Eisenhower's Theory of Power and Morals
NIEBUHR, REINHOLD
Eisenhowers Theory of Power and Morals Moral sentimentality is dangerous in the greatest center of power in the world By Reinhold Niebuhr Evidence has been accumulating for some time that the...
...Israel is a thorn in the flesh of these oil-rich monarchs and of Colonel Nasser...
...Eisenhowers Theory of Power and Morals Moral sentimentality is dangerous in the greatest center of power in the world By Reinhold Niebuhr Evidence has been accumulating for some time that the President has some very naive ideas on the relation of power to morality in politics...
...One does not have to be a moral cynic or subscribe to the dictum that "might makes right" to feel uncomfortable about the President's preachments...
...After all, despite his naive preachments, he is trying to keep Communist influence out of the Middle East and incidentally trying to protect some very important oil interests of our own in the region...
...We are the benign corner policeman who tells the little boy to give back the marbles he gained in a fight...
...He must have some other source of prestige...
...In the case of the State of Israel, the President was adamant that the little nation must quit Gaza for the sake of vindicating the moral principle that force can no longer be used as an instrument of national policy...
...These observations do not imply a Machiavellian cynicism...
...Those realities make it inevitable that the great nations, particularly Russia and America, cannot be disciplined, and that even small nations cannot be effectively disciplined unless the great nations reach an agreement...
...Few of our European allies and few of our Congressional leaders agreed with the President...
...It is at least a more comprehensible policy than that which is implied in the suggestion that Israel must risk extinction for the sake of vindicating a principle...
...It is all the more frightening since the evidence was multiplied just before and after a national election which gave the author of these strange ideas a secure tenure of another four years in the world's greatest seat of power...
...We will not promise anything, for that would obscure the moral lesson...
...That would spoil the whole tableau...
...Luce, our former Ambassador to Italy, was nearer to the truth when she observed that the future of the United Nations would be imperiled if Israel did submit...
...Probably he once honestly thought he would better the lot of the miserable Egyptian peasants, but he has not done so...
...We thought this magnanimity would at least impress the Communist and uncommitted worlds...
...The President felt very strongly that if Israel were allowed to keep any of the spoils of her successful venture...
...To comprehend it at all, one must piece together the implications of his various moral preachments and try to make a pattern of reason out of them...
...they cannot play a part, they must be the part they play...
...Nasser and the oil monarchs have had a vivid lesson in the dependence of the European economy upon their resources of oil and transportation...
...What can he do but seek political prestige by playing the part of the victimized but essentially powerful monarch whom the greatest nations on earth woo, pleading with him to relent a little in his fury, seeing that we have done our best to teach the miscreant a moral lesson...
...He is able to perform this significant task while taking time off from the even more arduous task of circumventing the law in the case of Kashmir...
...The reluctance of our European allies and of our own Congressional leaders to apply sanctions to a nation seeking survival in a hostile world, and the fortunate offer of a compromise proposal by Foreign Minister Lester Pearson of Canada, obviated the necessity of applying sanctions through the United Nations upon a desperate Israel...
...He was able to hold to his position only because the American Presidency offers a unique level of independent power...
...The United Nations is a very useful instrument of diplomacy, and we would be seriously deprived if it perished...
...The second, even more dubious, is that the United Nations embodies the conscience of mankind and is the current expression of the "moral law" he is so anxious to vindicate...
...He seems to think that the uneasy authority of the United Nations is identical with the reign of law, and predicted that if Israel would not submit, the very existence of the UN would be placed in jeopardy...
...The defeat by Israel put an end to his dreams of military glory...
...But Mr...
...If one talks about power, one does not necessarily mean battalions...
...the reign of law would be threatened...
...Dictators must take themselves seriously...
...From the beginning of the Suez crisis to the tension over Israel's refusal to quit the Gaza strip without guarantees, General Eisenhower's policy has given a very vivid—even frightening —picture of this naivete...
...One can only admire its complete irrelevance and shiver for the future prospects of the nation and our allies, who are bound to us by reason of our strength though they may have many misgivings about the wisdom which directs it...
...It does not matter that Israel ventured into Gaza to prevent force from being used against her and to eliminate the source of most of the commando raids upon her borders...
...Might it not be good policy to sacrifice Israel for the sake of wooing the Arabs and Nasser...
...But how can Nasser relent...
...but he cannot think of the past, he must think of the future...
...If he is at all reflective, he must find humor in this situation...
...On the basis of this assumption, we cannot allow any nation to retain the fruits of violating the principle...
...For the problem of power spoils the picture of pure morality...
...One may mean merely the manipulation of interest...
...There is no rejoinder for this devastating assertion of "moral leadership," which Arthur Krock extolled as a rare display of "moral courage...
...One needs only to be as realistic as Pascal, who observed that "Justice without power is impotent and power without justice means tyranny," to feel that the man who controls the greatest center of power in the modern world has not thought through the relation of power to justice in politics, particularly in foreign affairs...
...We may have prevented his downfall on the occasion of the British and French invasion...
...There may be moments when he gives a knowing wink to the prompters in the wings—but probably not...
...But we hint that, if the little boy toes the line of high morality and gives back the marbles, we will use our influence with the neighborhood toughs who took the marbles from the little boy in the first place, so that the marbles will be divided more equitably and everyone will have learned his moral lesson...
...Nor are they intended to depreciate a genuine concern for the moral element in foreign policy—only to call attention to the moral sentimentality which is dangerous in any seat of power, particularly in the greatest center of power in the modern world...
...He is a dictator in a miserably poor nation...
...But these latter developments do not obscure the original miscalculations about morality and power which informed the policy of the Administration and created the crisis...
...Thus he could stand upon this moral eminence alone, with the possible companionship of his Secretary of State—a rather pathetic picture for the leader of a great nation...
...One of his presuppositions is undoubtedly that modern conditions of nuclear warfare have absolutely ruled out the "use of force...
...Briefly, the President seems to believe that the moral Tightness of a position is itself the only source of power, that this moral rightness is so important for the preservation of world peace that it is necessary to ask a weak nation to risk extinction for the sake of vindicating the majesty of the law...
...The first assumption of the President's moral code is that force is ruled out in any and all situations...
...Nasser has already proved that the sentiment of gratitude will not dissuade him from his heedless course...
...Menon remains hostile, and Chou En-lai and Khrushchev have warmed up the cold war again...
...These conclusions are dangerous because they allow the Russians to push us around, at the risk of a nuclear war, with little risk in fact because we have broadcast to the world that we will not assume such a risk at any cost...
...What was the logic behind the President's position...
...but if it is what the President thinks it is, we have sunk to the deplorable level of depending for our "moral law" upon V. K. Krishna Menon, who artfully constructs these Arab-Asian majorities which express and interpret the moral law...
...If the President were not so intent on his moral preachments, someone might advise him that any technical means taken to free the European economy of its undue dependence on Middle Eastern oil or Suez transportation would do more to make Nasser and the monarchs reasonable than all our preachments to Israel and all our expectations of gratitude...
...In other words, the President's picture of the United Nations is a dangerously fanciful one because it obscures the power realities in that august body...
...Perhaps this parable pictures the President's policy unfairly...
...He has drawn strictly pacifist conclusions from the dilemma of nuclear stalemate...
...Unhappily we have, by our blindness to the political realities, furnished the instruments of coercion for our oldest allies...
...When Senator Knowland drew back the curtain from the realities and asserted that he would not coerce a small nation as long as the UN could not force the Russians to take their claws off Hungary, the President had the perfect moral answer to this scruple: "Two wrongs do not make a right...
Vol. 40 • March 1957 • No. 10
