[Joseph S. Nye. Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.. Oxford University Press. New York, 2020. 254 pp]
review / Emili J. Blasco
The question that serves as degree scroll for the new book by Jospeh Nye, known to the general public for having coined the expression soft poweris not a concession to secularized thinking, but rather a lack of boldness to assert from entrance the convenience of ethical reflection in foreign policy decisions, an importance that, despite the question mark, is intuitively defended by the author.
In fact, the question, in itself, is an approach core topic in the discipline of international relations. A common approach is to see the world scenario as a conjunction of states that fight among themselves, in an anarchic dynamic where the law of the strongest prevails. Internally, the state can move according to criteria of the common good, attending to the different needs of its inhabitants and making decisions at the national or local level through democratic processes. But beyond its own borders, does the legitimacy granted by its own voters not require the president to guarantee the security of its citizens against external threats and to safeguard the national interest against that of other states?
The fact that the state is the basic subject in international relations marks, of course, a dividing line between the two spheres. And therefore the question of whether the ethical discernment demanded of the leader in the domestic sphere should also be demanded of him in the foreign sphere is fully pertinent.
Only from extreme positions that consider that the state is a wolf for the state, applying the Hobbesian principle to international order (disorder) (and here there would be no supra-state to discipline this tendency of the state-individual), can it be defended that amorality governs all against all. On a lower rung is the so-called offensive realism and, on a lower rung, defensive realism.
Nye, a scholar of international relations, believes that realist theory is a good starting point for any president when defining a country's foreign policy, given that he must be guided especially by the ethics of responsibility, as he fulfills a "fiduciary role." "The first moral duty of a president is that of a trustee, and this begins with ensuring the survival and security of the democracy that elected him." But from here it should also be explored what possibilities exist for partnership and international mutual benefit, not closing the door to approaches of liberalism or cosmopolitanism from entrance .
"When survival is at stake, realism is a necessary basis for a moral foreign policy, though not sufficient," says Nye, for whom it is a "question of Degree". "Since there is never perfect security, the moral question is what Degree security should be assured before other values such as welfare, identity or rights become part of a president's foreign policy." He adds, "Many of the most difficult moral decisions are not all or nothing [...] The difficult moral decisions are in the middle. While it is important to be cautious about the dangers of a slippery slope, moral decisions rest on matching ends and means with each other." He concludes that "the maintenance of international institutions and regimes is part of moral leadership".
From the very beginning of the book, Nye uses the three conditions that have traditionally been used in moral treatises to judge an action as ethically good: that the intention, the means and the consequences are good at the same time.
Using these three scales, the author analyzes the foreign policy of each of the U.S. presidents since World War II and establishes a final ranking in which he combines both the morality of their actions on the international scene and the effectiveness of their policies (because an ethical foreign policy may be the case, but one that does little to further a country's national interests).
Thus, of the fourteen presidents, he considers the four with the best grade in that combination to be Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Bush I. In the middle he places Reagan, Kennedy, Ford, Carter, Clinton and Obama. And as the four worst he mentions Johnson, Nixon, Bush II and ("tentatively for incompleteness") Trump. Having made the ranking, Nye warns that he may have given precedence to the Democratic administrations for which he worked.
The book is a quick review of the foreign policy of each presidency, highlighting the presidents' doctrines, their successes and failures (as well as examining the ethical component), so it is also interesting as a succinct history of U.S. international relations over the past eighty years.
The aspect of morality perhaps lacks a greater academic foundation, since it is a discipline especially studied since the scholastic era. But Nye's purpose was not intended to delve into this subject, but to offer a brief study of applied morality.
Reading Nye is always thought-provoking. Among other reflections he makes, one might highlight the idea of the new prospects that would have opened up for the world if particularly propitious times had coincided in the calendar. In particular, he suggests that if Brezhnev and his gerontocratic generation had left earlier and the USSR had also been beset by serious economic problems earlier, Gorbachev might have come to power coinciding with Carter's presidency; what they would have achieved together is, however, the realm of speculation.
