What is America's National Interest?

Hans Morgenthau, the University of Chicago professor of international relations, has been dead for twenty-six years. But his writing remain a bracing antidote to the fuzzy thinking of today's neo-conservatives. The shifting rationales for the Iraq war suggests incoherence in foreign policy as well as a failure in epistomology. Just count, for example, the fallacious statements-- claims that have turned out to be either dishonest or ignorant-- in the president's remarks from four years ago:

"Saddam Hussein is a threat to our nation. September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least, as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country. My job is to protect the American people. It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we're now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organization could be deployed here at home.

"So, therefore, I think the threat is real. And so do a lot of other people in my government. And since I believe the threat is real, and since my most important job is to protect the security of the American people, that's precisely what we'll do.

"Our demands are that Saddam Hussein disarm. We hope he does. We have worked with the international community to convince him to disarm. If he doesn't disarm, we'll disarm him."

Now contrast that to the lucidity of Dr. Morgenthau, who sought to find action between nation-states in objective laws rooted in rational interests in distinction to sentiment or fear:

"A realist theory of international politics will also avoid the other popular fallacy of equating the foreign policies of a statesman with his philosophic or political sympathies, and of deducing the former from the latter. Statesmen, especially under contemporary conditions, may well make a habit of presenting their foreign policies in terms of their philosophic and political sympathies in order to gain popular support for them. Yet they will distinguish with Lincoln between their "official duty," which is to think and act in terms of the national interest, and their "personal wish," which is to see their own moral values and political principles realized throughout the world. Political realism does not require, nor does it condone, indifference to political ideals and moral principles, but it requires indeed a sharp distinction between the desirable and the possible-between what is desirable everywhere and at all times and what is possible under the concrete circumstances of time and place."

Thus, the interest of a nation isn't what the president or Congress or even what the majority of the people of the United States always desire. It rather is rooted in qualities and also values that transcend that. Perhaps the best way to define interest is by looking at ourselves-- as members of a family, as spouses, as employees or employers. Our self-seeking inclinations are banked by custom, religion, and law. I want to get rich but I also want to enjoy a good life. I want to have a good life but I also want my kids to have a good life. As we go through life, we make all kinds of calculations that will contribute to our personal and collective goals. We don't burn through our pay check at the casino and nor do we punch our neighbor in the face because we think he may someday punch us in the face. This is nothing more than common sense. The constraints that impose appropriate behavior at the individual level seems to have been overtaken at the national level by a kind of psychosis. This condition that seems to appear again and again in American history allowed for the war to make the world safe for democracy, to contain communism, and to bring democracy to a part of the world that has never known democracy.