Can Great Power Politics Be Ethical?
Commentator
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a meditation on power politics, also cross-posted at
. I have a piece up at trying out a (new for me) genre — political fiction. By the way, I’m setting up a (rule-of-thumb) schedule for this Substack — posting on politics early in the week, on culture later in the week, and then on whatever I feel like over the weekend (sometimes fiction, sometimes something a little more whimsical).Best,
Sam
CAN GREAT POWER POLITICS BE ETHICAL?
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.
Pointed and thoughtful as always good sir. I’m curious what might be the subsequent process of thought for average citizens like me and you if the strategy weren’t, in fact, defensible. There’s a lot of talk about what SHOULD be done in response to one of the most complex civilian, military, and ethical quandaries in modern history, but what really happens once we decide the American (i.e Israeli) policy is no longer defensible? What does that even mean for people like you and me? Does it mean writing essays extolling the virtues of a better way? Such is the conundrum of the liberal mindset: we have plenty of well-intentioned ideas about what or what not to do, but such a moralistic stance, paradoxically, becomes as much of an ethical straight jacket as many of the politics of power you mentioned.
I need a whiskey.
You assert "...The last three quarters of a century of international relations has basically, unequivocally, been a failure...", I see them as a time where the U.S. did much more good than harm, and many problems solved. The Soviet, French and British empires largely disappeared; the standard of living in the developing world has improved in ways unimaginable at the start of the period (for instance, no one would have predicted that India would largely be free of periodic starvation years) and problems unforeseen that seemed insoluble (like AIDS in Africa) were addressed by a concerted international effort led by the U.S. Much of this was not inevitable or simply luck but due to the policies adopted by the strong.
And some problems that now are convulsing us are products of the successes over the past decades. China is example number one. Right now as best I can tell we are tied in knots because China is building very cheap electric cars that they want to export. I am trying to see the problem with this in a world that is frying.
Now the problems the world faces are long and daunting. But I think the past decades can easily be seen as a time when more times than not the U.S. acted for the good of the world, rather than in our narrow self-interest. That does not mean we did not do plenty of "bad" or self-serving actions. But on a net basis, I think the scales can be seen as favoring the U.S. as a actor looking for the common good, rather than completely self-serving; and even if one sees the balance tilted the other way, there are actions by the U.S. that should be placed in "acting for the greater good" side of the ledger.