Ethical Realism

The problem before you was to come up with a book that will shake up people and point out some of the things that we can draw on in our own history to help us understand what's going on. The idea is to link philosophy with politics with strategy to then talk about contemporary problems. One key component here is the title of the book, Ethical Realism. You're arguing for a philosophy for dealing with the world that reflects our tradition. So, let's talk a little about ethical realism.

Ethical realism is derived from the philosophy of three thinkers who we take as our principal inspirations. Reinhold Niebuhr, also a great foreign policy thinker; George Kennan, architect of the containment doctrine who later, of course, became a very strong critic of what he saw as excessively militarized American strategies during the Cold War; and Hans Morgenthau, German Jewish refugee from the Nazis who became in many ways the intellectual father of the realist school. What ethical realism tries to do is two things. First, it tries to produce a strategy which is conditioned by ethical considerations, both in what it wants to do but also in things that it refuses to do, like sanctioning torture, for example, while at the same time (unlike too many people who present themselves as ethical in foreign policy today), actually having a strategy that will work in the real world.

The other thing we try to do through ethical realism is produce an approach which will, if you like, bring together the two halves of the American soul. We've seen again and again through modern history that most American citizens quite rightly expect that the policy of their government will serve the interests of the American people and the security of the American people. In that sense, they're realists. They're not prepared to sacrifice either of these things on a large scale for ethical goals elsewhere in the world. Equally, we've seen again and again that a majority of Americans distrust and dislike a policy of pure realism, classical realpolitik as espoused by Henry Kissinger, for example. They expect American policy to be morally conditioned, to some extent at least, both in what it aims to be to create but also in what it actually does. So, what we hope through this philosophy, or the revival of this philosophy, is to try to answer both of these problems in American foreign policy formulation.

Help our audience understand what the tenets that ethical realism offers -- tenets and principles leading to virtues, I guess you would say, in how we approach the world.

We try to distill, from this great amount of thinking, understandable tenets that we could hang our hat on, and a number of these we can briefly mention.

Study is one of them, and just to give you an idea, Daniel Ellsberg during the Vietnam War rightly said that the Kennedy administration, for all its intellectual brilliance, none of the major protagonists could have passed an intro class on Vietnamese history, culture, sociology, ethnology, and that that is morally a suspect position to be in. Likewise Paul Bremmer, as was mentioned in the New York Review of Books, and his senior staff -- not one person had a master's degree in anything related to Middle East studies. If you're going to go into a country and radically alter it you have to study what that country is about: its history, its culture, its local customs. If you can't do that you are bound to fail, and more importantly, morally you have put yourself in a position that is suspect. That is something that everyone would understand.

Secondly and in line with this is humility. Even if you have this notion of being able to study everything, you will never know enough to entirely understand what you're doing, and the information may be flawed, you may be flawed, the timing may be flawed. If any of these factors is true it leads to a caution, it leads to a sense of limits. It's not "do nothing," but it's do things while being aware that this is the reality. Likewise, this leads to a hierarchy of interests, as Anatol was talking about, that you can't do everything. It isn't enough to make a laundry list; these tough tradeoffs are indeed part of what the world's about. You simply aren't powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to make this work.

Prudence is a third virtue that comes out of this, that given this notion that we've brought forward, a prudential view that there are consequences to your actions and, as in Iraq, if you go in without a plan to deal with the counterinsurgency, without a plan to talk to Sistani, without a plan to talk to the Sunnis, without a plan to safeguard nuclear materials, without a plan for postwar reconstruction, you are not looking at things that are obvious, that the CIA warned them about, that the State Department warned them about, that frankly the Heritage [Foundation] plan for what to do in postwar Iraq warned them about, that you are violating prudential principles that are fundamental.

Responsibility flows out of this, that the key is to have an ethic of consequence and not an ethic of conviction. It isn't enough to say, "Well, I meant well." Everyone means well. The reality is that you have to think about what the consequences are of your actions. For instance, throwing away the lives of servicemen by not doing these things is a morally untenable point.

Our last principle is patriotism, and we think

this is important because it has to connect to the American people, for all the political reasons we've said; and
it's moral, because like Truman and Eisenhower, I actually like the American people.

The reason I'm writing this book is not because we're anti-American but rather because we love America and are incredibly upset with what's going on.

Another key point brought up by Niebuhr is that other people have patriotism too, and to assume that the Iranians are going to give up all their principles and support a pro-American position is living in fantasyland. No government in the world, be it democratic or otherwise, could survive if that were the reality. As Atticus Finch said to his daughter Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, to understand a person you have to walk a mile in his shoes. When you add all this together you get a very different kind of foreign policy coming from this very different philosophy.

How did this get lost, these virtues? Is it a matter of timing, of where we stood in the world after the end of the Cold War? Is it, as we were talking earlier, the atavism of these groups? Wouldn't you expect all these things that you're describing to already be there? Because they were there before and they're very American.

I think two things happened which were a very, very terrible combination. One was something which in itself was wonderful, which was American victory in the Cold War, but it did produce a mood of triumphalism, that America is all powerful, can do anything. And then came 9/11, which makes America, as has often been said, seem on the one hand still all powerful but at the same time uniquely vulnerable for the first time in its history. That is a disastrous combination, when on the one hand you think you have the power to do anything but on the other hand you feel very frightened and at risk.

Each of those two things was seized upon by the neoconservatives in particular with, it must be said, political brilliance, the way that they seized those two moments and used them as vehicles for their agenda.

The third thing, which was tremendously strengthened by victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Communist model, was American democratic messianism, the belief that America can spread its system to the rest of the world successfully, even if countries apparently don't want it or their elites and governments oppose it, and even, if necessary, by force of arms. This is something which is so apparent in the leadership of the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans.

The thing is, it worked in Eastern Europe, but it worked in Eastern Europe for a whole set of very specific reasons, one of them being the European Union, which did the heavy lifting there, which you cannot replicate in the Middle East, for example. People have forgotten that. They've forgotten what was unique about Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, and they think that somehow Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan resembles Poland from that point of view. It quite obviously doesn't.

It's this one-size-fits-all approach, that there's no difference between Poland and Iraq. Something that we said along the way: Iraq isn't a nation, it's three Ottoman Empire provinces put together by the British for imperial convenience, which has never been stable through the supposedly golden Hashemite period where there were twenty coups in twenty years. It's never been stable, and to assume that somehow its history and Poland's are either worth ignoring or that they're the same, and it has to be one of the two, leads to disastrous policy outputs. It's a laziness that goes back to the view of Communism.

The other key link between the liberal hawks and the neocons and today is this one-size-fits-all, that there are no differences between Persian nationalism, Shiism, Sunni radicalism, Wahhabism, Alawis in Syria, they're all the same; people who want a caliphate and people who are socialists, they're all the same. It's this lumping things together, which is exactly what the preventive war types [say], like James Burnham, [who was] wrong to say Chinese Communism will always be like Soviet Communism which will always be like Yugoslav Communism. This was patently untrue then and patently untrue now, and is another example of these liberal hawks who'd be horrified agreeing with James Burnham, whom they'd laugh at, at cocktail parties, but on the other hand they espouse his views. The world is simply more complicated than that.

So, it seems, talking here to two historians, that we're dealing with the consequences of our own history, both its success but also its long-term history. I think it was Louis Hart [who said] "We did not have a revolution; we're not going to understand the world when we go out to fight the Communists," and he's writing this in 1950. So, these are continuing themes.

That's one of the key things that we did in trying to resurrect ethical realism. See, it isn't just ethical realism that's been around a long time, it's this utopian strain that's been around since James Burnham, and indeed, back to Thomas Payne. Our soldiers are freezing to death at Valley Forge and he's writing, "Together we can begin the world over again." This is a battle that's gone on. The difference is the virulence with which the neoconservatives have attacked this, the military aspects of it, and the fact that this time the liberal hawks and the neoconservatives are bluntly winning.

After Iraq that is an astounding thing to say but the reality is books like this [are] a manifesto to everyone who believes in a sober, realistic, sensible, ethical policy, that they can indeed still emerge triumphant in the place that it matters, Washington, where these power decisions are made. When you say this to a European -- I work in Berlin -- they laugh at you. They can't believe that I'm being remotely serious. But I am. If we don't solve things -- the great thing about America is it has a corrective system. The great thing about it is that, but people who don't know what's going on can't possibly make that decision. What we wanted to offer them was an alternate view of both history, of philosophy, but how to wed them together in what we should do from here.

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