WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

CODA: Volume XX, No 3, Fall 2003	Print
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Weighing Iraq on Morgenthau’s Scale

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A deceased German-born University of Chicago political theorist who is on everybody’s lips is Leo Strauss (1899–1973), mentor of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and other leading Republicans. Yet another deceased German-born University of Chicago political theorist has in my view more to say about our present foreign policy pickle. I refer to Hans Morgenthau (1904–80), nowadays often confused with his unrelated namesake, Secretary of the Treasury Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr. (For a vivid memoir of the former, see David Fromkin, "Remembering Hans Morgenthau," World Policy Journal, fall 1993.)

Like Strauss, Morgenthau was born Jewish in the wrong country, attended a German university (Munich in his case, Marburg in Strauss’s), and then in the 1930s both restarted their academic careers as refugees on these shores (via Brooklyn College and the University of Kansas in Morgenthau’s case; via the New School in Strauss’s). Intellectually, they followed different paths. Strauss was a Platonist who excelled in abstruse debates with such forgotten figures as his onetime sponsor, Carl Schmitt, a prickly Teutonic elitist. By contrast, Morgenthau turned his gaze on the tangled underbrush of foreign policy, using as his signpost national interest defined in terms of power. He was a tough-minded realist, and so proudly described himself.

For Morgenthau, motives and personal virtue were irrelevant. He noted that the disastrous British appeaser Neville Chamberlain had the best of intentions, while the zealous Jacobin Robespierre’s very virtue made him send the less virtuous to the guillotine. He judged as blasphemous any claim that a given nation or leader was guided by Providence. Concrete results, not universal principles, were his test of a policy’s morality. In his view, prudence—"the weighing of the consequences of alternative political actions"—was the supreme virtue in politics.

All this he elaborated in Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, which for two decades was the dominant textbook in its field, running through five editions after its debut in 1948. The final chapter distills "four fundamental rules" and "five prerequisites of compromise" that Morgenthau hoped would prevail in diplomacy. Out of curiosity, I perused them afresh to speculate how this hard-shelled political philosopher might view the policies that led American forces into Iraq. Morgenthau would not have applauded: President Bush and his associates have managed to flout or failed to take adequate account of all nine rules.

As set forth by the late Michelson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, those maxims are:

1. Diplomacy Must Be Divested of the Crusading Spirit. Here Morgenthau cites this warning by the nineteenth-century American sage William Graham Sumner: "If you want a war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man’s own reason and betray him against himself. Civilized men have done their fiercest fighting for doctrines." It seems probable that Morgenthau would roll his eyes at phrases like "axis of evil," "let’s roll," "shock and awe," "bring ‘em on," "dead or alive," and "regime change."

2. The Objectives of Foreign Policy Must Be Defined in Terms of the National Interest. The problem is that President Bush asserted but was unable to demonstrate anything but a possible future threat to America’s national interests. For a casus belli, he relied on disputed or fuzzy intelligence concerning the Baghdad regime’s links to the September 11 terrorists and on its ability to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the face of rigorous full-scope inspections.

3. Diplomacy Must Look at the Political Scene from the Point of View of Other Nations. Few Bush administration speeches provoked a quicker backlash abroad than Vice President Dick Cheney’s August 26, 2002, address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In blunt language, he shrugged off the value of inspections and claimed Iraq would have nuclear weapons "fairly soon," enabling it to "seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world’s energy supplies, directly threaten America’s friends throughout the Middle East, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." The White House apparently did not review his final text, and was caught off guard by the ensuing uproar, notably in Germany, where Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats were heading into a razor-close election. The incident exemplified the solipsism that cost Washington heavily in terms of foreign support. Morgenthau cites a pertinent warning from Edmund Burke: "Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear."

4. Nations Must Be Willing to Compromise on All Issues That Are Not Vital to Them. The Bush team adamantly opposed allowing U.N. inspectors an additional six months to scour for evidence of Iraq’s development of forbidden weapons, putting its heaviest chips on a secondary issue. It was this refusal that gave France, Germany, and Russia plausible grounds for resisting a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. On all sides, whatever the motives of protagonists, positions hardened, precluding a compromise that was within reach in the informed judgment of a former State Department hand, James Rubin, writing in the September/October 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs.

5. Give Up the Shadow of Worthless Rights for the Substance of Real Advantage. The real advantage, the prize worth seeking, was U.N. validation of the use of force against Iraq, which could have given needed succor to embattled Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain, brought on board wavering partners like Turkey, and blunted opposition in what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld too brusquely dismissed as "Old Europe."

6. Never Put Yourself in a Position from which You Cannot Retreat Without Losing Face and from Which You Cannot Advance Without Grave Risks. In a textbook example, the United States mobilized a massive military force on Iraq’s frontiers in the months preceding the March attack. In seeking to box in Saddam Hussein, the United States found itself boxed in by the looming advent of hot weather, rendering any compromise at the Security Council the more difficult. Whatever benefit this show of force may have had for Washington in forcing the pace of events was offset by America finding itself more isolated on a major global initiative than at any time in memory.

7. Never Allow a Weak Ally to Make Decisions for You. Strong nations are especially susceptible to this blunder, says Morgenthau, citing as a classic example the way in which Turkey forced the hand of Great Britain and France just before the Crimean War in 1853. By coincidence in early 2003, Washington counted on Turkey to permit the use of its territory to open a northern front against Iraq. At the final moment, an unsteady new government in Ankara, responding to popular sentiment, denied the American request, causing a change in invasion plans, with the result that U.S. Marines rather than the U.S. Army led the way into Baghdad. The Leathernecks were the least qualified by training or temperament for police duties. The outbreak of wholesale looting in Baghdad that resulted left an indelible impression of U.S. incompetence.

8. The Armed Forces Are the Instrument of Foreign Policy, Not Its Master. Morgenthau quotes the seventeenth-century English statesman, Viscount Bolingbroke: "Here let me say that the glory of taking towns, and winning battles, is to be measured by the utility that results from these victories. Victories that bring honour to the arms may bring shame to the councils of a nation." The White House decided at the outset to give the Pentagon plenary authority in postwar Iraq, and rejected any substantive role for the State Department, much less the United Nations. The occupation confirmed that the U.S. military excelled at winning battles but not in nation building, and that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership gravely underestimated the costs and manpower needed to rebuild a shattered nation (as their braided colleagues had warned).

9. The Government Is the Leader of Public Opinion, Not Its Slave. In the months leading up to the Iraq war, President Bush excelled in the drums-and-trumpet department but failed, one presumes for political reasons, to prepare Americans for the cost and difficulty of the campaign. By ruling out any rescinding of promised tax cuts, by failing to urge such measures as more stringent auto-emission standards to reduce dependence on imported oil, he promised victory without real domestic sacrifice. At no point did he prepare Americans for the enormous commitment in money and manpower required to rebuild Iraq. His administration’s sanguine outlook was expressed in March 2003 by Paul Wolfowitz: "We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction soon." President Bush was strong on homilies about freedom but weak on the likely cost of waging a preemptive war with shallow international support. It was "Churchill lite." Finally, in early September, in a tardy turnabout, the president called for $87 billion to cover the costs of American operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, with barely a hint of a major course correction, he turned to the once-despised United Nations for help. This coincided with a significant reduction in his approval rating, and one surmises that it was a nudge from his political seer Karl Rove that moved the tiller as much the persuasive words of Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Now we have a new life of Rockhill by Kenneth Wimmel, himself a U.S. Foreign Service officer for 25 years, mostly in Asia, who regrettably died in 2000, before this handsome volume was published by Orchid Press. The good angel who edited and introduced Wimmel’s book is a retired businessman (industrial chemistry), linguist, and scholarly authority on Tibet, Braham Norwick of New York. One hopes this fresh look will begin to revive the memory of an exceptionally interesting figure.

Yet Rockhill is scarcely alone in the musty hall of forgotten heroes. Elsewhere in these pages we memorialize Ralph Bunche, another polymath. And our publisher and World Policy Institute director Stephen Schlesinger now recalls to life the remarkable constellation of talents responsible for the success of the 1945 San Francisco Conference. His book, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations, published by Westview this fall, will come as a surprise even to those who think they know the story. I was struck especially by the unsung role of Leo Pasvolsky, a Russian Jewish immigrant who as a journalist covered the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and became a Brookings Institution specialist in international law. He was the advisor to Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who chaired innumerable committee meetings to distill a consensus on what became the United Nations Charter adopted at San Francisco. Yet even at Brookings they are unaware of Pasvolsky’s pivotal part in global diplomacy. He deserves a plaque, a chair, and a full-dress biography. And why not establish a Hall of Memory for Forgotten Heroes?

—Karl E. Meyer

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