But he is also known as a major figure in the Realist school of foreign policy thinking. And while his proposal to "pastorlize" Germany hardly seems to have reflected hard-headed empirical calculation, his reputation fares better in this article from 1965, from the early months of the "Americanization" of the Vietnam War, Vietnam: Shadow and Substance New York Review of Books 09/16/1965 edition (link behind subscription). He wrote, in words that are worth remembering when we hear how terribly humiliated Dick Cheney and John McCain would be if we withdraw from the Iraq War:
The prestige of a nation is not determined by the success or failure of a particular operation at a particular moment in history. Quite the contrary, it reflects the sum of a nation's qualities and actions, of its successes and failures, of its historic memories and aspirations. The pages of history record many examples of nations which, secure in their possession of great power and recognized as such by their peers, have suffered defeat or retreated from exposed positions without suffering a loss in prestige. When was the prestige of France higher: when it fought wars in Indochina and Algeria which it could neither win nor thought it could afford to lose, or after it had liquidated these losing enterprises? And how much did American prestige suffer in the long run from the debacle of the Bay of Pigs, as thorough and spectacular a failure as one would wish only one's enemy to suffer, and as humiliating a revelation of governmental incompetence as one would not want perhaps even one's enemy to reveal? When France demonstrated the wisdom and courage to liquidate two losing enterprises on which it had staked its "honor," its prestige rose to heights it had not attained since the beginning of the Second World War, and the Bay of Pigs has weighed little in the scales of American prestige, heavy as they are with power and success. To say, then, that we ought not to be in Vietnam but cannot leave because our prestige would suffer, is to confound ephemeral fluctuations of public opinion with the lasting foundation of national power and prestige and to think little of American power and of the American prestige which reflects that power.Tags: hans morgenthau, lessons of iraq, vietnam war
Yet the same fear that anticipates a disastrous loss of prestige from a temporary setback engenders an overestimation of national power, and a need to transform a losing into a winning position. The sense of inferiority, which underestimates our national power and prestige, calls forth a policy of bluff. Obsessed with the fear of the permanent loss of prestige which we imagine would follow a temporary setback, we have become oblivious to the much more serious loss of prestige which would ensue, and has already ensued, from the continuation and escalation of a losing enterprise. Can anyone who has followed foreign public opinion carefully and with at least a measure of objectivity doubt that our prestige throughout the world has declined drastically since the beginning of 1965? Nobody questions our physical power to destroy Vietnam, South and North. Yet in even so friendly a country as Germany, which depends upon a commitment of our physical power to its defense, there are people within and outside the government who question our ability to honor this commitment when we have sent the flower of our armed forces to Vietnam without having a chance to win. Everywhere people question, sometimes under their breath and sometimes loudly, the wisdom and morality of the government of the United States. And what will our prestige be if hundreds of thousands of American men are bogged down in Vietnam, still unable to win and unable to retreat?
Unaware as we are in general of the nature and the greatness of our power, we have become negligent of its limits in dealing with Vietnam. Thus our judgments and actions are at odds with empirical reality. On the one hand, our knowledge of reality counsels us to liquidate a losing enterprise, and thus we try to negotiate our way out; but the negotiating conditions we stipulate always limp a couple of months behind reality, and thus our attempts consistently fail. For, on the other hand, our policy makers are dominated by a state of mind combining a sense of inferiority with a sense of invincibility, which has made us decide that we cannot afford to retreat and that we must and can win. Since a rational assessment of empirical reality contradicts this decision, we are compelled to disregard reality and to invent a mythological reality which supports our decision. (my emphasis)
1 comment:
Umm, you've confused Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the postwar "classical realist" school of internetional relations studies, with Henry J Morgenthau, Jr., who was FDR's Secretary of the Treasury and lent his name to the so-called Morgenthau Plan to pastoralize postwar Germany. You're not the first to make this mistake.
We can never know, but I very much doubt Hans, realist that he was and steeped in the post-Versailles history of his native Europe, would have thought much of Henry's plan.
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