A REALISTIC NATION STATE

By Gabriel Moran

For the past fifty years United States foreign policy has been dominated by a school of thinking that is called Arealism.@ The fact that the people who think this way have been able to appropriate the presumptuous self-description Arealist@ is evidence of their success in running the country. The two clear attempts to change direction happened after 1960 and after 1976. Everyone knows how these two attempts ended. John Kennedy=s proclamation that we would Abear any burden, pay any price, meet any hardship@ for the success of liberty everywhere in the world ended in the tragedy of Vietnam. Jimmy Carter=s attempt to attend to human rights in South America, Africa and elsewhere ended in double-digit inflation and hostages in Iran.

After 1992 there were sporadic attempts by Bill Clinton to change the basis of foreign policy. Some fragile successes were achieved but there was a certain messiness in rethinking the way that the United States should interact with other nations.

The ARealist@ Premise

Beneath U.S. foreign policy lies a very clear ethical principle which is proclaimed to beArealistic@; anyone who questions it is by definition unrealistic or idealistic. Nevertheless, what is so confidently assumed to be realistic is a peculiar ideological doctrine that is theoretically thin and practically destructive.

The principle I refer to is a belief that the world consists of individuals who are naturally selfish. Each of these individuals has a single self-interest: an unquenchable desire for power.

To any objection by an individual that he or she does not think that way, the Arealist@ readily acknowledges that an individual can - and often should - mask the selfishness. Codes of morality have been established to restrain selfishness. Religions, especially Christianity and Buddhism, preach selflessness. To the limited extent that religions are successful, the world is a kinder place. In contemporary writing, morality is equated with Aaltruism,@ that is, sacrificing oneself for the other person.

Political Arealists@ maintain that although altruism can sometimes work at the level of individuals, it is impossible for nations. To invite a nation to act unselfishly would be suicidal. A nation state that thinks it is acting altruistically has deluded itself and lost sight of national self-interest. A nation can have only one interest, the accumulation of power. Morality is a term that should not intrude upon discussions of international politics.

In the United States of the twentieth-first century, the immediate source of Arealism@ is a secularized version of Christianity. What is thought to be realistic is a Christian doctrine of Aman the sinner@ without any doctrine of grace or redemption. It is difficult to imagine a more depressing view of the human situation than belief in original sin but no belief in God. And yet U.S. foreign policy since World War II has been built on that premise.

A key figure was Reinhold Niebuhr who had astounding influence on government thinking during and after World War II. Niebuhr believed in a God of grace and redemption. Unfortunately, he was far more successful in convincing government leaders that this is a world wracked by original sin.

Niebuhr had attained prominence with his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society. Government leaders loved that title. Morality is necessary and good for Aman.@ Individuals should be generous, compassionate, self-sacrificing. These qualities will create a morally good citizenry, a nation worth defending by government officials who operate in the amoral or immoral world of Asociety@ or nation. George Kennan, speaking for political Arealists,@ called Reinhold Niebuhr Athe father of us all.@

I think that in the last decade of his life before his death in 1971 Niebuhr had some sense of the monster he had created. He acknowledged that his view of Aman@ was too narrowly Augustinian. He wished he had paid more attention to Jewish and Catholic thought. He wanted to Asoften@ his realism or apply it Aless consistently.@ But there was no way out from within the categories he still assumed. He was writing in the midst of the Vietnam fiasco which provided powerful evidence that national idealism does not work. For Niebuhr, Arealism@ remained the only alternative.

That the Unites States got into Vietnam by misplaced idealism is largely true. It should not be forgotten, however, that the last six years of the war were fought by Arealists@ in the White House. Henry Kissinger, a dedicated Arealist,@ tried to extricate the United States on the basis of self-interest and not morality. In The White House Years, Kissinger writes that ACambodia was not a moral issue...what we faced was an essentially tactical choice.@ Kissinger is right on one point; Cambodia is indeed not the name of a Amoral issue,@ but the name of a country whose people were devastated by the needs of Kissinger=s Atactical choice.@

Until 1989, the United States=s narrow vision of the world could be excused on the basis that it was confronted by a power which was seeking world domination. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a crucial moment for the United States to rethink its position vis-a-vis other nation states and to move away from its crude view of power. It is difficult to remember the quaint phrase Apeace dividend@ that was so common a decade ago.

This is where realism gets a country when its military budget is more than the next six countries in the world combined and it does 80 percent of the world=s development of weapons. If you begin by assuming that everyone is your potential enemy, then it is not surprising to discover that everyone is a potential enemy. And in order to Adefend@ yourself in a world of immoral nations, no amount of military hardware will ever be enough.

The Alternative ro ARealism@

Can the United States rethink its outlook on the world? That was unlikely to happen without a drastic change in the world=s situation. The change initiated by the events of September 11 is the kind of thing that has the potential to bring about a fundamental change in thinking. One can hope that the present crisis will lead to a less arrogant, more moral country. But a crisis is just as likely to drive the United States further into paranoia.

There are also cooperative ventures that U.S. citizens and companies engage in. Along that route some basis of mutual respect may be built. Artists, athletes, overseas volunteers and business people often have a saner view of the world than political Arealists@ in the government.

A rethinking of the ethical basis of foreign policy would require a fundamental change in language. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1964 that a friend had said a better name for his book would have been Not So Moral Man in His Less Moral Communities. That would have been an improvement. One should indeed be realistic about the struggle between good and evil in the world, as Niebuhr was trying to warn. But the struggle runs through the middle of each person and each community.

The phrase Aself-interest@ is a near contradiction. AInterest@ (inter-est) is what is between. A person does not have an interest; a person in interacting with other persons discovers a multiplicity of interests within the self. The moral struggle is to discover which interests of the self should be given first place; that will determine what kind of self the person becomes. Undeniably the person needs power to survive and prosper but there are many kinds of power. The power to dominate the last man is one crude form of power. Receiving or giving affection can also be powerful - is in fact close to the root meaning of power as receptiveness.

Morality regulates persons in their dealing with other persons in a variety of communal and corporate structures. If one starts with the language of Aindividual/society,@ then there is a dichotomy whenever morality is discussed. But continuity exists between persons acting in small communities and persons acting as business and political leaders. Both persons and nations always have one or more interests at play in decisions. But the interests of others can and should be integral to the actions.

Christian and Jewish morality does not say love your neighbor instead of yourself. Rather, it says love God and the love that is received makes it possible to love your neighbor as yourself. Contemporary writers who equate morality and altruism seem unaware that morality had been discussed for thousands of years before the invention of the term altruism in the 1850s. Only if one assumes that the human being is Anaturally selfish@ does altruism become the hopelessly idealistic alternative.

The alternative to selfishness/altruism is mutual pacts in which persons and nations strive to find common interests. The United Nations represents a fragile structure of pacts between nations. It is tempting to be cynical about the United Nations and its inefficiencies. But the United States=s foot-dragging on everything from signing treaties to paying its dues can only worsen the condition of the United Nations. The only present alternative to cooperation at the United Nations is the United States deciding what will be done militarily, diplomatically, economically.

Even if the United States were being run by very wise people, the attitude would be outrageous. The United States is being run by people who are not evil but who rely on their own narrow view of what is the Anational interest.@

I think the tragic misunderstanding of morality by advocates of Arealism@ can be seen in George Kennan, whose attempt to state his position is strangely contorted by his assumption of what Amorality@ means. At the beginning of his essay AMorality and Foreign Policy@ (Foreign Affairs, 1985), Kennan says that he wishes to correct the misconception that he has advocated an amoral or even an immoral foreign policy. He then proceeds to say that morality should be kept out of foreign policy. If there is another possibility than amoral, immoral and moral, I am at a loss to know what it could be. Despite his insistent protest to the contrary, his views in that essay can be called deeply moral. For example, Kennan writes: AIt seems to me than our purposes prosper only when something happens in the mind of another person, and perhaps in our own mind as well, which makes it easier for all of us to see each other=s problems and prejudices with detachment and to live peaceably side by side.@ How can that possibly be done except by people who, with their own moral convictions, see other people and other nations as moral agents?

One of the most revealing statements by Kennan comes at the end of the essay where he reflects on morality=s relation to religion. He asks Awhether there is any such thing as morality that does not rest, consciously or otherwise, on some foundation of religious faith, for the renunciation of self-interest, which is what morality implies, can never be realized by purely secular and materialistic considerations.@ He raises an important question about the ultimate basis of morality. But in asking the question he manifests confusion on two points: 1)the assumption that religion is the renunciation of self-interest 2)the belief that morality implies the renunciation of self-interest.

Kennan is caught where Augustine was when he wrote The City of God and pitted the love of God against the love of man. But Augustine came to realize that the earthly city contains relatively just and relatively unjust regimes. The love of human beings, including oneself, is a love of God=s creation. Ironically the United States=s foreign policy is guided by The City of God; the irony, of course, is that the United States=s city of God is lacking God. Into that vacuum goes the national interest as defined by Arealism.@ And while the United States worries over the niceties of Achurch-state separation@ its foreign policy is built upon a badly digested Christianity.