but required.
Pascal’s observation that “men never do so much harm so happily as when they do it through a religious conviction” applies to secular forms of morality as well. Thucydides explains that the downfall of Athens was precipitated by the reckless attempt to conquer Sicily, an adventure brought on by the Athenians’ sense of their moral and material superiority. Only an awareness of the need to do some evil can limit states from doing even more evil.
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