The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy;... [It maintains] an excess of secrecy, and a censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenseless against every unfavorable turn of events and every sinister rumor. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of its rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism.
  --  SIGMUND FREUD, "Reflections Upon War and Death."

      Freud wrote these words in 1915, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. They convey the disillusioned horror felt by so many at witnessing the brutality, the deceit, the secrecy, and the abject lawlessness of governments in wartime and, above all, at seeing their hypocrisy in prescribing standards for private individuals that they themselves had no intention of observing. But Freud held out little hope for change. The disillusionment, he insisted, came from having nurtured an illusion in the first place -- the illusion that human societies had reached a level of civilization where wars, if fought at all, would be brief, chivalrous crusades conducted with the utmost concern to minimize suffering and to protect noncombatants. This would never happen, he suggested, since the most primitive instincts lie close to the surface in all societies. The layer of socially imposed moral constraints is vanishingly thin, easily damaged in times of conflict. Wars would continue to be as bitter and cruel as ever, only more and more destructive because of the growing "perfection" of weapons. Freud ended, in utter pessimism, by suggesting that the saying "If you desire peace, prepare for war" might now best be paraphrased as "If you would endure life, be prepared for death."

      Across the Atlantic, President Woodrow Wilson expressed similar horror over the conduct of the Great War. But he drew exactly the opposite conclusions. For him, the illusion lay in taking that conduct to reflect a permanent fact of human nature and thus giving up the effort to seek a moral world order. The standard of government conduct should be set as high as that of personal conduct, and nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of enforcing it. The majority of the world's citizens loathed war and violence, secrecy, and oppression; if only their voices could be heard, he argued, and if only leaders were to seek "open convenants openly arrived at," reform would be irresistible.

      As the United States prepared to enter the war, hopes rose that the resulting infusion of force and idealism could indeed bring an end to all future wars. Wilson's stature, at home and abroad, lent credence to these hopes. Here was a man with the broad and generous perspective and the moral principles that Kant had called for. Having been granted unprecedented power to put them into practice, he had formulated a strategy informed both by scholarship and practical politics. Above all, he had the will to give himself wholeheartedly to this task.

      Wilson was convinced, moreover, that it was America's task to show the way. He insisted that the principles of America were also those of mankind. America's flag, he claimed, was humanity's flag; and there could be no retreat, no compromising the cause of that humanity. Before him, many had spoken of the "white man's burden" in civilizing the world; in 1891, W. T. Stead had written that "the English-speaking race is one of the chief of God's chosen agents for executing coming improvements in the lot of mankind." That Wilson had narrowed the leadership role to his country alone surprised few who had witnessed the nation's euphoria over "manifest destiny" in previous decades.

      By the beginning of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Wilson's fervor was such that a tight-lipped Georges Clemenceau likened him to Moses bearing the Ten Commandments. Inexperienced in foreign affairs, he was unprepared for the maelstrom of forces confronting him. His strategy of persuasion had been formulated without adequate attention to the "friction" of which Clausewitz had written. Before long, increasingly ill and fatigued, Wilson had seen most of his Fourteen Points cut back. The secret deliberations and machinations at the conference made his "open covenants openly arrived at" a meaningless phrase. Conquered populations, far from being free to choose their nationality, were ruthlessly divided up to satisfy European powers. French and British demands for exorbitant German reparations carried the day. And in the end, Wilson's fellow Americans rejected the League of Nations, which he had worked so hard to establish.

      It was inevitable that Wilson's missionary zeal and the collapse of his efforts would trouble even those who were in sympathy with many of his internationalist goals. His moralistic stance and his failure to take the realities of practical politics into consideration made many observers recoil, not only from his advocacy of a new moral order, but from taking morality into account at all in the conduct of foreign policy. Their views were reinforced as they heard endless bombast about peace in the decades after the War and winced at lofty but impotent proposals such as the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war.

      Seasoned observers like Hans Morgenthau, Raymond Aron, and George Kennan reacted against such impractical idealism by adopting what they called a "realist" stance in international politics. Their attitude, close to that of Clausewitz but more carefully worked out, was one of strong opposition to what they saw as a moralistic approach to foreign policy. The first business of government, they argued, is not what is right in some abstract sense but what best serves a nation's interest. To act otherwise is likely to encourage false expectations and to bring about political failures resulting in needless human suffering. Thus Morgenthau held that the First World War had been prolonged unnecessarily beyond merely securing the defeat of the enemy in order to "make the world safe for democracy." Those who insisted on morality in foreign policy have been, according to such realist views, innocuous utopians and hypocrites at best and, at worst, fanatics willing to go to any length to impose their views.

      Underlying the realist conclusion that it is impossible to rely on morality in foreign policy, one often finds a relativist claim: if we look at the many conflicting moral principles that have been invoked by governments through the centuries, we shall be hard put to find any unanimity. Apart from windy generalizations, no moral values hold for all societies. Thus, George Kennan notes in a recent article that "there are no internationally accepted standards of morality to which the U.S. government could appeal if it wished to act in the name of moral principles."

      Up to a point, Kennan is surely right. It is true that standards differ from nation to nation and that even the most widely known moral codes, such as the Ten Commandments or the Buddhist Five Precepts, overlap only in part. This should caution reformers against imagining that others must adopt, wholesale, the particular ideals common in their own societies. But it does not prove Kennan's claim that there are no internationally recognized moral standards; for, as suggested in Chapter II, the codes do have much in common concerning the most fundamental constraints--on violence, deceit, and betrayal in particular--that human societies have sought to impose on conduct. Breaking a truce was as reprehensible in Homer's day as it is in our time. And the practices of genocide and other atrocities in our century have received near-universal condemnation.

      There is nothing mysterious or self-contradictory about showing what the American Declaration of Independence called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind." The fact that not all cultures have identical moral standards should not lead us to conclude that they can agree on none. Nor is everything lost just because there is disagreement on the moral judgments we take to be fundamental. Fanatics may argue that genocide is morally legitimate; this does nothing to undermine the authority of the general consensus on the issue.

      Even if realists were to find such an argument persuasive in principle, it would do nothing to alter their condemnation of those who invoke morality in international affairs, for their central point is an utterly practical one. What does it matter if the governments of, say, Chile, South Africa, Afghanistan, or Iran solemnly join in condemning torture, so long as they continue to practice it? Hypocrisy and inconsistency have been the rule in foreign policy, not the exception, as debates in the U.N. General Assembly can make painfully clear. The governments most zealous in pointing to the vices of others tend to think nothing of their own, while accepting those of their allies without batting an eyelash. Leaders have too often invoked morality to cover up for particularly egregious actions. Throughout history, the cruelest crusades and most vicious inquisitions have been conducted in the name of some religious or secular dogma that was declared so exalted, so self-evidently superior as to justify any amount of violence and persecution.

      It was against such a background that George Kennan warned against "the carrying over into the affairs of states of the concepts of right and wrong, the assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment." Such assumptions, though rooted in a desire to do away with war and violence,

make violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest. A war fought in the name of high moral principle finds no early end short of some form of total domination?

      Public officials responsible for blatantly aggressive policies often invoke moral principles quite cynically, without taking them seriously for one moment. But if aggressors believe in the righteousness of their cause, they are--if anything--even more dangerous. To the extent that they identify their own cause with all that is good, and their adversary with Satan or absolute evil, they are especially likely to fall prey to the pathology of partisanship: their perspective may contract to the point where they no longer stop to question actions that they would otherwise find repugnant. In either case, whether they use moral language cynically or self-righteously, the discrepancy between their words and their actions generates distrust both at home and abroad.

      The fact that governments have so often invoked moral principles naively, hypocritically, inconsistently, or in order to exploit and oppress, justifies every caution. Moralistic language can indeed be counterproductive. But this conclusion hardly proves that all moral principles should be set aside in practical contexts. Causing harm poses a greater problem for someone concerned to act morally than for one who has jettisoned all such concern. It is self-contradictory to insist on abandoning all moral concerns in international relations on the (inherently moral) grounds of wanting to reduce suffering. To do so is also unnecessary. Laws and medicine can also be abused, yet no one suggests that they should be abolished. It is hypocrisy and abuse that should be fought, not the laws or the medicine or the moral principles themselves.

      This distinction finds illustration in Woodrow Wilson's own presidency. In spite of his railing against U.S. intervention in Central America, more such interventions took place during his term of office than during any previous period. His explanations were of the most idealistic nature: thus, after the bombardment of Vera Cruz in April 1914, he assured the world that the United States had "gone down to Mexico to serve mankind." At the very least, such claims raise doubts about Wilson's sincerity and about his consistency in invoking his ideal of nonintervention. But our legitimate doubts about Wilson do nothing either to support or to undercut the principle of nonintervention itself. Similarly, the fact that South African officials discourse on the need for nonviolence, while engaging in ruthless violence against blacks and dissenters and against neighboring nations, shows blatant hypocrisy and inconsistency; but it does nothing to prove that all appeals for nonviolence are worthless and insincere.

      Wilson's realist critics were surely right in showing how such dissonance between language and action serves only to increase public skepticism and distrust. But it was an illusion for them to suppose that a sphere of foreign affairs could be separated out from domestic affairs and denuded of moral considerations. It was an illusion, too, and one increasingly anachronistic in the nuclear era, to believe that if every nation tried to steer clear of moral language, common survival would somehow be better ensured through the workings of some unseen hand or of a balance of power. Realism today requires the abandonment of these illusions, but it also calls for heeding the warnings of Morgenthau and Kennan and others against moralizing and the abuses that it has so often brought in its wake. If, as I have argued, moral constraints are now indispensable in international relations as elsewhere, but if they are also, as the realists suggest, likely to be misused out of hypocrisy, ignorance, or fanaticism, then it matters to recognize what forms this misuse takes and to minimize each one.