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.
Thank you A. Jay. I'm very early in wrestling with these ideas. The 'realist' - or cynical - school can lead to some pretty absurd conclusions. Vietnam is probably chalked up under its ledger. So is the arguments of the Joint Chiefs in the '50s arguing for a preemptive first strike against the USSR.
I got pretty interested in Campbell Craig's Glimmer of a New Leviathan which juxtaposes Morgenthau with Reinhold Niebuhr. And I think a great deal of American policymaking is a debate between these schools of thought - presidents like Eisenhower and Obama espousing Niebuhr-ish views and contending with the Morgenthauian perspectives of their senior advisors.
I agree that these are perennial questions. I don't know what the 'right' answer is and suspect that there is none.
Niebuhr I see as a genuine realist, and Obama, whom you mention, and Biden now. Niebuhr was a realist, in part, because he was empirical. Despite his faith, he changed dramatically over time, based on experience. In contrast, far left idealogues, no less than the cynics, are driven by an idée fixe that excludes contrary evidence of how the world works. They would barely distinguish, if at all, between a cynic and a realist.
Something cynics miss, I think, is that despite how ineffectual the world's multilateral legal constructs and institutions are -- and I agree with you, they are -- the fact that we've ever even managed to evolve them, and on so massive a scale, against all the amoral, power-driven forces that threaten to overwhelm us, is pretty remarkable. That can't be discounted.
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.
Thank you Josh! Yeah, these kinds of thought experiments are fun and I'm sort of coming late to the party. Didn't know about your political science major! That's a really important, interesting question - what does the Gandhi/MLK vision look like when applied internationally. I did take a course in college, which laid out on the one hand the idea that states are constructed through the monopolization of violence and then contrasted that with Gandhi/MLK. Obama's 2016 interview in The Atlantic is very interesting. He claimed that his decision not to strike at Assad was his 'liberation' from the Washington Playbook of violence. I'm reading right now about a Byzantine emperor who seemed to do very well by bestowing mercy on defeated rivals - and thereby encouraging other rivals to surrender. But I understand why it's so difficult for states to act this way. I do find it very difficult to imagine Israel not retaliating for 10/7 or America not hunting down Bin Laden after 9/11. It seems like sooner or later you always end up being in this play of deterrence and retaliatory violence.
I have a different perspective, perhaps because I was born in 1962 and was well aware of the Cold War. Until 1989, there was a shadow of fear over America and presumably Russia as well that the world could really end.
That we won the Cold War without having to fight the USSR was to me a very big deal. Arguably the most important event/non-event in the history of the last 79 years.
So where I would differ with you both is that on a continuum of whether the post WW2 era has been positive or negative in terms of international relations, I would give the world at least a "B" for not destroying itself and not having another use of nuclear weapons in a conflict.
If you told the statesmen of 1945 that this was the result, I think they would have been very surprised and very pleased.
I kind of misspoke in my post. When I said "international relations," I meant more multi-lateral, conciliatory relations of the sort practiced by the UN. The world did succeed in not destroying itself, but a great deal of the credit for that goes, I think, to the principle of deterrence. The US building up forces in Germany. The US fighting in Korea. Once a balance was achieved through the application of force, then it was possible to maintain some kind of order. What played no real part in that - unfortunately - was some wise multi-lateral council working everything out diplomatically (which was what FDR I think genuinely hoped from Yalta and then from the creation of the UN).
With that perspective I agree. In some ways, a mostly ineffectual organization like the UN is worse than no organization at all because it can induce complacency and make it almost impossible to attempt build something more substantive.
I grew up during the Cold War, but didn't understand the dynamics well enough to feel the imminent threat it posed. But this did fuel a lot of doomsday storytelling in my Pentecostal circles.
"B" is above average -- maybe a "C" for avoiding the worst case scenario? 😊
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.
Thank you A. Jay. I'm very early in wrestling with these ideas. The 'realist' - or cynical - school can lead to some pretty absurd conclusions. Vietnam is probably chalked up under its ledger. So is the arguments of the Joint Chiefs in the '50s arguing for a preemptive first strike against the USSR.
I got pretty interested in Campbell Craig's Glimmer of a New Leviathan which juxtaposes Morgenthau with Reinhold Niebuhr. And I think a great deal of American policymaking is a debate between these schools of thought - presidents like Eisenhower and Obama espousing Niebuhr-ish views and contending with the Morgenthauian perspectives of their senior advisors.
I agree that these are perennial questions. I don't know what the 'right' answer is and suspect that there is none.
Niebuhr I see as a genuine realist, and Obama, whom you mention, and Biden now. Niebuhr was a realist, in part, because he was empirical. Despite his faith, he changed dramatically over time, based on experience. In contrast, far left idealogues, no less than the cynics, are driven by an idée fixe that excludes contrary evidence of how the world works. They would barely distinguish, if at all, between a cynic and a realist.
Something cynics miss, I think, is that despite how ineffectual the world's multilateral legal constructs and institutions are -- and I agree with you, they are -- the fact that we've ever even managed to evolve them, and on so massive a scale, against all the amoral, power-driven forces that threaten to overwhelm us, is pretty remarkable. That can't be discounted.
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.
Thank you Josh! Yeah, these kinds of thought experiments are fun and I'm sort of coming late to the party. Didn't know about your political science major! That's a really important, interesting question - what does the Gandhi/MLK vision look like when applied internationally. I did take a course in college, which laid out on the one hand the idea that states are constructed through the monopolization of violence and then contrasted that with Gandhi/MLK. Obama's 2016 interview in The Atlantic is very interesting. He claimed that his decision not to strike at Assad was his 'liberation' from the Washington Playbook of violence. I'm reading right now about a Byzantine emperor who seemed to do very well by bestowing mercy on defeated rivals - and thereby encouraging other rivals to surrender. But I understand why it's so difficult for states to act this way. I do find it very difficult to imagine Israel not retaliating for 10/7 or America not hunting down Bin Laden after 9/11. It seems like sooner or later you always end up being in this play of deterrence and retaliatory violence.
I have a different perspective, perhaps because I was born in 1962 and was well aware of the Cold War. Until 1989, there was a shadow of fear over America and presumably Russia as well that the world could really end.
That we won the Cold War without having to fight the USSR was to me a very big deal. Arguably the most important event/non-event in the history of the last 79 years.
So where I would differ with you both is that on a continuum of whether the post WW2 era has been positive or negative in terms of international relations, I would give the world at least a "B" for not destroying itself and not having another use of nuclear weapons in a conflict.
If you told the statesmen of 1945 that this was the result, I think they would have been very surprised and very pleased.
Josh, I may be too easy of a grader!
Hi David,
I kind of misspoke in my post. When I said "international relations," I meant more multi-lateral, conciliatory relations of the sort practiced by the UN. The world did succeed in not destroying itself, but a great deal of the credit for that goes, I think, to the principle of deterrence. The US building up forces in Germany. The US fighting in Korea. Once a balance was achieved through the application of force, then it was possible to maintain some kind of order. What played no real part in that - unfortunately - was some wise multi-lateral council working everything out diplomatically (which was what FDR I think genuinely hoped from Yalta and then from the creation of the UN).
- Sam
With that perspective I agree. In some ways, a mostly ineffectual organization like the UN is worse than no organization at all because it can induce complacency and make it almost impossible to attempt build something more substantive.
I grew up during the Cold War, but didn't understand the dynamics well enough to feel the imminent threat it posed. But this did fuel a lot of doomsday storytelling in my Pentecostal circles.
"B" is above average -- maybe a "C" for avoiding the worst case scenario? 😊