Good and evil: Framing U.S. foreign policy in moral terms

'Roundtable Ethics' features University faculty members answering ethical and moral questions solicited from the community. The questions may range from personal to academic in nature. The 'Prince' hopes that the column will spark campus dialogue.

This week's columnist, Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School.

What is morality in international affairs?

President Bush, in an address at the West Point Commencement in June 2002, declared America to be "in a conflict between good and evil" and insisted that "America will call evil by its name." In his National Security Strategy, he argues that "the concept of 'free trade' arose as a moral principle even before it became a pillar of economics." He describes his approach to foreign aid policy in the same vein, recognizing a "moral imperative" to include "all of the world's poor in an expanding circle of development."

What does it mean to frame American foreign and domestic policy in moral terms, around the dichotomy of "good and evil," "right and wrong"? This rhetoric of morality recurs periodically in American history, society and culture. But the post-Cold War era has given way to an era defined by globalization, with all its permutations, and the war on terrorism, in what many are calling the information age. Approaching the challenges of this era from a moral perspective reframes key issues in national security strategy, economics, development policies, post-conflict reconstruction and public health.

For the past several decades, the language of morality in international affairs has been largely captured by the human rights movement. The very concept of universal human rights is premised on the equal moral worth of every human being on earth. To be human is to be entitled to a measure of fundamental dignity, which translates into a right to life, to liberty, to freedom from cruelty, to basic sustenance, to equal protection of the law and to citizenship in some polity.

These are noble ideals. They animate many extraordinarily dedicated men and women around the world who are willing to risk their own lives and livelihoods to try to assure the basic human rights of others. The human rights movement has never questioned the morality of its cause as a whole, even as individual activists debate the relative importance of civil and political versus economic, social and cultural rights, or the best way to balance universal human rights against cultural traditions and identities. But that morality, as a lens on the world and on specific foreign policies, is a double-edged sword.

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The crusades were moral campaigns, or rather military campaigns conducted under the banner of morality. Christians saw themselves fighting on the side of right, "in a conflict between good and evil." Indeed, immediately after Sept. 11 President Bush likened our war on terrorism to a crusade, but was quickly shushed by those on his staff who sought to avoid framing foreign policy as a war between two great religions: Christianity and Islam. As countless scholars and sages have observed, numerous wars have been fought and lives lost in the name of a moral creed, whether religious or ideological. And "exterminations," whether the Jews in Nazi Germany or the Tutsi in Rwanda, are typically preceded by a de-humanization of their subjects — identifying them as "vermin" or "cockroaches." Labeling individuals to be killed as insects or as other animal pests is a hideous, backhanded confirmation of the intrinsic moral worth of human beings; the moral license to kill in such situations flows from a denial of the humanity of the victims.

The alternative to morality in international relations has traditionally been "realism," from Thucydides through Machiavelli to Morgenthau. This is "realpolitik," or power politics: the view that states should not act on moral grounds but only to balance the power of other states that might threaten them. As we move ever closer to a war on Iraq, it may be surprising to many to remember that the chief opponents of the war in Vietnam were realists; that George Kennan endorsed realism as an alternative to what he saw as dangerous American "legalism-moralism," leading us "to make the world safe for democracy," in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, rather than tending our own garden and looking to secure the rights and dignity of every American. That same realism animates Henry Kissinger's concerns about our present policy toward Iraq and motivated a group of international relations scholars who describe themselves as realists to publish a half-page ad in The New York Times arguing that Saddam could be deterred without war.

Framed this way, realism may seem like the moral choice, for those who wish to avoid unnecessary killing of Americans and Iraqis, who recoil at the prospect of the many civilian casualties that are likely to result from American bombs and missiles, no matter how careful our forces are.

But consider again the human rights dimension. Suppose the United States had proposed to go to war against Saddam Hussein after he gassed his own people. We went to war against Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia on similar grounds. Hussein himself is indeed evil; were it not for so much apparent evidence of mixed motives, would it be so hard to agree that America is "call[ing] evil by its name"?

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As members of a community of the mind, dedicated to intellectual inquiry for its own sake, many of us here at the University are better at raising these questions than providing answers — certainly in this short space. But these issues are obviously not purely intellectual. They have enormous practical and pressing implications.

As a School of Public and International Affairs, the Woodrow Wilson School will explore these implications and push for answers at the inaugural Princeton Colloquium on Public and International Affairs, a University-wide event to be held on April 25-26. The topic will be "A World of 'Good and Evil?' The Return to Morality in Public and International Affairs." I invite all readers to attend, but urge you to start the conversation now.