Restraining Imperial Hubris: The Ethical Bases of Realist International Relations Theory

Abstract

Students of American politics and society have long observed that America’s own distinctive adoption of Enlightenment thinking and related liberal universalism has led to the development of an unhealthy messianic streak in the country’s foreign policy. What American citizens want, it is often believed, others everywhere ought to naturally want as well. The next logical step is to assert that the United States has a “moral duty” to deploy its formidable power internationally as a means to ensure that individuals everywhere can benefit from the liberties that Americans enjoy at home. This leaves the temptation of crusading interventionism abroad constantly looming on the horizon, based on what Louis Hartz identified long ago as an absolutist American impulse to “impose Locke everywhere.”2 The phenomenon has been usually interpreted as the result of America’s peculiar historical experience: on the one hand, the absence of a powerful feudal class antagonistic to liberal ideas left the Lockean faith in universal natural rights virtually unchallenged; one the other hand, the success of early continental expansion combined with the lack of powerful and threatening neighbors led to a widespread belief among American citizens in their country’s international omnipotence that remained virtually unchallenged until the aftermath of World War I.3 Sometimes American statesmen merely deployed the rhetoric of a cosmopolitan “mission” instrumentally, while their true goal was to advance the nation’s interest and improve its security through expansion. That was, for instance, clearly the case of the late Thomas Jefferson and of John Quincy Adams. On other occasions, American presidents genuinely internalized the belief in a moral mission to change the world, such as in the case of Woodrow Wilson, and more recently, Ronald Reagan as well as George W. Bush. In all those instances, arguments about the “export” or promotion of cosmopolitan values abroad were regularly adduced as a justification for American military interventionism, which made it much easier for domestic public opinion to swallow the costs of similar projects.4 Leading post-World War II realist scholars of international relations, such as Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Arnold Wolfers, and Robert Tucker have always