Which principles should guide american diplomacy moral

Firstly, it establishes a hierarchy of foreign policy priorities to avoid the ineffective use of resources and overextension. The four main objectives of U. The purpose of diplomacy is to strengthen the state, nation, or organization it serves in relation to others by advancing the interests in its charge. Using tact and diplomacy appropriately can lead to improved relationships with other people and are a way to build and develop mutual respect, which in turn can lead to more successful outcomes and less difficult or stressful communications.

There are only five vital national interests: to prevent the threat of an attack of weapons of mass destruction on U. But it is by no means clear, from a values-free perspective, why Acirema should be attached to a principle of peaceful relations among states and the illegitimacy of aggressive war or conquest. True, Acirema does not want to be attacked and would seek to maintain sufficient power to deter and if necessary defeat any potential aggressor.

Acirema would pursue an overall strategy of maintaining its dominance. Again, this is not foreign to current U. But the United States has welcomed and encouraged modernization, economic growth, and globalization not only in order to enrich Americans, but also according to a theory that greater trade flows and economic interdependence make for a more peaceful international environment and are good in themselves.

Neither of the latter two justifications would matter to Acirema. There is danger in an Acireman policy that encourages other states to become rich: With riches comes the capacity to develop military power that in turn might challenge Acirema, or covertly to fund challenges and challengers.

Acireman policymakers would want to examine the trade-off between the economic benefits of an open trading system and the potential danger in allowing others to enrich themselves, thus potentially increasing their power. An Asian economic flu might be a bad thing, but it might also be a good thing. Acirema might want to identify potential vulnerabilities in the Chinese economy and try to exploit them to undermine Chinese economic growth.

The collapse of central authority in China would be destabilizing — but primarily for the Chinese, who might then be too preoccupied with their internal turmoil to pose a threat.

More generally, the stability Acirema would seek would be the stability of its own position. The stability of other states and relations among other states is of concern only insofar as it impinges on the stability of the Acireman position. Indeed, a subsidiary strategy of preserving dominance might be to maintain a fragile international stability, one in which all other states felt themselves to be constantly at risk from instability without actually sliding into it with a potentially adverse effect on Acirema.

Under this scenario, one would have to reject engagement in the Middle East, except with regard to securing Acireman energy needs. Meanwhile, however, it is not solely Acireman support for Israel that antagonizes certain elements in the Middle East, and to the extent that funding for these elements comes from governments that have grown wealthy from oil revenues, it may be best to go directly to the source and deprive the funders of the revenue. Acirema might seize and hold sufficient oilfields to see to its needs and then destroy the capacity of others to exploit the resources on their territory.

In the event that the negative repercussions of such a move might be deemed too costly, then Acireman disengagement from the region might work — provided it is accompanied by an unambiguous warning from Acirema to states in the region about the unacceptability of funding terrorists, their ideological supporters, and their sympathizers.

Acirema would have to make clear that regime elimination awaits any states that fail to accept that their continued oil revenue depends on their refraining from harboring, funding, or supporting anti-Acireman terrorism.

The credibility of such a policy would likely require a demonstration. On the contrary, any state foolish enough to provoke Acirema to forcibly remove its regime, with all the risk and expense that would entail for Aciremans, would be on its own to sort out what comes next. The policy of Acirema toward Israel is a specific case of what would be a more general revision in alliance policy.

The essential question for Acirema with regard to any ally is whether Acireman security is improved, on net, as a result of the alliance. The notion of an alliance as an all-purpose mechanism for securing the cooperation of others in mutual pursuit of security objectives would need to be reassessed. Needless to say, Acirema will harbor no prejudice in favor of cooperation or multilateralism, instead asking whether cooperative or multilateral means would bring a benefit that Acirema cannot obtain on its own.

Acirema need not be especially concerned with the opinions of states that lack the capacity to make a difference. There will be no free-riding on the provision of security, because Acirema will not enter into alliance relationships except with partners whose tangible assets improve Acireman security. Needless to say, any assistance Acirema would choose to provide to other states would be tightly tied to the tangible benefit received, either economically or in terms of security.

Acirema might have a concern with averting refugee flows toward its shores, but only if the cost of action abroad to prevent the flows exceeds the cost of turning away those attempting to enter.

Local disputes in faraway places would not necessarily bother Acirema. There is nothing historically unusual about violent contests for power within states, and Acirema would not worry overmuch about the outbreak of such conflicts. They have disadvantages in terms of disrupting commerce, but they have advantages as well in that those engaged in fierce local conflict are unlikely to have the surplus capacity to threaten Acireman national interests.

Even intense local conflict, with civilian deaths running to hundreds of thousands, would have to be assessed through the prism of whether it poses any sort of threat to Acirema that might warrant intervention. Doing so would come at the cost of pressing other, more useful demands upon weaker states and would needlessly complicate relations with stronger states.

The strongest states will be those with nuclear weapons, and the impulse of states to acquire them would undoubtedly be very strong. Needless to say, Acirema would have to be very wary of states already possessing substantial nuclear arsenals.

As for those newly seeking to acquire the technology of atomic weapons, Acirema might choose to acquiesce, provided it was confident that its own arsenal was deterring any aggression against Acirema.

This might be true of some but not all states. On the other hand, possession of a nuclear deterrent by another state might embolden that state to act against the national interests of Acirema. It might be necessary to take preemptive action to establish that mere possession of a few nuclear weapons is not sufficient to deter or coerce Acirema.

Acirema might have to launch a nuclear attack first. Of course, there would be some risk of nuclear counterattack if the other state had the means to deliver its nuclear weapons. On the other hand, Acirema could withstand such a small strike, whereas its antagonist would be obliterated. Yes, we have wandered into the bizarro territory of Dr. Strangelove , and the scenario described above is both monstrous to contemplate and impossible to envision actually coming to pass.

But why is that? Patrick Buchanan tried a slightly attenuated version of the Acirema project and was unable to win the Republican nomination, let alone seriously contest the general election.

Disband nato , abandon Israel, destabilize China, welcome wars when useful, disregard genocide, and wage preemptive nuclear war? While such views are consistently found in certain small segments of the political spectrum, there is, thankfully, no plausible passageway from America to Acirema.

Some have claimed — and the National Security Strategy and other statements of President Bush flirt with — the notion that U. Such an argument effectively dodges the question of which should take precedence. We disagree on the relative magnitude of the danger there. The point is that without the moral frame of reference, one could imagine having a debate about whether the collapse of a state into civil war, warlordism, and genocide is good or bad for the United States — and that such a debate would remain imaginary, because it can never occur in the real world.

Why should you look out for No. Because you place a value on No. While, to this day, the United States has been accused often with justification of failing to live up to the values of the Declaration of Independence, the United States has never been able to or seriously attempted to expunge those values from all consideration in the conduct of domestic or foreign policy.

This seems unlikely to change. W hile the place of American values in foreign policy endures, questions remain about how such policies should be implemented and how the inevitable trade-offs should be managed, especially in the current political environment. The Bush legacy casts a long shadow. During the past several years, intellectuals and policy analysts have offered numerous grand strategies as a corrective to Bush, rebalancing foreign policy between realism and idealism.

Instead of adding yet another grand strategy slogan into the mix, we believe that it is more important to describe a set of principles and priorities that should guide U. Below we outline six principles, each rooted in American ideals and serving American interests.

This is not an exhaustive list, yet it shows that it is possible to construct a common agenda between liberals and conservatives that is firmly built upon a commitment to uphold — and promote — values. Standing against the conquest of territory by force. The United States must continue to uphold one of the most basic norms of international relations: preventing and, when necessary, reversing the conquest of territory across an international border by military force.

As made clear by the alternative Acirema world described earlier, a great power like the United States could decide that upholding this norm is too costly or outside the bounds of its core national interests.

We believe that since preventing territorial conquest by force remains a keystone of the international system and a driver of its enduring stability, this must remain a core value of U. Such a commitment entails certain responsibilities around the world and, fundamentally, demands an interventionist foreign policy — preferably as an active partner through international institutions, but if necessary alone.

The means that are required will depend on the specific situation and the other U. Yet the full range of tools — from diplomacy to sanctions and political isolation to military force — must always be available. Other instances will require U. And on some and hopefully rare occasions, the United States will have to use military force to reverse aggression, as George H. Bush did in when he created and led a un -sanctioned international coalition to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.

Today, looking into the future and the probability of a smaller American presence in Iraq, the commitment to territorial integrity will be critical insurance against potential incursions by neighbors such as Iran.

Of course, another way of describing this is that by valuing the protection of territorial integrity from threats of force, we are valuing the defense of sovereignty. Defending liberal regimes. The United States should be prepared and willing to help any and all democratic governments that come under challenge internationally or from internal antidemocratic elements seeking to overturn liberal political and social order and the rule of law. This is a basic principle of democratic solidarity , according to which the most secure, established, and stable liberal democracies, the United States above all, should acknowledge a responsibility to come to the assistance of democratic governments that are threatened, that have yet to become fully consolidated and mature, or are subject to forces of internal instability.

Liberal democracy, in the view of most of those who govern themselves according to its principles, is not merely a matter of sovereign choice — just one among many options.

Rather, citizens of democracies tend to regard their form of government as the right or best choice, at least for them; they would not consider trading their form of government for autocratic or totalitarian or theocratic government and would rightly consider any force in favor of such a change in governance as a serious threat, one to be challenged and defeated — not by whatever means necessary, such as abandonment of liberal principles for the sake of security, but by any means legitimate within the horizon of liberal principles.

If citizens of democracies view their system as the right or best choice for themselves, those citizens and that state ought to be willing to acknowledge the rightness of the choice of liberal democracy among the citizens of other states. They have a stake not only in their own domestic political arrangements, but in their view of the rightness of liberal democracy, which does not end at their borders.

A threat to liberal democracy elsewhere is accordingly a challenge and one to which any democratic states with the means to do so should be willing to meet head on. The United States has a number of alliances with democratic states, including several with allies that were not democratic when the alliance relationship began but became so, perhaps partly as a result of the security provided by the United States.

These alliance commitments remain fully in force, but they are only a beginning. The United States must recognize that it will not sit idly by as nondemocratic states try to undermine or even overturn democracies or fragile liberalizing states. On the contrary, the United States should step up, together with other democratic states, to provide all the support or assistance possible.

The correct response when a powerful nondemocratic state tries to coerce a weaker democratic state — such as Russia has tried with Ukraine and especially Georgia — is not to temporize out of deference to the power of the strong but to speak up unequivocally in defense of democracy under threat.

To stand aloof or to appease the stronger power would be to embolden antidemocratic forces, and not just locally. Some argued that extending the nato alliance to the Baltic States was foolish because of the military difficulty of defending Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania against attack and because extending the Atlantic Alliance onto the territory of the former Soviet Union would unnecessarily antagonize Russia. We strongly disagreed at the time and believe we were correct.

In our view, the newly won freedom of the Baltic nations and the establishment of liberal democratic governments there already created obligations for the United States and nato countries. The process was exemplary in warding off any urge to interfere with and disrupt democratic development and consolidation there — and elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, in our view. A principle of democratic solidarity is not only good in itself; it makes external threats to democratic governments less likely by demonstrating that making such threats will have adverse global consequences for anyone inclined to pursue such a course.

It would be a mistake to view the principle of democratic solidarity as a military doctrine; its main components are political, diplomatic, and social. There are some instances in which democratic solidarity comes with conditions. But when wielded alone, hard power can exact higher costs than when it is combined with the soft power of attraction.

The Roman empire rested not only on its legions, but also on the attraction of Roman culture. The Berlin Wall came down not under an artillery barrage, but from hammers and bulldozers wielded by people who had lost faith in communism. It can be reinforced by the narratives that a president uses to explain his foreign policy.

John F. Kennedy, Reagan, and Barack Obama, for example, framed their policies in ways that attracted support both at home and abroad. Nixon and Trump were less successful in attracting those outside the United States. There is a moral difference between a broad, long-term definition of national interest that can include citizens of other nations and a myopic definition that excludes others. Another important mental map of the world involves viewing the world through a lens of common humanity, known as cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitans see all humans as of equal moral worth regardless of borders. While it may be weak, some degree of international human community exists. As neural science has shown, moral intuition about other humans is evolutionarily hard-wired into people. The cosmopolitan mental map rests on the belief that basic human rights are universal. One can simultaneously feel part of a town, a state, a region, a profession, a transnational ethnic group, and humanity at large.

However, loyalty to the outer circles tends to be weaker and generate weaker moral duties than cosmopolitans often assume. One can be a stout inclusive nationalist and a moderate globalist at the same time, but the community of nationality is usually stronger.

Borders are arbitrary and sometimes unjust, but nations are communities that similarly engender additional roles, rights, and responsibilities.

I often used to ask my students to test their moral intuitions about the existence and limits of cosmopolitanism with the following thought experiment. Suppose you are a good swimmer reading at the beach and you notice a child drowning in the surf. Would you put down your book and rescue her? Most would say yes. Most would say the foreign language would make no difference. If she were somewhat further out and you were not a strong swimmer, how much risk would you take?

Answers would range from the prudent to the heroic. If there were two children, one of which was yours, and you could rescue only one, would it matter whether it was yours? There are various strands of liberalism including economic liberalism, which stresses the pacific benefits of trade; social liberalism, which emphasizes contacts among people; and institutional liberalism, which argues that institutions can create a society of states that mitigates the negative effects of anarchy.

Liberals argue that rudimentary practices and institutions such as the balance of power, international law, norms, and international organizations can create enough order to establish a framework for making meaningful moral choices in most cases.

Institutions shape expectations of future behavior, which allows leaders to go beyond simple transactionalism.

Institutions of international law and morality play a role even in war. The just war doctrine originated in the early Christian church as Saint Augustine and others wrestled with the paradox that if the good did not fight back, they would perish and the evil would inherit the earth. That doctrine of just self-defense became secularized after the 17th century and today it provides a broad normative structure that encompasses all three moral dimensions discussed above: good intentions represented by a just cause; forceful means that are proportional to the situation and which discriminate between military and civilian targets; and good consequences that emerge from a prudent regard for the probability of success.

Just war doctrine is more than theoretical. It is enshrined both in international humanitarian law e. Soldiers who violated the moral principles that are enshrined in the law of armed conflict have been jailed in many countries including the United States. Different mental maps of the world portray anarchy differently, and that affects the way leaders frame their moral choices.

Modern liberals follow the Lockean approach to international anarchy and believe that institutions stabilize expectations in ways that permit reciprocity and morality to enter into policy decisions. Liberals argue that while there is no world government, there is a degree of world governance. They argue that anarchy therefore has limits. At the same time, they recognize that the state is a key institution of world politics both as a reality and as a moral community.

Even a renowned liberal philosopher like John Rawls believed that the conditions for his theory of justice applied only to domestic society. The rise of human rights law after World War II, particularly in reaction to the horror of genocide, has complicated presidential choices.

The American public wants some response to genocide, but it is divided over how much. For example, in retrospect, Bill Clinton criticized his own failure to respond to the genocide in Rwanda in Clinton has acknowledged that he could have done more to help the United Nations and other countries to save some of the lives that were lost in Rwanda, but this example is a reminder that good leaders today are often caught between their cosmopolitan inclinations and their more traditional democratic obligations to the people who elected them.

These three mental maps of world politics are not mutually exclusive — in practice, leaders mix them in inconsistent ways in different contexts to shape the stated intent, means, and consequences of their foreign policies.

Given a world of sovereign states, in my personal policy experience, realism is the best map to start with.

For example, at the end of the Cold War when I participated in formulating an East Asia policy in the Clinton administration, we wanted to integrate a rising China into liberal international institutions, but we started with a realist policy of reaffirming the U. The two approaches were complementary to one another. Realism is the right place to start, but too many realists stop where they start without realizing that realism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for crafting good policy.

They fail to recognize that cosmopolitanism and liberalism often have something important to contribute to forming an accurate moral map. When survival is in jeopardy, realism is a necessary basis for a moral foreign policy, but it is not sufficient for all foreign policy scenarios. The question again is one of degree.

Most foreign policy choices involve questions about authorizing arms sales to authoritarian allies or criticizing the human rights behavior of another country. It is not enough to say that security comes first or that justice presupposes some degree of order.

Presidents have to assess how closely a situation fits a Hobbesian or Lockean mental map, or where an action lies on a continuum between ensuring security and pursuing other important values. Public opinion also shows a similar pattern of mixing mental maps. Because the American people are usually more concerned with domestic issues than foreign policy, they tend toward a basic form of realism.

Security from attack and economic security generally rank highest in opinion polls. Because elite opinion is often more interventionist than the public, some critics argue that the elite is more liberal than the public. Intervention has been a fraught issue in recent foreign policy debates, prompting questions about when the United States should take actions that involve extending its reach beyond its own borders.

Since , the liberal Charter of the United Nations has limited the use of force to self-defense or actions authorized by the Security Council where the United States and four other countries have veto power. Realists argue that intervention can be justified if it prevents disruption of the balance of power upon which order depends.

Cosmopolitans prioritize justice and individual human rights to justify humanitarian intervention. Liberals argue that nations are groups of people with a sovereign right — enshrined in the U. Charter — to determine their own fate. Intervention can only be justified to counter a prior intervention or to prevent a massacre that would make a mockery of self-determination.

In practice, these principles often get combined in odd ways. In Vietnam, Kennedy and Johnson argued that America was countering a North Vietnamese intervention in the South, but the Vietnamese saw themselves as one nation that had been artificially divided for realist, Cold War balance-of-power purposes.

In the first Gulf War, George H. Bush considered himself a realist and refused to intervene to stop the shelling of civilians in Sarajevo, but after devastating pictures of starving Somalis were shown on American television in December , he sent American troops on a cosmopolitan humanitarian intervention in Mogadishu, which subsequently became a problem for his successor. In the second Gulf War, American motives for intervention were mixed.

Theorists have sparred over whether the invasion of Iraq was a realist or a liberal intervention. Security Council as his father had in the first Gulf War. Realism is a broad tendency, not a precise category with clear implications for policy. Certainly Cheney and Rumsfeld considered themselves realists. In the presidential debate, both Trump and Hillary Clinton said the United States had a responsibility to prevent mass casualties in Syria, but neither advocated major military intervention.

In terms of consequences, the means are as important as the ends. No one of the mental maps of the world provides presidents with an easy answer or substitutes for their good judgment and contextual intelligence when deciding whether to intervene or not.

In its broadest definition, intervention refers to external actions that influence the domestic affairs of another sovereign state, and they can range from broadcasts, economic aid, and support for opposition parties at the low-coercion end of the spectrum, to blockades, cyber attacks, drone strikes, and military invasion at the high-coercive end.

From a moral point of view, the degree of coercion involved is very important in terms of restricting local choice and rights.