Morality and the National Interest

...and infrequently, they are transformed radically by revolutionaries acting to advance what they conceive to be the nation's "true" interests...

...As the Washington Post remarked regarding the President's early speeches and actions on human rights, the messianic strain in American politics has not been expressed so purely since Wilson's time...

...negatively, it means preventing the destruction of a people, or the loss of sovereignty or territory...

...If a way of life defines a nation's more enduring values, the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy poses a means-ends problem that raises profound ethical questions...

...Nevertheless, it is out of such qualities that peoples are formed...

...History has found Woodrow Wilson guilty of the sin of moralism because of the uncompromising quality of so many of his declarations, which contrasted all the more glaringly with the compromises he accepted at Versailles...

...It must acknowledge the existence of institutions and practices necessary to the conduct of diplomacy that have no parallel on an interpersonal level...

...Sovereignty or territory lost can be regained, but once a people is destroyed, the nation it constituted is relegated forever to the pages of history...

...I am wary, rather, of rhetoric belied by deeds: It gives rise to popular cynicism and disaffection, and generates misunderstanding of the critical role moral values play in serving the national interest of a democracy...

...For our purposes, though, a prolonged semantic investigation is unnecessary...

...Sovereignty, the second indispensible attribute of nationhood, permits a country's government to exercise its authority free from external control (except for specific restraints stemming from the voluntary acceptance of international obligations...

...Still, some tendencies toward moralism can be observed...

...Once nationhood is thus defined, it becomes apparent that, positively speaking, national survival involves the continuing existence of a sovereign people inhabiting a given land...

...And unless we reject the nation-state system (as pacifists, anarchists and others have done), we must accept those institutions and practices...

...All other things being equal, it is sovereignty that differentiates a nation from a colony...

...What methods should be employed to protect the national interest...

...A sovereign government is therefore independent, regardless of whether it is democratic or authoritarian...

...it draws its moral outlook from a religious tradition that proclaims the dignity, worth and preciousness of every human being...

...To be sure, these values are not permanently fixed: They normally evolve slowly, in response to changing conditions...

...Any foreign policy which operates under the standard of the national interest," he has written, "must obviously have some reference to the physical, political, cultural entity which we call a nation...

...In a war, for example, it might be in the national interest for a country's leaders to give up some territory in order to make a peace that preserves sovereignty and prevents further loss of lives...

...It is sufficient, first, to establish the context presupposed when some policy or other is said to serve the national interest, and second, to examine its connection to our notions of morality...

...Our conception of morality must certainly take appropriate account of whether we are dealing with the behavior of nations or of individuals...

...In particular, we must recognize that the diplomat's decisions can affect the fate of the nation, and that the calculations influencing those decisions are of a different order from the ones we make in daily life—hence the frequency of compromises reached by diplomats that seem like betrayals of principle to individuals for whom the choice between good and evil is always clear cut...

...Yet as suggestive as the distinction between moral man and immoral society may be, its relevance is limited as it applies to American—or to any—democracy, where men and society are linked in an indissoluble tie...

...On the one hand, since the national interest presupposes survival, perhaps democracies cannot afford to conduct a diplomacy that plays fair when the enemy plays dirty...

...to add to the confusion, it is used both empirically, to describe what the national interest is perceived to be, and normatively, to assert what it ought to be...

...President Carter's Administration is still in its infancy, and any judgment of it would be premature...

...the survival of some significant part of a population is uniquely vital to nationhood...

...A people is not simply a random collection or aggregate of human beings, but an organic totality of some kind, identified by a shared language, religion, ethnic origin, or system of values...

...But for democracies, dilemmas abound...

...Three necessary conditions for nationhood come to mind: a land, sovereignty and a people...

...at times, they are modified more rapidly by leaders bent on reform...

...Reinhold Niebuhr succinctly diagnosed what he considered the heart of the problem by distinguishing "moral" man from "immoral" society...

...Clearly, a variety of combinations is possible, and all of them have at one time or another occurred...

...no prudential considerations can condone various aspects of its conduct of the Vietnam War, or the way it violated democratic due process in the management of foreign policy...

...Similarly, George F. Kennan condemned the tendency of American statesmen to carry over "into affairs of state the concept of right and wrong, the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment," and Morgenthau has repeatedly warned of the risks of relying on moral abstractions to determine foreign policy...

...Given the ambiguity that systematically infects conventional usage of both concepts, no simple answers to these questions are possible...

...On the other hand, sacrificing means to ends can have equally dire consequences: Our century has repeatedly provided object lessons demonstrating how immoral tactics employed ostensibly to serve the national interest contaminated the values they were supposed to foster...

...How should a way of life be defended...

...By definition, then, salus republica supremo lex is the axiom implicit in all discussions of policies advanced in the name of the national interest...

...With this heritage, it is not enough for our leaders to justify their conduct of foreign policy by invoking the national interest...

...Since the three elements are separable, though, ascertaining in concrete situations whether a particular policy serves the national interest may be difficult...

...My objection, of course, is not to the exceptions themselves—on practical grounds they can be shown to do more good than harm to our democratic way of life...

...Due to acoident and history, the specific combination of these characteristics can and does vary significantly from one nation to another: The Swiss are without a common language, religion and ethnic identity, while Americans possess the first but lack the last two...

...In serving the national interest, a country's leaders are commited not merely to protecting their people's continued existence, but to defending both the way of life that identifies them as a people and the moral (or...

...The identification of a given land with a given nation explains why territorial integrity is invariably considered a vital part of the national interest...

...No matter how change occurs, the moral quality of life is vitally affected by whether a nation's government is democratic or totalitarian: by whether or not it permits dissidence and allows the free development and expression of ideas...

...The survival of a political unit such as a nation in its identity is the irreducible minimum, the necessary element of its interest...

...What "style" of diplomacy should prevail...

...It is, of course, not absolutely essential Norman Jacobs, who recently retired as editor of the Foreign Policy Association, currently lives in Paris...

...And although democratic leaders habitually cite imperative reasons of state to justify whatever methods they might choose, they cannot escape the fact that in our way of life morality derives from an ethic where right and wrong, good and evil, are fundamental categories of judgment...

...And from the primacy of survival it follows that under no imaginable circumstances could the pursuit of diplomatic policies deliberately aimed at a nation's destruction ever be in the national interest...

...As one commentator has acutely noted, now no nations violating human rights need apply to buy arms from the U.S.—except friendly oppressors like South Korea and Iran...

...But that does not tell us what a nation is, or what its existence and survival entail...

...All, that is, save one: It can never be in the national interest to sacrifice every inhabitant of the nation for any reason whatsoever...

...National interest alone has a bewildering variety of connotations...

...Under other circumstances, it could conceivably be sensible to temporarily surrender sovereignty in order to maintain territorial integrity or to protect the people...

...Strengthening the Wilson parallel, Carter's sweeping commitments to human rights were soon overtaken by explicit exceptions made in the best tradition of realpolitik...

...as some would contend, immoral) values that way of life incorporates...

...The rebirth of the State of Israel suggests it is even possible for a people to survive indefinitely without any land, provided it enjoys other ties strong enough to preserve its identity...

...How to tighten the link—or bridge the distance—between man and society is the supreme challenge confronting the diplomacy of a democracy...

...that a country retain all of its territory all of the time...

...That brings us to the intimate connection between morality and the national interest...

...The validity of these insights is unquestionable?up to a point...

...Indeed, the seeming disjunction between the principles involved in interstate and interpersonal relations has led some of our most prominent political thinkers to question the relevance and advisability of applying the latter to the conduct of foreign affairs...

...The third component of a nation is its citizenry...

...Hans J. Morgenthau has provided a valuable starting point...

...We need not await history's verdict to condemn the Nixon Administration for immorality...

...Are the two compatible, or must power politics be the name of the game nations play with each other...

...In dictatorships or nations controlled by ideological fanatics, resorting to realpolitik and dirty tricks raises no issue of principle...

...Land is the physical locus a people obviously needs to develop its historic existence...

...Our system of government conceives of the state as existing to serve the individual...

...they have to show how policies designed to protect the way of life of the nation's populace are somehow compatible with the moral principles of the individuals who constitute the populace...