I’m slowly reading Henry Kissinger’s World Order. And the topic he returns to again and again is the two poles in foreign policy: Realpolitik, meaning just the power relationships between nations, and morality. Here he is talking about US foreign policy at the start of the Cold War:
[T]he United States assumed leadership of the global effort to contain Soviet expansionism — but as a primarily moral, not geopolitical endeavor.
He quotes John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State in the Eisenhower administration, writing about the old days of foreign policy as “immediate self-interest” being replaced by “a new era when nations will be guided by principle.” Kissinger comments:
The implication that other nations had “selfish interests” while America had “principles”and “destiny” was as old as the Republic.
Reading between the lines, I interpret Kissinger as saying the new way is a problem.
And you know what’s coming next. I bring in Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his distinctions: the political between friend and enemy, and the moral between good and evil.
So my take is that when you combine the political and the moral in foreign policy, you are getting real close to a religious war. It’s one thing to say that the Europeans are our allies and we want to keep the Soviets out of Poland, Hungary and Romania. It’s another thing to say that Communism is evil and we must keep its evil influence out of Europe. And yet, I suspect, the fact that in the US this combination is “as old as the Republic” means that the leader of the United States has to combine the two to the American people if he wants them to support his foreign policy. The Other Guys aren’t just enemies, but evil enemies.
Of course, we see this in domestic politics, where the Other Party is usually considered not just wrong, but evil. See Trump, Donald J., a threat to democracy.
I realize, of course, that the political and the moral cannot be completely separated. Murderers, obviously, are an enemy of society, and they must be stopped by force, because we cannot have people running around killing other people. But we also regard them as evil.
Now, of course, because I am so wise, I judge the political programs of our liberal friends as foolish and harmful. I don’t think of liberals as evil, just wrong. I realize that in any politics, we distribute goodies to our friends and tax and loot price gougers. But politics never stops there. It always wants to make moral judgments, as in: hey, it stands to reason that Big Business is bad and needs to be held in check. And it is obvious that we seniors deserve our Social Security checks.
I’d say that we should minimize government power and spending and taxing and regulation and avoid using the government to impose our moral judgments, except where absolutely essential.
I’d say that the more we humans link politics and morality, the worse it gets. And the worst is to fold politics and morality and the economy into one, as in Communism.
We know we should use the power of the state to hunt down murderers and robbers. Although you’ll note that our beloved Soros prosecutors want to be nice to robbers.
But whatabout price gougers? Whatabout economic royalists? Whatabout greedy bankers? Should we use the power of the state to go after them? Or should we just be content with shaming them? For instance, we have reduced the incidence of tobacco use substantially by making it shameful and uncool.