Hans Morgenthau and the National

Interest
Cornelia Navari

H
ans Morgenthau’s concept of “the national interest” first appeared,
somewhat like thunder out of China, in the essay “The Primacy of
the National Interest” as part of a forum in the Spring  issue of
The American Scholar titled “The National Interest and Moral Principles in
Foreign Policy.” As William Scheuerman observes, “The concept of the ‘national
interest’ first takes on a special analytic status in this essay.” In the essay, the na-
tional interest is first presented as a necessary corrective to what Morgenthau had
already characterized in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics as legalism, moralism,
and sentimentalism in American politics, and as a more effective guide to foreign
policy than the American tradition seemed able to provide.
The political context is critical to understanding Morgenthau’s thinking on the
subject. At the time of the forum’s publication, the cold war was in its early stages,
and there was growing public unease not only about Soviet intentions but also
American responses. Scheuerman stresses the Russian atomic bomb explosion
in August  and the vexed questions of the new demands of an atomic
age. But Morgenthau’s use of the national interest as a framework for under-
standing the new requirements for an American foreign policy appeared before
the Russian test (the forum was organized in late ), and relates rather to
the steady institutionalization of the cold war that had occurred throughout
: the signing of the Brussels Treaty by Britain, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Luxembourg, creating a collective defense alliance; the U.S. de-
cision to go ahead with the Marshall Plan absent Soviet concurrence; and the de-
velopment of the Atlantic security pact. More pertinently, at the end of 
Morgenthau had been invited by George Kennan, then head of policy planning
in the State Department, to join the team of State Department policy consultants,
where he was defending negotiation with the Soviets and urging the continuation

Ethics & International Affairs, , no.  (), pp. –.

©  Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs
doi:./SX

47
of diplomatic efforts to heal the growing rift. Morgenthau was uneasy about
Kennan’s famous essay “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” because it appeared to
support a policy of containment, thus structuring, he would argue, an unnecessary
degree of enmity between the two countries. Morgenthau had underlined his com-
mitment to the classic principles of diplomacy in , in a response to the emerg-
ing idea that with the establishment of the United Nations traditional diplomacy
had become outmoded. Elaborating on this idea, he had argued in Politics Among
Nations that modern technology had obviated the use of war as a mechanism of
dispute settlement, thereby increasing the importance of diplomacy; and by ,
with the breakup of Allied cohesion, he would openly support a negotiated settle-
ment on the basis of spheres of influence.
The inspiration for Morgenthau’s contribution to the forum appears to have
been E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, –. Morgenthau had been
handed the entire corpus of Carr’s foreign policy works to review for the first
issue of World Politics, which appeared in August , and his long review is
full of praise for Carr’s analysis of the psychological and political roots of interwar
“idealism.” The juxtaposition of idealism and “realism” was a central feature of
Carr’s analysis, and Morgenthau immediately adopted the distinction, thereby es-
tablishing the basic schema by which theories of international relations would be
ordered (and a good deal of their history written) for the rest of the century: “real-
ism/idealism” comes directly from Morgenthau’s encounter with Carr. But what
particularly struck Morgenthau—in his review he repeats Carr’s formulation twice
—was the latter’s designation of the requirements for “effective political thinking.”
These were: “a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgment, and a
ground for action.” It was these requirements that Morgenthau intended the con-
cept of a national interest to fulfill.
The source of Morgenthau’s national interest as a political and moral grounding
for American cold war policy has been variously assigned. Christoph Frei places it
with Friedrich Meinecke and the continental Machiavellian tradition; Niels
Amstrup, more accurately in my view, with the German legal idea of
Lebensinteressen (“life interests”), the technical term Morgenthau used for interna-
tional claims in his  doctoral dissertation. The term derives from German
labor law, in which Morgenthau was trained. “Life interests” were those claims
that related to the actual physical and mental wellbeing of the worker, as opposed
to the trade unionists’ demands for such things as representation on management
boards, considered less “vital” to the worker.

48 Cornelia Navari
 But the critical question in  was not the technical content of national in-
terest, but rather its use as a guide or fundamental principle in foreign policy,
and in this aspect there can be little doubt as to the source, since he tells us so
himself. In “The Primacy of the National Interest,” his contribution to the
American Scholar forum, Morgenthau relates the idea directly to Alexander
Hamilton’s Pacificus and Americanus articles. He set his research assistant
Kenneth Thompson to collect similar instances of national interest conduct, re-
sulting in a large collection of case studies featuring Disraeli, Jefferson,
Salisbury, Hume, Charles James Fox, Talleyrand, and eventually Niebuhr. Their
findings were published in a  set of readings entitled Principles and
Problems of International Politics, under the joint editorship of Morgenthau and
Thompson.
Morgenthau explained his preference for an Anglo-Saxon reading of national
interest in his  piece for the British Yearbook of World Affairs, his third ex-
cursion on the subject. There, he castigated the Machiavellian continental tradi-
tion (of which Meinecke’s was “the classic account”) as an “a priori
abstraction” and an essentially philosophical polemics, “leaving the issue in the
end where they found it.” In the English-speaking world, on the other hand,
the idea of national interest was reflected in actual decision-making and displayed
“a continuing concern with the successful conduct of foreign policy as the precon-
dition for national greatness and survival.” And this had been due to holding
“with an unshakeable constancy . . . principles [that] were in no degree abstract
or speculative,” as Castlereagh had demonstrated in his dealings with the
French. According to Morgenthau, the Anglo-Saxon tradition, with its concern
for palpable “interests,” had made of the national interest the grounding of a
great and (as he would soon come to argue) principled foreign policy.
The argument, put briefly in those terms, did not immediately convince.
William T. R. Fox’s rejoinder, published alongside Morgenthau in the American
Scholar forum and entitled “The Reconciliation of the Desirable and the
Possible,” argued that the national interest was impossible to determine without
some explicitly declared set of value preferences. Edgar Mowrer, a Pulitzer
Prize–winning journalist, Deputy Head of the Office of Public Information during
WWII, and author of The Nightmare of American Foreign Policy, echoed this
view in the subsequent discussion, with an argument for “the normal and some-
times inevitable choice between conflicting moral values.” There was also a more
muted chorus of arguments that there was “no national interest, only class

hans morgenthau and the national interest 49

interests,” reflecting the continuing influence of Charles A. Beard’s The Idea of
National Interest ().
When the Soviets exploded their atomic device in August , Morgenthau set
to analyzing the implications for American diplomacy with a “flurry of articles.”
He moved quickly to offset claims that this event constituted a radical change in
the East–West confrontation; and he repeated his argument that technology had
obviated war as policy, of which the atomic bomb was merely the latest demon-
stration, arguing that it had only enhanced the significance of negotiations and
diplomacy. The polemics brought him to the attention of the president of the
University of Chicago, who invited him to give the  Walgreen Foundation
Lectures, out of which In Defense of the National Interest was born. In this series
of talks he would establish his idea of the national interest and spell out the
grounds on which the United States could negotiate with the Soviet Union.
For ethical grounding, he bowed in the direction of Fox’s argument for the ne-
cessity of a value choice: now it was not merely that the Founding Fathers had
supported (and accordingly authorized) the idea of acting in the national interest
for the new republic. Acting in the national interest was also a principled policy, as
the British in particular had most clearly and repeatedly demonstrated. In the first
of his Walgreen lectures, he claimed to have divined the true significance of the
Monroe Doctrine, among other significant policies in the history of the Republic.
Guarding the Western Hemisphere from great-power rivalry was not merely an “in-
terest”; it rested on ethical principles, notably on the “moral postulates of anti-
imperialism and mutual non-intervention.” It was at the same time a policy in the
national interest, in that it provided the conditions for the “safety and enduring
greatness of the United States.” The Monroe Doctrine was an exemplar in which pol-
icy and principle were brought together. In the fourth of the lectures he laid out his
“Conditions for a Negotiated Settlement,” setting out the case as between the alter-
natives of “Negotiation or War” (having foreseen, and dismissed, the possibility of
what in the event did occur—a cold war “lasting perhaps for a generation”), and
publicly put forward his argument for spheres of influence.
In his review of the published lectures, entitled “Ideas and Illusions,” A. J. P.
Taylor opined that divisions over Germany made any policy of spheres of influ-
ence unlikely.” Raymond Aron had already disputed the idea in his Le Grand
Schisme of , arguing that such agreements generally rested on a shared polit-
ical vision, and that the ideological aspects of the superpower confrontation made
a spheres of influence agreement impossible. But especially damaging for the task

50 Cornelia Navari
Morgenthau had set for himself were two essays by Frank Tannenbaum, senior
Latin Americanist and distinguished historian within American academia. The
first was on the “American Tradition in Foreign Relations,” and appeared in
the Foreign Affairs of October ; the second and more significant was entitled
“The Balance of Power versus the Coördinate State,” appearing in the Political
Science Quarterly of June . Tannenbaum argued that balancing power was
not in the American tradition, citing the Latin American and Western
Hemisphere experiences, where the United States had not in fact played powers
off against one another. He presented an alternative model for U.S. foreign policy,
one that fulfilled Morgenthau’s requirement for a principled policy and that did so
rather convincingly. Tannenbaum’s concept of the “coordinate state” rested on the
argument that the American tradition in foreign affairs derived from its unique
experience with federalism, one that, transposed to the international arena, im-
plied and demanded an “equal dignity of all states,” irrespective of wealth or
power. As examples of “federalism in international relations” he proffered the or-
ganization of states in the “American system,” the Commonwealth, the Swiss
Confederation, and the coming Atlantic Alliance.
A more serious challenge to Morgenthau’s defense of the national interest was
being mounted on grounds of its “scientific” status, especially as a guide to policy-
making. In June  the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences or-
ganized a two-day conference on the subject of the ends of U.S. foreign policy,
entitled “The National Interest: Alone or with Others?”—a clear bow to
Morgenthau’s influence, but attended by experienced practitioners. Abraham
Feller, former professor of international law at Yale and head of the UN legal
department, who was invited to address the issue directly, charged that “neo-
realism,” as he called it, consisted of little more than the “mantras of diplomacy
and negotiation,” and that it proposed no real end or objective to which policy
should be directed. Diplomacy was a “procedure,” he declared, “with no more sub-
stantive content than speaking or writing.”
A participant, Morgenthau took the opportunity to stipulate American inter-
ests, but did so only briefly. (These were: first, predominance in the Western
Hemisphere; second, a European balance; and third, an Asian balance—the latter
in tatters, he claimed, because the administration was refusing to deal with the
Chinese communists.) His response to the critics (and to the mixed reviews of
his and Kennan’s books) was to prepare a much more substantial account
than anything he had attempted so far, addressing the charges of vagueness, the

hans morgenthau and the national interest 51

issue of the heterogeneity of interests, and in particular the role of the United
Nations—the latter reflecting the seriousness with which he regarded Feller’s char-
ges. He also attempted to define precisely what was at the heart of a national in-
terest in an article entitled “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the
United States,” which appeared in September, following the conference.
Generally considered Morgenthau’s definitive statement on the topic, the article
opens with a discussion of the concept’s place in significant debates in the history
of U.S. foreign policy, presenting the current debate as “more fundamental to the
understanding of American foreign policy” than any that had preceded it. (Robert
Osgood, Morgenthau’s PhD student, had just completed Ideals and Self-Interest in
America’s Foreign Relations, portraying a tension between “ideals” and “self-
interest” throughout its history, on which Morgenthau was drawing.)
Morgenthau acknowledged that “the argument [of elusiveness and lack of defini-
tion] has substance as far as it goes, but . . . it did not invalidate the usefulness of
the concept.” He made a new distinction between the “logically required” and the
“variable”: the first referring to “the physical, political, and cultural identity [of the
nation] against encroachments by other nations”; the second as “determined by
circumstances.” Moreover, he acknowledged that “the contribution that science
can make to this field . . . is limited,” and gave a good account of the analytical
steps that would have to be taken to produce a definitive understanding of a
particular national interest at a particular time.
Morgenthau had, however, some difficulty going much further. The argument
descended into a ramble on the nation as a product of history, with its inevitable
“variable” elements (among which he named sectional and “other-national” inter-
ests in the American case). There was staunch denial of the idea that the United
Nations could represent a collective interest, following which the discussion
moved toward aphorisms. These included: “a country which had been settled
by consecutive waves of foreigners was bound to find it particularly difficult to
identify its own national interest”; “a rational order must be established among
the values that make up the national interest”; and “the national interest of a na-
tion which is conscious not only of its own interest but also of that of other na-
tions must be defined in terms compatible with the latter.”
Such a conclusion was less than rigorous and was registered as such by the two
most noted Realists of the time. Arnold Wolfers published his “‘National Security’
as an Ambiguous Symbol” in the Political Science Quarterly of December ,
arguing that while the national interest did indicate a general direction of policy,

52 Cornelia Navari
in the sense of “demands that are ascribed to nations rather than individuals . . . be-
yond this, it has very little meaning.” Raymond Aron, already dismissive of the idea
that the superpower confrontation could settle into stable spheres of influence and
preparing to confront the issue of negotiations in his Les Guerres en Chaîne, wrote
his “Quest for a Philosophy of Foreign Affairs” directly in response to “Another
‘Great Debate.’” It was an emphatic denunciation of Morgenthau and all his works.
Left to his own devices, Morgenthau might have quietly let the whole matter of
national interest rest where it was at the end of —at best as an essentially con-
tested concept, at worst in a conceptual limbo. In any event, a three-power agree-
ment on German reconstruction had sealed the fate of a policy of negotiations,
and he was soon to leave public service, quite determined not to serve power
again. What intervened was not a great debate or an intellectual awakening. It
was a publisher with a nose for extended shelf life. Alfred Knopf, who had pub-
lished In Defense of the National Interest, and who had provided Morgenthau
with “enthusiastic support and wise council,” wanted the concept of national in-
terest incorporated into a second edition of Politics Among Nations, to appear in
. Initially doubtful, Morgenthau accomplished it, but only by abandoning the
idea that the national interest could serve as a via media between ideals and inter-
ests. He incorporated the national interest into the argument of Politics Among
Nations by the simple expedient of subordinating it to power. In this new, now
fifth formulation published in the  edition, it appears as one of the “principles
of political realism.” Morgenthau recast the national interest as “interests in terms
of power”—that is, the “national interest” simply became the acquiring, mainte-
nance, and expansion of a state’s power. It was no longer a set of historical vari-
ables, a moral guide, a synthesis of realism and idealism, or a justification for
negotiation. Rather, it was one of a set of “principles of political realism” and a
somewhat redundant aide-de-camp in the Realist quest for analytical rigor.
Nonetheless, “national interest” did not thereby entirely lose its association with
broader aims. In , Robert Jervis, summarizing the importance of Morgenthau
for U.S. foreign policy, stressed the centrality of Morgenthau’s concept of the na-
tional interest—“for what it denied: that states should follow either sub-national or
supra-national interests.” For Jervis, it conveyed the idea that a nation could legit-
imately be considered to have concerns of its own; and moreover, that “the con-
cerns of segments of the population” could “legitimately be put aside” in favor of
“the wider good.” Jervis’s understanding of Morgenthau’s national interest is a
variant of raison d’état, tamed to an American understanding.

hans morgenthau and the national interest 53

NOTES

The American Scholar is the Phi Beta Kappa magazine; originally for members of the society, it had
become a venue for the presentation of intellectual debate on issues of national importance.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Primacy of the National Interest,” as part of the forum entitled “National
Interest and Moral Principles in Foreign Policy,” American Scholar , no.  (), pp. –.

William Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau, Realism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity, ), p. , n. .

The explosion was only announced to the American public by President Truman at the end of
September .

Scheuerman, Hans Morgenthau, pp. –.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “Diplomacy,” Yale Law Journal , no.  (), pp. –; the arguments
would be repeated in latter chapters of Politics Among Nations.

E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, – (London: Macmillan, ), p. .

Christoph Frei, Hans. J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State
University Press, ); Niels Amstrup, “The Early Morgenthau: A Comment on the Intellectual
Origins of Realism,” Cooperation and Conflict , no.  (), pp. –.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Moral Dilemma in Foreign Policy,” The Yearbook of World Affairs, vol. 
(London: Stevens & Sons, ), pp. –.

Published just before Politics Among Nations, also by Knopf, Mowrer’s book presented international
relations in terms of power politics, but in which Americans had to engage to protect their democratic
institutions. The Chicago Daily News’s foreign correspondent in Europe in the run up to war, he was a
social democrat and one of the founders of Americans for Democratic Action, demonstrating the ease
with which American liberals could be converted to power politics, so long as power was in the service
of good causes.

Edgar Mowrer, “The Inevitable Compromise,” American Scholar , no,  (), p. .

The most recent American treatment, Charles Beard’s The Idea of National Interest had raised the ques-
tion as to whether there was any such thing, having argued rather convincingly that American foreign
policy had fallen under the sway of sectional interests.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “On Negotiating with the Russians,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , no. 
(), pp. –, among others. Morgenthau was not the only one who would argue that the
bomb made “peace” inevitable; so too did the growing disarmament lobby.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Mainsprings of American Foreign Policy: The National Interest vs. Moral
Abstractions,” American Political Science Review , no.  (), pp. –; the first printed version
of the first lecture.

Hans J. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign
Policy (New York: Knopf, ), p. .

A. J. P. Taylor, “Ideas and Illusions,” Nation, September , , pp. –.

The term encompassed Kennan as well Morgenthau, the former of whose account of America’s foreign
policy, drawn from his own Walgreen Lectures, had appeared, using the idealist/realist distinction to
organize the historical material. Suggested by Morgenthau for the  series, Kennan’s lectures reflect
Morgenthau’s influence.

A. H. Feller, “In Defense of International Law and Morality,” Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science  (July ), pp. –; there is a substantial contrary argument, but
Morgenthau did not avail himself of it.

See esp., American Political Science Review , no.  (), pp. –.

Hans J. Morgenthau, “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,” American
Political Science Review , no.  (), pp. –.

Arnold Wolfers, “‘National Security’ as an Ambiguous Symbol,” Political Science Quarterly , no. 
(), p. .

Raymond Aron, “En quête d’une philosophie de la politique étrangère,” Revue Franςais de Science
Politique , no.  (). Though published in French, the argument was widely discussed, and
Morgenthau read French; he remained cool toward Aron for the rest of his life.

In a Declaration of September , , the Western occupying powers declared that they “regard the
government of the Federal Republic of Germany as the only German government freely and legitimately
constituted and therefore entitled to speak for the German nation in international affairs,” forestalling
any spheres of influence agreement.

In Defence of the National Interest, noted in the “Acknowledgments,” p. vii.

Robert Jervis, “Hans Morgenthau, Realism and the Scientific Study of International Relations,” Social
Research , no.  () p. .

54 Cornelia Navari
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