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Why morality matters in foreign policy

International relations are an anarchic sphere; there is no world government capable of restoring order
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Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Illustration, Photo: Shutterstock
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

When I told a friend that I had written a book about morality and foreign policy, she joked, "It must be a very short book." Such skepticism is widespread. An Internet search yields surprisingly few books on how the moral views of US presidents have influenced foreign policy. The leading political theorist Michael Walzer once described the preparation of American graduates in the field of international relations after 1945 as follows: "as was usually practiced, the moral argument was against the rules of discipline."

The reasons for suspicion seem obvious. While historians have written about American exceptionalism and moralism, diplomat-realists, such as George F. Kennan - the father of the American strategy of "deterrence" in the Cold War - have long pointed out the lack of an American moralistic-legal tradition. International relations are an anarchic sphere; there is no world government capable of restoring order. States are obliged to provide their own protection, and when survival is at stake, the end justifies the means. Where there is no rational choice, there can be no ethics. As the philosophers say - "you must mean you can". No one can accuse you of not doing the impossible.

By this logic, conflating ethics and foreign policy is a category error, like asking whether a knife sounds good, not whether it cuts well... It follows that, in order to evaluate a president's foreign policy, we need only ask whether it works, not whether it works. is it moral.

While that view has some merit, it sidesteps complex issues by oversimplifying them. The absence of a world government does not mean the absence of international order entirely. Some foreign policy issues are related to the survival of the nation state, but most are not. For example, after World War II, the US participated in several wars, but none of them were necessary for survival. And many important foreign policy decisions on human rights, climate change or Internet freedom are not related to war at all.

In fact, most foreign policy issues are about trade-offs between values ​​that require choices, rather than the application of a strict formula national interests. A cynical French official told me: “Like double I define what is good for the interests of France. Morality is not important". He did not seem to understand that the statement itself was a moral judgment. This tautology, or at best a triviality, says that all states try to act in their national interest. An important question is which way leaders choose to define and realize those national interests in different conditions.

In addition, whether we like it or not, Americans constantly make moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. (...) For example, after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in his country's consulate in Istanbul, Trump was criticized for ignoring obvious evidence of a brutal crime for the sake of good relations with the Saudi crown prince.

Liberal New York Times described Trump's statement about Khashoggi as "recklessly transactional, devoid of facts", while the conservative Wall Street Journal stated that "we do not know any US president, not even among the harsh pragmatists such as R. Nixon or L. Johnson, who would write such a public statement without paying any attention to the enduring values ​​and principles of America". Oil, arms sales and regional stability are national interests, but they are also values ​​and principles that are attractive to others. How can they be combined?

Unfortunately, many judgments about ethics and contemporary US foreign policy are haphazard or poorly thought out, and much of the ongoing debate focuses on Trump's personality. My new book "Do Morals Matter?” tries to correct that by showing that some of Trump's moves are not without precedent when it comes to US presidents since World War II. An astute journalist once told me: "Trump is not unique; he is extreme”. More importantly, Americans rarely have a clear idea of ​​the criteria by which we judge foreign policy. We praise presidents, like R. Reagan, for the moral clarity of their statements, as if well-expressed good intentions were enough to make ethical judgments. Ali V. Wilson and Dz. Bush showed that good intentions without adequate means to achieve them can lead to ethically bad results, such as the Treaty of Versailles after World War I or Bush's invasion of Iraq. Or we judge the president only by the results. Some analysts believe that R. Nixon ended the war in Vietnam, but he sacrificed 21.000 Americans to create an "appropriate interval" to save his reputation. It turned out to be an unimportant pause on the road to defeat.

Good moral reasoning must be three-dimensional, measured, and must balance intentions, consequences, and means. Foreign policy must be understood accordingly. In addition, an ethical foreign policy must take into account the importance of maintaining an institutional order that promotes moral interests, in addition to specific important actions such as helping dissidents or a persecuted group in another country. And it is important to take into account the ethical consequences of "doing nothing", such as President H. Truman's willingness to lead to a stalemate during the Korean War and be politically punished in his country, instead of following General Douglas MacArthur's recommendations on the use of nuclear weapons.

As Sherlock Holmes observes, you can learn a lot from a dog that doesn't bark. It is absurd to claim that ethics will play no role in the foreign policy debates expected this year. We should admit that we always use moral reasoning to judge foreign policy, and we should learn to do it better.

The author is a professor at Harvard University Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2020.

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