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.
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.