There’s a dark moment somewhere in one’s political education where you come across people like Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, the doctrine of ‘limited war,’ the idea that war and conflict are inherent to the international state of affairs.
Here is Morgenthau’s formulation of it (as paraphrased by Campbell Craig):
What is the duty of a state then in a world of such mayhem? It is to engage in political action. The liberal West had become enamored with scientific, rationalistic means of ameliorating power politics both at home and abroad. Such trusting in reason, Morgenthau wrote, is to “leave the field to the stronger irrational forces which reason will serve.”… The only way to contend with such forces is to act, to pursue power, knowing fully that such action will inevitably bring about injustice and conflict.
The idea is that it’s possible to reach some kind of harmonious balance within a state itself, but those principles simply aren’t operable internationally. Self-interest prevails, and as Campbell puts it (again paraphrasing Morgenthau):
A modern nation can do two things: seize power or eschew that power in favor of a rationalistic plan to change the world. Choosing the latter always means defeat, no matter the intentions, political system, or moral stature of the nation in question.
What’s difficult about Realism (the school of thought associated with Morgenthau) is that you suspect it’s probably right — sort of the same sinking sensation as when you read Machiavelli or Hobbes and take in their dark doctrines.
The last three quarters of a century of international relations has basically, unequivocally, been a failure (and in a way that was almost perfectly predicted by Morgenthau) — the UN does a certain amount of humanitarian good but is nowhere close to the wise council of nations that was envisioned at its founding. The international criminal courts, after the initial leg-up from Nuremberg, have been almost totally incapable of bringing malignant state actors to account.
The actual framework of international relations is widely, if quietly, understood to be pretty much exactly as described by Morgenthau — overlapping zones of national self-interest. And discourse on foreign policy tends to occur in two registers. On the one hand, there are the moral exhortations of the mainstream (largely liberal) press — the urge to ‘do something,’ the deference to ‘international law’ — and then the icier perspectives in Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy magazines, the circumspect language of government missives, which speak to how it’s actually done, what the logic of power actually is. Any time somebody like John Mearsheimer or Kissinger speaks, there is a sudden hush in the room — everybody forgetting their exhortations for a moment, everybody thinking that they’re getting the real low-down, self-interest raised almost to a science.
For proponents of the Realist school, that’s exactly what it is — a science, with its own perverse code of ethics attached. The idea is that not only is it permissible to act violently or even cruelly as part of the maintenance of state power, but that when the situation calls for it you must do so. This is a sensibility that long precedes Morgenthau or Kissinger — it’s the ethic of the ‘statesman,’ a strange figure who for the good of the collective is meant to operate in an amoral realm, in something close to pure reason (picture Machiavelli or Philippe de Commynes or Varys of the Small Council). Benjamin Labatut’s The MANIAC, which I reviewed recently, discusses the attempt made by John von Neumann through game theory to put this ethic on a mathematical footing — although, as Labatut acidly notes, in its pure form that ethic is like “a malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational.”
The question becomes whether there is another way, a better way. To which a random British accent in my imagination pops in to say ‘not bloody likely.’ But the counter-argument there would be the dispute between Hobbes and Locke within the framework of the nation-state, with Hobbes taking a position parallel to Morgenthau/Kissinger and holding that hierarchy and a certain amount of brutality are inevitable and with Locke positing a rival position that has come to rule the day: that the state could be conceived of as a series of voluntary and interlocking contracts, and with state power more or less just a guarantor of the security of private contracts. One school of thought (which is the dominant belief in our society) is that the adoption of Lockean principles represents a new world and sea change in politics — instead of imagining power as being consolidated at the top and then bestowed or devolved as suited the ruler’s prerogative (which was the feudal conception), it was possible to imagine power as originating in private contracts and being deputized to ‘public servants.’
If such a thing were possible within a state, it stood to reason that the same principle should apply internationally. Probably what that meant — different schools of political science have had it — is that states had to have skin in the game. That it wasn’t enough to have the goodwill of international covenants; that states would have to have interlocking trade partnerships to disincentive conflict (this was the theory of Norman Angell, which had the misfortune of being published in 1909, that such networks would prevent the outbreak of any future wars) or had to contribute funds and peacekeepers to a joint body like the UN.
But none of it has happened. The nation-state remains the chief political unit in international affairs, which means also that the size and military power of nation states becomes the arbiter of the dynamics of international affairs (with the Security Council, for instance, making a mockery of all the underlying principles of the UN). Simply put, powerful nations act differently from nations that are less powerful — and if you follow the logic of people like Morgenthau and Kissinger, powerful nations are virtually obligated to act as befits their station.
That logic results in what Obama derisively calls the Washington Playbook, or what Andrew Bacevich excoriates as the Washington Rules. “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow. It’s a playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment. And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses,” said Obama. The emphasis on “overwhelming force,” applied at will anywhere in the world, leads, wrote Bacevich, to “a condition approximating perpetual war” and to a situation like Vietnam in which the bombing of villages was undertaken “in order to affirm the United States’ claim to global primacy and to quash any doubts about American will.” It’s the logic that Biden is adopting in his recent strikes on Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It’s the logic that Israel has adopted in Gaza. “Israel’s most urgent need … is the immediate restoration of our shattered deterrence,” Yossi Klein Halevi wrote after 10/7.
Is it fair? No. Is it just? Almost certainly not. It’s very open to the Chomsky critique of the US and its ‘proxies’ not abiding by the post-war international covenants that they themselves set up. But it is the way things have been for a long time. And in its perverse way, it has its own ethic to it — power exercising its prerogatives; power maintaining its favored imbalances. Is it defensible? That’s a more complicated question than I can really wrap my mind around at the moment, but I do think it’s important as we assess the US’ role in the world, and Israel’s in the Middle East, to at least recognize the terms that we are dealing in. Power politics has its own logic, its own rules, its own slippery morality.
Sam Kahn writes
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This is a perennial and profoundly important question, Sam. I think we have to ask what it means for international politics to be ethical (great-power or not, though great powers certainly intensify the dynamics).
Do we mean that each act, and every policy, committed and pursued by a nation -- considered in a kind of laboratory isolation of ethical analysis, separated from any other act, disconnected from the web of connection and context -- has to possess a purity of purpose and effect?
I think most people would answer in that case "no." But people don't live and nations don’t act in such laboratories.
I also think "realism" is a misnomer for the school of international relations that goes by that name -- and its misnaming skews our thinking. I think it's more properly termed the "cynical" school. It's cynical because it projects the worst in human and national behavior in action and reaction and proposes accordingly. I wouldn't argue too strongly against those perceptions, but to omit the genuine idealism that also motivates people and gives meaning to their lives, and thus sometimes, complexly, nations, too, and that has helped shape the modern world, however feebly, is not "realism." Realism doesn't omit any element of reality.
This brought me back to my Political Science classes, in the early days when I was still a Poly Sci major and loved nothing more than this kind of thought experiment.
Whether it's just or defensible seems almost beside the point: it is the way the world continues to work. How soon the U.S. feels the flip side of this dynamic from a power like China is an open question. Thousands of acres (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of Iowa farmland are Chinese owned. I'm not sure many American realize how vulnerable we are to these truths.
The thinkers you don't mention, Sam, are folks like Gandhi and MLK, Jr. MLK felt that in a nuclear age, it was nonviolence or nonexistence. We forget about that nuclear threat, but I wonder if that is a blind complacency rather than a realistic grasp of our world. Perhaps Gandhi was just a more successful Bernie Sanders, most powerful as the underdog, but lacking a vision coherent enough to succeed in the position of ultimate power. Gandhi and MLK show the power of nonviolence for the oppressed.
I was a thoroughgoing liberal in MLK's sense of the term -- believing the potential goodness of human nature -- when 9/11 happened. And I remember wondering aloud with friends if the U.S. might have mobilized more goodwill around the world if they had responded to that tragedy by saying something like, "This pain makes us mindful of the suffering of our brothers and sisters over here," and then dispensing humanitarian aid, or some other charitable act that would have been far less expensive and perhaps much more powerful in dispelling the venom that built toward the 9/11 attack (which was decades in the making). At the time, I really believed that all we were doing by going to war was ensuring that the cycle would continue. As it effectively has, at great cost.
As you say, we have never seen, in the modern age, a nation state act with anything like genuine charity in response to a violent wrong. Vladimir Putin is perhaps the best example of why that continues to seem unlikely. It's sobering, but I still wonder if Hobbes and Kissinger were right, and the Ghandis, MLKs, and Bernies offer a quixotic vision, or if the current model is just the only one we've tried.
At the risk of growing windy, one of my clients (whose writing I hope to help promote on Substack soon) has riffed with me about how arbitrary the representation of reality offered by quantum computing is. Any form of computing offers a representation of our world, but he compares it to standing in a field and looking only at the ground beneath one's feet -- deliberately omitting the rest of the field from the logic of the computing model. In that sense, the world *as it is* is actually the world *as it is within a certain paradigm.* I still wonder if many viable alternatives remain untested, untried.