Trump Can Learn From Morgenthau's 6 Principles of Political Realism
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Nathan A. Sears
Hans Morgenthau was a leading postwar intellectual of political realism in the international relations discipline and, at times, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy. In his 1949 article, “The Primacy of the National Interest,” Morgenthau criticized the Truman Doctrine for placing universal moral principles (e.g., the promotion of freedom and democracy) above the national interest as the standard for U.S. foreign policy, and in the 1960s he became a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Following Morgenthau’s legacy of dissent on U.S. foreign policy, a group of international relations scholars (including prominent realists) in the U.S. academy published a piece in the New York Times in September 2002, warning the U.S. government that war against Iraq would not be in the national interest. While a clear “Trump Doctrine” is yet to materialize, the foreign-policy inclinations of the new administration are detectable from President Trump’s campaign rhetoric and his first weeks in the White House. What might Morgenthau have to say about the administration’s emerging foreign policy?
Many of Morgenthau’s core insights about foreign policy and international politics are captured in his six principles of political realism, found in his seminal work Politics Among Nations. The second, fourth and fifth principles are of particular relevance to the current administration. Morgenthau’s second principle states that “the main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined as power.” Morgenthau believed that international politics is fundamentally a struggle for power (understood in terms of the mutual relations of political control between nation-states), and that peace is often tenuous in a world lacking a sovereign authority that can protect the interests and survival of individual states (an insight that has been codified in the neorealist conception of “international anarchy”). As a result, the “national interest” is primarily concerned with the resources (especially military and economic capabilities) and limitations (primarily the balance of power) that determine the national power of the state in international politics.
Source URL (retrieved on February 21, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/trump-can-learn-morgenthaus-6-principles-political-realism-19481
