The Balance of Power as a Guide to Policy-Making

Abstract

Of the neutralist American foreign policy in 1913 and 1914, George F. Kennan wrote that History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics.... A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster.' Kennan implied that unless foreign policy-making achieves,a considerable degree of independence from the total political process there can be no assurance of national survival. Survival implies intelligent and dispassionate planning and analysis, which in turn are dependent upon their separation from politics as traditionally practiced in a democracy. Historically the balance of power has been held out as a means for planning policy in an intelligent and dispassionate manner. It has been considered as a highly practical principle at once clarifying the nature of the state system and setting forth the operational rules whereby the survival of single states within that system might be assured. Its merits lay in its objectivity, its detachment from ideology, its universality, and its independence from short-term considerations. It stressed the essentials, timeless and inescapable, in international affairs: power and power relationships. The eighteenth century advocates of the balance of power pictured Europe as a confederation or system. Despite its division into sovereign states, eternally in competition with each other, Europe was held to be a great family of units characterized by similar institutions, similar value systems, and similar cultural traits. Even the motivations of European rulers and statesmen were considered to be identical. Politics, therefore, unfolded in a milieu characterized by an institutional and cultural consensus among the participants. A Fleury as well as a Frederick the Great,