America & the World: Principle & Pragmatism

By Henry Kissinger

The following Bicentennial Essay is the ninth in a series that has been appearing periodically, surveying how the U.S. has changed in its 200 years.

America has perennially engaged in a search of its conscience. How does our foreign policy serve moral ends? How can America serve as a humane example and champion of justice in a world in which power is still often the final arbiter? How do we reconcile ends and means, principle and survival? Today the challenge of American foreign policy is to avoid the illusion of false choices: we must live up to this nation's moral promise while fulfilling the practical needs of world order.

OUR HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

From its beginning, Americans have believed this country had a moral significance that transcended its military or economic power. Unique among the nations of the world, America was created as a conscious act by men dedicated to a set of political and ethical principles they believed to be of universal applicability. Small wonder, then, that Santayana concluded: "To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition."

But this idealism has also been in constant tension with another deep-seated strain in our historical experience. Since Tocqueville, it has been frequently observed that we are a pragmatic people -commonsensical, undogmatic and undoctrinaire, a nation of practical energy, ingenuity and spirit. We have made tolerance and compromise the basis of our domestic political life. We have defined our fundamental goals -justice, liberty, equality and progress -in open and libertarian terms, enlarging opportunity and freedom rather than coercing a uniform standard of conduct.

America has been most effective internationally when we have combined our idealistic and our pragmatic traditions. The founding fathers were idealists who launched a new experiment in human liberty. But they understood the global balance of power and manipulated it brilliantly to secure their independence. Franklin and Jefferson perceived that the European powers saw the conflict in North America as part of a global struggle. Their diplomacy led to the involvement of Britain's enemies -France, Spain and Russia -in ways that favored the rebellious colonies, and then cut loose from them in a separate treaty of peace by which John Jay won the British Crown's recognition and liquidated the residual problems of the Revolution.

Thus America's energies were released to populate and build a continental nation and to perfect domestic institutions. As we did so, both our pragmatic nature and our moral commitment took deeper root in the national character -but often as seemingly separate and even contrasting factors. When faced in 1802 with the attempt of France to control the mouth of the Mississippi, Thomas Jefferson was above all concerned with the future prospects of French control over trade in and out of the American heartland.

But as our practical needs were served, so too was our idealistic strain. James Madison declared that "the free system of Government we have established is so congenial with reason, with common sense, and with a universal feeling, that it must produce approbation and a desire of imitation -Our country, if it does justice to itself, will be the workshop of liberty to the civilized world, and do more than any other for the uncivilized." The implications of this outlook would lead both to the advocacy of interventionism, as in Edward Everett's 1823 case for supporting the Greek revolution, and isolation, as in William Seward's 1863 rebuttal of requests to oppose Russia's mistreatment of Poland.

Yet throughout the 19th century, our greatest achievements came through efforts marked by both moral vision and practical purpose. Theodore Roosevelt noted that long before Jefferson negotiated an end to the French claim to Louisiana, that and other foreign claims had been effectively undermined by the great western movement of Americans and the free communities they quickly founded. But the consolidation of their pioneering achievements was made possible by those negotiations and by subsequent diplomatic successes. The annexation of Florida, the Oregon boundary settlement with Great Britain, the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, the Gadsden Purchase, the purchase of Alaska from Russia -all were triumphs of diplomacy during decades when most citizens believed America did not have, or need, a foreign policy.

Indeed, our very achievements in dealing with the world brought most Americans under the sway of a shared mythology. As a society of men and women who had fled the persecutions and power politics of the Old World, Americans -whether Mayflower descendants or refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848 -came to assume that we were beyond the reach of the imperatives of traditional foreign policy.

With our security assured, we became bemused by the popular belief that President Monroe's obligation to defend the Western Hemisphere, and indeed almost any obligation we might choose to assume, depended on unilateral American decisions

to be entered into or ended entirely at our discretion. Americans never paid attention to British Foreign Secretary George Canning's justification of the Monroe Doctrine: "We have called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the old." Shielded by two oceans and enriched by a bountiful nature, we proclaimed our special situation as universally valid, even for nations whose narrower margin of survival meant that their range of choices was far more limited than our own.

It was, as C. Vann Woodward has called it, "the age of free security." As usual, Abraham Lincoln depicted it most vividly. "Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years."

We disparaged power even as we grew strong; we saw our successes as the product not of fortunate circumstances and considerable effort, but of virtue and purity of motive. The preoccupation of other nations with security only reinforced our sense of uniqueness. Arms and alliances were seen as immoral and reactionary. Our native inclination for straightforwardness brought increasing impatience with diplomacy, which often calls for ambiguity and compromise.

In this atmosphere even the purchase of Alaska -which excluded Russia from our continent -was regarded in its day as a folly. Congress was prevailed upon only with the greatest difficulty to provide the $7 million to complete the deal. The mythology of American ineptitude in its diplomatic pursuits carried into the 20th century. Will Rogers always got a laugh when he cracked, "America never lost a war and never won a conference."

THE 20TH CENTURY

Forgetful of the wisdom and skilled statecraft by which the founding fathers won our independence and secured our safety, and disdainful of the techniques by which all nations -even the U.S. -must preserve their interests, we entered the 20th century largely unprepared for the part we would be called upon to play.

As our power grew, we became uncomfortable with its uses and responsibilities, and impatient with the compromises of day-to-day diplomacy. Our rise to great power status was feared and resisted by many Americans who foresaw a process of deepening involvement in a morally questionable world. In the early decades of this century, we sought to reconcile the tension between ideals and interests by confining ourselves to humanitarian efforts and resorting to our belief in the pre-eminence of law. We pioneered in relief programs; we championed free trade and the cause of foreign investment. We attempted to legislate solutions to international conflicts.

These efforts to banish the reality of power were aborted by our involvement in two world wars.

While we had a clear security interest in a Europe free from domination by any one power. Woodrow Wilson argued the case for intervention in wholly idealistic terms. He described it in 1917 as "the opportunity for which the American people have sought to prepare themselves ever since the days when they set up a new nation in the high and honorable hope that it might, in all that it was and did, show mankind the way to liberty." Thus we would do battle for universal moral objectives, not for a new equilibrium -a war to end all wars, not a peace in which victors and vanquished sought a balance of their interests.

Disillusionment set in as the outcome of the war necessarily fell short of expectations, and indeed as the one-sided nature of the peace required ever greater efforts to maintain it against countries with no stake in the settlement. A tide of isolationist sentiment rose, in which moral proclamations were coupled with an unwillingness to undertake concrete commitments. We were loath to face a world of imperfect security, alliances of convenience, recurrent crises and the need for a political structure that would secure the peace.

In the decades after World War II, we undertook our first sustained period of peacetime world leadership with a supreme self-assurance fortunately matched by overwhelming material superiority. And we faced an antagonist whose political system and actions on the world scene explicitly threatened the very existence of our most cherished principles.

In a period of seemingly clear-cut divisions, we saw little need for an explicit definition of the national interest. We saw economic problems around the world of the kind we had solved successfully in our own country, and sought to overwhelm them with the weight of resources, assuming that economic progress automatically led to political stability. In short, without making a conscious design to do so, we were trying to shape the world to our design.

Our postwar policy was marked by great achievements.

America found within itself extraordinary capacities of vision and creativity. Leaders of both parties and many backgrounds -Truman and Eisenhower, Vandenberg and Marshall, Acheson and Dulles -built a national consensus for responsible American world leadership based on both principle and pragmatism. The recovery of Western Europe and Japan, the creation of peacetime alliances, the shaping of the global trade and monetary system, the economic advance of newer and poorer nations, the measures to control the nuclear arms race -these constitute an enduring record of American statesmanship.

OUR CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE

We face an equally great challenge today. America is thrust into the role of global leadership with a dual responsibility. We must maintain our security and global peace by the traditional methods of power and diplomacy. But we know that nuclear war could destroy civilization, and therefore we must go beyond traditional foreign policy to shape a world reflecting the imperatives of interdependence and justice.

We remain the strongest nation and the largest single influence in international affairs. For 30 years our leadership has sustained world peace, progress and justice. Our leadership is no less needed today, but it must be redefined to meet changing conditions. Ours is no longer a world of American nuclear monopoly, but one of substantial nuclear equivalence. Ours is no longer a world of two solid blocs and clear-cut dividing lines, but one of proliferating centers of power and influence. Ours is no longer a world amenable to national solutions, but one of economic interdependence and common global challenges. Ours is a world where moral affirmation can be carried out only through stages, each of which is by definition imperfect.

Thus for the first time in American experience, we can neither escape from the world nor dominate it.

Rather we -like all other nations in history -must now conduct diplomacy with subtlety, flexibility, persistence and imagination. We must fuse our great national assets of idealism and realism, our moral convictions and our pragmatic bent. We can no longer impose our own solutions; yet our action or inaction will influence events, often decisively. We cannot banish power from international affairs, but we can use our vast power wisely and firmly to deter aggression and encourage restraint and negotiation. We can help construct a wider community of interest among all nations. We must continue to stand for freedom in the world.

These are worthy goals. They can be achieved. But they summon a different dimension of moral conviction than that of a simpler past. They require the stamina to persevere amid ambiguity, and the courage to hold fast to what we believe in while recognizing that at any one time our hopes are likely to be only gradually fulfilled. It is the essence of moral purposes that they appear absolute and universal. It is the essence of foreign policy to take into account the views of others who may also see their values in this manner.

Clearly, we must maintain our purposes and our principles. But we risk disaster unless we relate our moral convictions to concepts of the national interest and international order that are based not on impulse but on a sense of steady purpose that can be maintained by the American people for the long term.

AMERICA'S AGENDA

America -and the community of nations -today faces inescapable tasks:

P: We must maintain a secure and just peace. P: We must create a cooperative and beneficial international order. P: We must defend the rights and the dignity of man.

Each of these challenges has both a moral and a practical dimension. Each involves important ends, but ends that are sometimes in conflict. When that is the case, we face the real moral dilemma of foreign policy: the need to choose between valid ends and to relate our ends to means.

Peace is a fundamental moral imperative. Without it, nothing else we do or seek can ultimately have meaning. Averting the danger of nuclear war and limiting and ultimately reducing destructive nuclear arsenals is a moral as well as a political act.

In the nuclear age, power politics, the struggle for marginal advantages, the drive for prestige and unilateral gains must yield to an unprecedented sense of responsibility. History teaches us that balances based on constant tests of strength have always erupted into war. Common sense tells us that in the nuclear age history must not be repeated. Every President, sooner or later, will conclude with President Eisenhower that "there is no alternative to peace." But peace cannot be our only goal. To seek it at any price would render us morally defenseless and place the world at the mercy of the most ruthless. Mankind must do more, as Tacitus said, than "make a desert [and] call it peace."

There will be no security in a world whose obsession with peace leads to appeasement. But neither will there be security in a world in which mock tough rhetoric and the accumulation of arms are the sole measure of competition. We can spare no effort to bequeath to future generations a peace more hopeful than an equilibrium of terror.

In the search for peace we are continually called upon to strike balances -between strength and conciliation; between the need to defend our values and interests and the need to consider the views of others; between partial and total settlements.

America's second moral imperative is the growing need for global cooperation. We live in a world of more than 150 countries, each asserting sovereignty and claiming the right to realize its national aspirations. Clearly, no nation can fulfill all its goals without infringing on the rights of others. Hence, compromise and common endeavors are inescapable. The growing interdependence of states in the face of the polarizing tendencies of nationalism and ideologies makes imperative the building of world community.

We live in an age of division -between East and West and between the advanced industrial nations and the developing nations. Clearly, a world in which a few nations constitute islands of wealth in a sea of despair is fundamentally insecure and morally intolerable. Those who consider themselves dispossessed will become the seedbed of upheaval. But the tactics of confrontation with which some of the developing nations have pursued their goals are as unacceptable as they are unproductive.

The objectives of the developing nations are clear: economic development, a role in international decisions that affect them, a fair share of global economic benefits. The goals of the industrial nations are equally clear: widening prosperity, an open world system of trade, investments and markets and reliable development of the resources of food, energy and raw materials.

The process of building a new era of international economic relationships will continue through the rest of this century. If those relationships are to be equitable and lasting, negotiation and mutual regard among diverse and contending interests will clearly be required. On the part of the industrial nations, there must be a moral commitment -now, while there is still time for conciliation -to make the sacrifices necessary to build a sense of community. On the part of the developing nations, there must be an end to blackmail and extortion -now, before the world is irrevocably split into contending camps -and a commitment to seek progress through cooperation.

Our third moral imperative is the nurturing of human values.

It is a tragedy that the very tools of technology that have made ours the most productive century in history have also served to subject millions to a new dimension of intimidation, suffering and fear. Individual freedom of conscience and expression is the proudest heritage of our civilization. All we do in the search for peace, for greater political cooperation and for a fair and flourishing international economy is rooted in our belief that only liberty permits the fullest expression of mankind's creativity. Technological progress without justice mocks humanity; national unity without freedom is a hollow triumph. Nationalism without a consciousness of human community and human rights is likely to become an instrument of oppression and a force for evil. As the world's leading democracy, it is our obligation to dedicate ourselves to assuring freedom for the human spirit. But responsibility compels also a recognition of our limits. Our alliances, the political relationships built up with other nations, serve peace by strengthening regional and world security. If well conceived, they are not favors to others, but a recognition of common interests. They should be withdrawn when those interests change; they should not, as a general rule, be used as levers.

There is no simple answer to the dilemma a great democracy faces under such circumstances. We have a moral as well as a practical obligation to stand up for our values and to combat injustice. Those who speak out for freedom and expose the transgressions of repressive regimes do so in the best American tradition. But WILSON (1912) there are times when an effort to teach another country a moral lesson can undermine the very values we seek to promote. When sensitive issues are transformed into tests of strength between governments, the impulse of national prestige may defeat the most worthy goals. Thus we must take care not to elaborate a doctrine of universal intervention. We must remember that in our history such concepts have as often led to abdication as to overcommitment, both with disastrous results.

America's most profound contribution to world affairs has derived from our conviction that while history is often cruel, fate can be shaped by human faith and courage. Our optimism has enabled us to understand that the greatest achievements were a dream before they became a reality. We have learned through experience, as few people have, that all that is creative is ultimately a moral affirmation -the faith that dares in the absence of certainty, the courage to go forward in the face of adversity.

Americans must learn the inescapable need to relate our moral aims -which of necessity are stated in universal terms -to the imperative choices imposed upon us by competing goals and finite resources. Foreign policy is, like life, a constant effort to strike the right balance between the best we want and the best we can have between the ends we seek and the means we adopt. We need moral strength to select among often agonizing choices, and a sense of ethical purpose to navigate between difficult decisions. But we need as well a mature sense of means, lest we substitute wishful thinking for the requirements of survival. The ultimate test of morality in foreign policy is not only the values we proclaim but what we are willing and able to carry out.

As the greatest democracy in the world, America is a reminder to all that there is an alternative to tyranny and oppression. The revolution begun two centuries ago goes on, for much of the world still seeks the freedom and the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of law that this country has never ceased to seek, enjoy and perfect. The surest path to our own greater success, and the brightest hope for others, is to remain true to the American tradition -a heritage where reality is a point of departure but never our final horizon, and where ideals ennoble reality and enable us to shape our future.

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