Of Ethics and Foreign Policy
Do morals matter, or are they just window dressing that leaders use to justify personal or national interests? What makes foreign policy moral? Joseph Nye, the Harvard scholar who defined the notion of soft power, explores how US leaders choose to pursue national interest under different circumstances.
His approach to moral foreign policy is “threedimensional,” weighing and balancing the intentions, means and consequences of decisions and incorporating three intellectual maps of world politics: realism, cosmopolitanism and liberalism. He applies this frame to the 14 post-war US presidents: Four (Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Bush senior) combined morality and effectiveness in foreign policy, four (Johnson, Nixon, Bush junior, and Trump) hit the bottom. Beyond a firm conclusion that morals did matter, Nye draws patterns in the role of ethics and foreign policy: All presidents expressed formal goals and values attractive to Americans, including preserving US primacy. Provision of global public goods by the US had important moral consequences. Would an ethical foreign policy still matter in a new world where the liberal international order is over and major shifts in global power had begun? Nye places stresses an open and rules-based, not “liberal” and “American,” world order, and international institutions as a framework to promote global public goods.
Nye explores how US leaders choose to pursue national interest under different circumstances.