Morality and foreign policy

Powerful states are generally `satisfied powers' which uphold the status quo. The weak are revisionists, agitators who seek change. Common to both is the task of devising an agreed world order, which is thus invested with legitimacy.

"TO the reticent nations, including the United States, I'd say there is such a thing as a global conscience and now is the time to listen to it," Canada's Prime Minister Paul Martin aptly reminded the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Montreal in December. The allusion to the U.S.' opposition to the Kyoto Protocol drew from the U.S. Ambassador Daniel Wilkins, on December 13, one of the insolent remarks which American envoys, inebriated with power undiluted with propriety, have made their hallmark. The U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Alexander Vershbow, let loose a fusillade of ill-bred comments on both Koreas no sooner had he arrived in Seoul last October. The pattern, so familiar to us, reflects the mindset of their country's rulers. They recognise no checks on their power, legal or moral. Treaties are political documents, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., the egregious John Bolton, famously said; that is, they do not bind.

The U.S. Declaration of Independence, one of the truly great documents in history, was proclaimed avowedly, on July 4, 1776, out of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind". Two centuries later, the world has shrunk to a global village and international public opinion is an assertive reality. President George W. Bush and his team of neo-conservatives treat it with contempt and claim to be "realists" who are determined to break from the "idealists" who preceded them.

Their words and deeds find a resonance in their Indian counterparts, who, deriding Jawaharlal Nehru as an idealist, proclaim themselves realists, with little awareness of what realpolitik means. India's growing power is an intoxicant, and their recipe is the same as that of the Americans whom they ardently court - be unilateralist when you can; multilateralist when you must. Military power is all that matters. Legitimacy and morality are irrelevant abstractions.

Professor D.C. Watt, Professor of International History at the University of London, recalls that the term `realpolitik' was coined by the German publicist Ludwig Von Rochau in his book Grundsatze der Realpolitik in 1853. But, he warns, it "is to be distinguished from a policy of selfish national interest or from a ruthless reliance on naked power". Every single authority on the subject utters the same warning. Morality is not irrelevant in foreign relations; only, it is not decisive either. An individual is free to sacrifice himself for a principle. No responsible statesman would send his country to doom for any such reason.

Leaders do disservice to, both, the truth and to their people when they make claims to morality. The claims are false; the people are misled and turn on the leaders when things go wrong. As Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook's remark on May 12, 1997, soon after Labour was voted to power - "our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension" - came to haunt him in his brief tenure. Nehru came to be derided because he made tall claims to ethics while pursuing a foreign policy that was governed by the national interest, narrowly conceived, and executed with arrogance and ineptness - especially vis-a-vis Pakistan and China and other neighbours. Its consequences were attributed, not to incompetence, but to morality. Hence, the preposterous assertions that "India's strategic world view shifted from moralspeak to realpolitik"; after Pokhran II on May 11, 1998, particularly.

In an incisive analysis of The Ethics of Realism, John C. Hulsman and Amatol Lieven point out that the U.S. "openly adjusts its public conscience according to its geopolitical advantage, talking loudly about democratic morality in cases that suit it while remaining silent on others".

Ethical realism is characterised by prudence; alike in defining goals and devising the means. Neocons pursue the self-interest in the guise of morality and adopt any means available to secure their ends. "The Iraq war and its aftermath have been the first real test of the neo-conservative approach in action. It is not an anomaly of the neo-conservative philosophy, as some have argued. Rather, it springs fully formed like Athena from neo-conservatism's head. In other words, if the neo-conservative philosophy continues directly or indirectly to shape the national debate, then in certain circumstances `wars of choice' like that in Iraq will remain entirely possible in the future" (The National Interest; summer, 2005; emphasis added, throughout). The Roman historian Tacitus had the British chieftain Calgacus declaim before a battle with the invading Romans: "They make a desert, and they call it peace."

Striking aphorisms like this one of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, who unified Italy, must be read in context and not pressed too far: "If we were to do for ourselves what we are doing for Italy, we should be great rogues." Lesser men cannot invoke this for lesser causes. Hubris is an inherent trait in such; not prudence. Exceptionalism leads to unilateralism. As Owen Harries said in a lecture in Sydney on October 29, 2004, "there is something intrinsically nutty about using one's claimed moral superiority to justify one's adoption of lower ethical standards. To insist on the right to double standards - as American neo-conservatives like Robert Kagan are explicitly doing today - or to operate blatantly in terms of them, is to undermine one's own moral position and to store up trouble in the form of cumulating resentment and lack of credibility. Neo-conservatives often charge realists with exercising `moral equivalence'. `Moral equivalence' is a charge that has to be invoked with great care if it is not to become simply a device for deflecting criticism and stifling debate" ("Power, Morality, and Foreign Policy"; Orbis, Fall 2005).

Consider a classic exercise of prudence, a gift with which America's great Founding Fathers were blessed. France supported the cause of American independence and signed a treaty of alliance with the U.S. In 1792, in the War of the First Coalition, it was ranged against Britain, Austria, Prussia, Sardinia and the United Netherlands. President George Washington's Proclamation of Neutrality, on April 22, 1793, drew fire from idealists who advocated support to France. Alexander Hamilton's articles in reply, written under the pseudonyms "Pacificas" and "Americanus", are classics of their kind.

He wrote: "There would be no proportion between the mischiefs and perils to which the United States would expose themselves, by embarking in the war, and the benefit which the nature of their stipulation aims at securing to France, or that which it would be in their power actually to render her by becoming a party.

"This disproportion would be a valid reason for not executing the guarantee. All contracts are to receive a reasonable construction. Self-preservation is the first duty of a nation; and though in the performance of stipulations relating to war, good faith requires that its ordinary hazards should be fairly met, because they are directly contemplated by such stipulations, yet it does not require that extraordinary and extreme hazards should be run...

"Indeed, the rule of morality in this respect is not precisely the same between nations as between individuals. The duty of making its own welfare the guide of its actions, is much stronger upon the former than upon the later; ... Existing millions, and for the most part future generations, are concerned in the present measures of a government; while the consequences of the private actions of an individual ordinarily terminate with himself, or are circumscribed within a narrow compass... . The obligation to assist the cause of liberty must be deduced from the merits of that cause and from the interest we have in its support."

From 1807 to 1815, during the Napoleonic Wars, Thomas Jefferson repeatedly changed his views from supporting "an English ascendancy on the sea" to support to Napoleon; all for ensuring a balance of power in Europe.

It is a most instructive debate. The participants' views are set out in extenso. A Canadian scholar, James Eayrs, came down heavily on the side of morality in lectures he delivered at the University of Toronto, which it published in 1969 (Right and Wrong in Foreign Policy). Eayrs urged a "sceptical realism" while denouncing realpolitik as well as "Pharisean idealism" whose believers avow that their foreign policy is always right. "Pharisean idealism in recent years has been practised most spectacularly by the U.S. government; and of all Americans, John Foster Dulles has the most celebrated reputation for Pharisean statement."

He overlooked Nehru's equal claims to such distinctions. Nehru had no qualms about seeking, unsuccessfully though, an alliance with the U.S. in 1948-49. But he ridiculed America's allies, especially the South-East Asian states ("Coca Cola countries"). Remember the Pharisee who "prayed thus with himself: `O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioner, unjust, adulterous... "' (Luke; 18, 9).

Particularly relevant are Eayrs' censures on the slick professional diplomat who prefers cleverness to good sense and "intellectuals of the strategic community" who speak glibly of realpolitik. "It is as though foreign offices have built into their basements some sort of low temperature chamber where fledgling foreign service officers deposit their consciences on recruitment for redemption only on retirement." He quotes Louis Halle: "Most career diplomats, like most of us others, have no aim except to get on with their careers." Talk of morality leaves them cold; bar some exceptional ones, of course. "The scientific intellectual" and "the defence intellectual" likewise become, in their preoccupations, "somewhat deficient in moral sensitivity... and succumb to the sickness of brutal realism in its most sadistic and disagreeable form".

Eayrs is more censorious than reflective. We speak of nations and of governments. But they are run by men. We tend to believe that social and economic forces shape events and underestimate the role of humans who lead them. Men have shaped history. Leadership matters. Witness: Gandhi, Nehru and Churchill, to name a very few. Only a theologian and philosopher can understand the emotions that are at work in the heart of man when he becomes a representative of his people. In 1932, the Reverend Reinhold Niebuhr regretted that hardly anywhere "from either academic or ecclesiastical morality, does one hear a word about the limits of morality in politics". He made good the omission in a pioneering classic, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932).

Six decades later, Francis Fukuyama wrote: "Niebuhr's book bears re-reading to remind us that a realistic morality is not the same thing as amoral realism; that power even in the service of justice, must recognise its own limitations, and that democracies were capable of their own kind of hubris" ("Significant Books of the Last 75 Years"; Foreign Affairs, September-October, 1997).

Man's natural impulses like greed and the will to power can never be controlled by reason alone; only by countervailing power which, in turn, needs to be bridled. Realistically, there will ever be an uneasy balance of power. The moralist interposes between the two and urges "a rational check upon self-interest and a rational comprehension of the interest of others. Yet, the moralist may be as dangerous a guide as the political realist". He underestimates the strength of the impulses, the realities of coercion, the latent injustices in the social or international order, and places an "unjustified moral onus" on violent adversaries.

Niebuhr holds that: "An adequate political morality must do justice to the insights of both moralists and political realists. It will recognise that human society will probably never escape social conflict, even though it extends the areas of social cooperation. It will try to save society from being involved in endless cycles of futile conflict, not by an effort to abolish coercion in the life of collective man, but by reducing it to a minimum, by counselling the use of such types of coercion as are most compatible with the moral and rational factors in human society and by discriminating between the purposes and ends for which coercion is used... .

"A realistic analysis of the problems of human society reveals a constant and seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of society and the imperatives of a sensitive conscience. This conflict, which could be most briefly defined as the conflict between ethics and politics is made inevitable by the double focus of the moral life."

Niebuhr realised the inherent moral ambiguity, if not the immorality, of the political act. A sense of responsibility invests the act with a moral character. "A nation that is becoming duly aware of its responsibilities and acts accordingly, is moving towards morality."

He criticised George F. Kennan's rejection of the "moralistic-legalistic" approach and advocacy of national interest simpliciter. "Egotism is not the cure for an abstract and pretentious idealism. Preoccupation with national interest can quickly degenerate into moral cynicism even if it is originally prompted by moral modesty."

Next in the line came, in September 1939, Edward Hallet Carr's stunning work The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939. "A card carrying realist" as he calls himself, Prof. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago says that Carr's core arguments "are as relevant today as they were in the dark decade of the 1930s" ("E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Goes On"; International Relations; Sage, June 2005).

Carr points out that while sordid deals are censured, the men who performed are not punished. "The obligation of the state cannot be identified with the obligation of any individual or individuals; and it is the obligation of states which are the subject of international morality." In 1917, Woodrow Wilson pledged that "it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong will apply to individuals and to states". But what is one to say of U.S. Presidents who personally sanctioned assassination of foreign leaders? Were they not criminals liable to prosecution before an international tribunal? In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan approved a directive to "eliminate certain key individuals" in Syria (The Guardian; September 27, 2005).

Carr agrees with Niebuhr that "politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises". He holds that the theory of the divorce between politics and ethics evades the problem of moral justification or use of force. Interestingly, "the attempt to deny the relevance of ethical standards to international relations has been made almost exclusively by the philosopher, not by the statesman or the man in the street... all agree that there is an international moral code binding on states".

International morality is weak because international society is fractured. Powerful states are generally `satisfied powers' which uphold the status quo. The weak are revisionists, agitators who seek change. Common to both is the task of devising an agreed world order, which is thus invested with legitimacy.

"Harmony in the national order is achieved by this blend of morality and power. In the international order, the role of power is greater and that of morality less. When self-sacrifice is attributed to an individual, the sacrifice may or may not be purely voluntary. When self-sacrifice is attributed to a state, the chances are greater that this alleged self-sacrifice will turn out on inspection to be a forced submission to a stronger power. Yet, even in international relations, self-sacrifice is not altogether unknown... .

"Any international moral order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who do not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element of give-and-take, of self-sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. It is through this process of give-and-take, of willingness not to insist on all the prerogatives of power, that morality finds its surest foothold in international - and perhaps also in national - politics."

Peace rests on a balance of power as well as accord on the status quo. Power establishes the order; morality sustains it. Not by ethical principles alone, but by ensuring, through a political process charged with restraint and responsibility, peaceful reconciliation of conflicting interests.

Carr was a diplomat who took to scholarship. Hans J. Morgenthau was a political philosopher of first rank whose influence, dominant for long, survives still. His seminal work Scientific Man vs. Power Politics shocked people when it was published in the euphoria of 1946. Political problems are not susceptible to "scientific" solutions, but to political approaches, he argued.

In a passage of surpassing eloquence and insight he wrote: "Neither science nor ethics nor politics can resolve the conflict between politics and ethics into harmony. We have no choice between power and the common good. To act successfully, that is, according to the rules of the political art, is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny. That this conciliation is nothing more than a modus vivendi, uneasy, precarious, and even paradoxical, can disappoint only those who prefer to gloss over and to distort the tragic contradictions of human existence with the soothing logic of a specious concord."

This is not a denial but an affirmation of the relevance of ethics. In 1948 came Morgenthau's masterly work Politics Among Nations, which amplified his thesis. It became a bestseller and was instantly prescribed as a text by many universities.

"Political realism is based upon a pluralistic conception of human nature. Real man is a composite of `economic man', `political man', `moral man', `religious man', etc. A man who was nothing but `political man' would be a beast, for he would be completely lacking in moral restraints." One might add that while a man who is incapable of anything but moral outrage is to be pitied - since he substitutes emotion for rigorous analysis - he is surely to be despised who lacks the capacity for moral indignation.

International morality recognises the sanctity of human life and since 1945, of human rights. The Cold War exacted from both blocs an enormous material as well as moral toll. Cold wars always do. South Asia has not been spared either.

"The fundamental error that has thwarted American foreign policy in thought and action is the antithesis of national interest and moral principles. The equation of political moralising with morality and of political realism with immorality is itself untenable. The choice is not between moral principles and the national interest, devoid of moral dignity, but between one set of moral principles divorced from political reality, and another set of moral principles derived from political reality. The moralistic detractors of the national interest are guilty of both intellectual error and moral perversion."

Morgenthau's analysis of U.S. policy retains its relevance now, half a century later. "It is difficult for the United States to understand that other nations, in opposing American policies, may pursue their national interests, as legitimate as those which the United States denies pursuing but actually pursues just the same. The logic of the utopian image it has formed of its own position among the nations compels the United States to see the policies of other nations in the same light of utopian moralism. Since American foreign policy is by definition selfless and moral, the foreign policies of nations opposing it are by definition selfish and immoral. Since the United States is the policeman of the world seeking only peace and order and the welfare of all, only civil nations can dare oppose it. They are criminals when they act alone, conspirators when they act in union."

As far back as in 1957 Morgenthau warned: "No statesman could pursue indiscriminately a policy of protecting democratic governments everywhere in the world without courting certain disaster."

Judging by their writings, none of our swadeshi realpolitikers has a clue about the nuances in the thinking of acknowledged masters of realpolitik, all of whom stress the moral factor. "The realist recognises that a moral decision, especially in the political sphere, does not imply a simple choice between a moral principle and a standard of action which is morally irrelevant or even outright immoral. A moral decision implies always a choice among different moral principles, one of which is given precedence over others. To say that a political action has no moral purpose is absurd; for political action can be defined as an attempt to realise moral values through the medium of politics, that is, power. The relevant moral question concerns the choice among different moral values, and it is at this point that the realist and the utopian part company."

Morgenthau is at pains to emphasise that "the lust for power as ubiquitous empirical fact and its denial as universal ethical norm are the two poles between which, as between the poles of an electric field, this antinomy is suspended. The antinomy is insoluble because the poles creating it are perennial. There can be no renunciation of the ethical denial without renouncing the human nature of man. `We,' Benedetto Croce quotes an Italian as saying to a German, `with our bad faith, at least keep the intellect lucid, and we remain bad men, but men; whereas you lose it altogether and become beasts.' There can be no actual denial of the lust for power without denying the very conditions of human existence in this world... .

"There is no escape from the evil of power, regardless of what one does. Whenever we act with reference to our fellow men, we must sin, and we must still sin when we refuse to act; for the refusal to be involved in the evil of action carries with it the breach of the obligation to do one's duty. No ivory tower is remote enough to offer protection against the guilt in which the actor and bystander... are inextricably enmeshed." There is simply no escape from the human condition.

Contrary to the common notion, especially in India where compromise is branded as "a sell-out", national interest lies in peaceful resolution, especially in this nuclear age. "The national interest is of a nation that is conscious not only of its own interests but also of that of other nations must be defined in terms compatible with the latter. In a multinational world this is a requirement of political morality; in an age of total war it is also a condition for survival."

The journal War/Peace Report served an intellectual feast in its issue of February 1967 by publishing a comprehensive discussion between Niebuhr and Morgenthau on "The Ethics of War and Peace in this Nuclear Age". Morgenthau dismissed "the old chestnut that separates ethics from politics". None "can act without consideration of morality". Niebuhr agreed and added that "a sensitive moral being will be more conscious than an insensitive moral being of the relationship of his own self-interest to his judgment. It is significant that the self-righteous man is regarded as the chief doer of evil because he is unconscious of the evil that is in his `good'".

Both emphasised the need for a stable and legitimate international order, a theme which recurs in all the writings of Henry A. Kissinger. But while Morgenthau spoke up, Kissinger prefers silence today. Only a few in the media care to denounce the amoral policies which Bush pursues in the name of morality. One of them is Prof. Robert Jensen at the University of Texas. He regrets that Americans are "allowing pseudo-patriotic loyalties to override moral decision-making" (Hindustan Times, August 15, 2005).

Forty-five years ago, Kissinger wrote: "The stability of an international system depends on the degree to which it combines the need for security with the obligation of self-restraint. To rely entirely on the continued goodwill of another sovereign state is an abdication of statesmanship and self-respect. But to seek security entirely through physical domination is to menace all other countries. For absolute security for one country must mean absolute insecurity for all others. Where to strike this balance cannot be determined in the abstract; it is what makes diplomacy an art and not a science. But the balance must be established if the international order is to be stable" (The Necessity for Choice; page 148). He has long ceased to write in this strain: a tragic betrayal of the intellectual.

Kissinger's remarks are as true of the international order in South Asia - in its India-China-Pakistan triangle - as it is in the world order at large. Achievement of a legitimate order is, at once, sound politics and good morality.

There does come a time when a clash between morality and survival becomes inescapable. Lincoln was faced with a painful dilemma during the Civil War between saving the Union and emancipating slaves. His answer to Horace Greeley, a spokesman for the idealists, on August 22, 1862, is a masterpiece of eloquence and wisdom. He opted to save the Union first, and concluded: "I have here stated my purpose according to my views of official duty, and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free."

Wisdom such as this never comes to the charismatic narcissist, innocent of doubt, to the self-righteous, to men of cold logic bereft of imagination, or of stern rectitude devoid of compassion. Singly, each trait can lead astray. Combined, the individual becomes disdainful of human weaknesses and acquires notions of moral superiority, which wreak political ruin. Wisdom comes to a different type - one who is no less cold in his thinking, no less upright nor less ruthless in his actions, but is endowed with a soul. Painfully aware of the moral aspect, aware that as he acts politically he acts to sin, he is in agony in the face of great power. But act he must. And act he does. The public duty is not shirked. But he has the capacity to brood over it. The capacity, if you please, to shed a tear at the end of the day at a fate which drives him again and again, ever so remorselessly, to say and do the kinds of things he says and does.