What is a Moral Foreign Policy?

Originally published in
Project Syndicate on
March 4, 2020.

A foreign policy should be judged not only by specific actions, but also by how a
pattern of actions shapes the environment of world politics. Leadership in supplying
global public goods, for example, is consistent with “America First,” but it rests on
a broader historical and institutional understanding than Donald Trump has shown.

Many Americans say they want a moral foreign policy, but disagree on what
that means. Using a three-dimensional scorecard encourages us to avoid simplistic
answers and to look at the motives, means, and consequences of a US president’s
actions.
Consider, for example, the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and the two George
Bushes. When people call for a “Reaganite foreign policy,” they mean to highlight the
clarity of his rhetoric in the presentation of values. Clearly stated objectives helped
educate and motivate the public at home and abroad.
But that was only one aspect of Reagan’s foreign policy. The success of his moral
leadership also relied on his means of bargaining and compromise. The key question
is whether he was prudent in balancing his objectives and the risks of trying to achieve
them.
Reagan’s initial rhetoric in his first term created a dangerous degree of tension
and distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union, increasing the risk of a
miscalculation or accident leading to war. But it also created incentives to bargain,
which Reagan later put to good use when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the
Soviet Union. Reagan advanced US national interests, and he did so in a manner that
did not exclusively benefit American interests.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “What Is a Moral Foreign Policy ?,” Project Syndicate, March
4, 2020, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/how-to-judge-morality-of-foreign-policy-
by-joseph-s-nye-2020-03.

© The Author(s) 2023 41

J. S. Nye, Soft Power and Great-Power Competition, China and Globalization,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0714-4_6
42 What is a Moral Foreign Policy?

In contrast, George H.W. Bush, by his own admission, did not promote a transfor-
mative foreign policy vision at the end of the Cold War. His goal was to avoid disaster
during a period of rapid and far-reaching geopolitical change. While he referred to
a “new world order,” he never spelled out what it would look like. As Bush and his
team responded to forces that were largely outside of his control, he set goals that
balanced opportunities and prudence.
Bush limited his short-term aims in order to pursue long-term stability, prompting
some critics to complain that he did not set more ambitious objectives. Instead, he
was prudent in a turbulent time and managed to achieve American goals in a manner
that was not unduly insular and did minimal damage to the interests of foreigners.
He was careful not to humiliate Gorbachev and to manage Boris Yeltsin’s transition
to leadership in Russia.
With better communication skills, Bush might also have been able to do more to
educate the American public about the changing nature of the world they faced after
the Cold War. But given the uncertainties of history, and the potential for disaster
as the Cold War ended, Bush had one of the best foreign policies of the period after
1945. He allowed the US to benefit from the Cold War’s outcome while avoiding
calamity.
His son, George W. Bush, started his first term in office with limited interest in
foreign policy, but his objectives became transformational after the terrorist attacks
on September 11, 2001. He became focused on national security but turned to the
rhetoric of democracy to rally his followers in a time of crisis. His 2002 national
security strategy, which came to be called the “Bush Doctrine,” proclaimed that the
US would “identify and eliminate terrorists wherever they are, together with the
regimes that sustain them.”
In this new game, there were few rules and inadequate attention to the means.
Bush’s solution to the terrorist threat was to spread democracy, and a “freedom
agenda” thus became the basis of his 2006 national security strategy. But he lacked
the means to democratize Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein did not accomplish
the mission, and inadequate understanding of the context, together with poor planning
and management, undercut Bush’s grand objectives. The result was a sectarian civil
war in Iraq and a strengthening of the terrorist groups that eventually became the
Islamic State (ISIS).
A perpetual problem in US foreign policy is the complexity of the context,
which increases the likelihood of unintended consequences. Prudence is sometimes
dismissed as mere self-interest, but in foreign policy, it becomes a virtue. Negligent
assessment and reckless risk-taking often lead to immoral consequences, or what
in legal terms is called “culpable negligence.” Prudence also requires the ability
to manage one’s emotions. In both respects, President Donald Trump’s rejection of
intelligence and reliance on television sources raises serious moral as well as practical
questions about his foreign policy.
That leads, in turn, to the question of the role of institutions and how broadly a
president defines America’s national interest. A president’s foreign policy depends
not just on specific actions, but also on how a pattern of actions shapes the envi-
ronment of world politics. Leadership by the world’s most powerful country in the
What is a Moral Foreign Policy? 43

supply of global public goods is consistent with “America First,” but it rests on a
broader understanding of that term than Trump has shown. As Henry Kissinger has
put it, “calculations of power without a moral dimension will turn every disagreement
into a test of strength … Moral prescriptions without concern for equilibrium, on the
other hand, tend toward either crusades or an impotent policy tempting challenges;
either extreme risks endangering the coherence of the international order itself.”
Prudence is a necessary virtue for a good foreign policy, but it is not sufficient.
American presidents have been prudent when they needed to embrace a broader
institutional vision. In the future, a sense of vision and strategy that correctly under-
stands and responds to new technological and environmental changes—such as cyber
threats, artificial intelligence, climate change, and pandemics—will be crucial.
A moral foreign policy not only makes Americans safer, but also makes the world
a better place. We judge moral policy by looking at behavior and institutions, acts
of commission and omissions, and at all three dimensions of motives, means, and
consequences. Even then, the nature of foreign policy—with its many contingencies
and unforeseen events—means that we will often wind up with mixed verdicts.
Future presidents will confront two global power shifts that will shape the context
of American foreign policy in this century, one horizontal and one vertical. The
horizontal shift is the rise of Asia, or more accurately, the recovery of Asia. Before
the Industrial Revolution boosted the economies of Europe and North America in
the nineteenth century, Asia represented more than half the world’s people and half
the world’s economy. By 1900, Asia still had half the population, but its share of
the global economy had shrunk to 20%. Beginning with the double-digit economic
growth of Japan after World War II (which was an objective of US policy), the
world has been returning to more normal proportions as Southeast Asia, China, and
India followed in Japan’s footsteps. Particularly important is the rise of Chinese
power and the danger that the world will fall into a “Thucydides trap” in which a
devastating war is caused by the fear created in a dominant great power by the rise
of a new power.1 Some think the twenty-first century will be devastated by a war of
hegemonic transition similar to what happened in the last century, when Britain was
challenged by the rise in the power of Germany.
The other great-power shift is vertical and is driven by technology. The information
revolution that started in the 1960s with Moore’s Law about the doubling of the
capacity of computer chips every two years is providing more information to more
actors than at any time in history. This second power shift has sometimes been
called “the new feudalism,” in which sovereigns share authority with a variety of
other actors. Technology empowers non-state actors. They do not replace sovereign
states, but they crowd the stage on which governments act, creating new instruments,
problems, and potential coalitions.2 In addition, technology has increased economic,
political, and ecological interdependence and created more transnational linkages

1 At least one European Foreign Ministry, Denmark, has a tech ambassador with offices in Silicon
Valley and Beijing. Facebook has a transnational membership larger than the populations of the US
and China combined.
2 See Footnote 2
44 What is a Moral Foreign Policy?

and issues that are often outside the control of governments, but affect the relations
between them. Such global interdependence has also had redistributive effects within
societies, which are in turn altering domestic politics that affect foreign policies.
Both these power shifts challenge the liberal order of the past seven decades.
Respected commentators such as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times have argued that
“we are at the end of both an economic period—that of Western-led globalization—
and a geopolitical one, the post–Cold War ‘unipolar moment’ of a US-led global
order. The question is whether what follows will be an unravelling of the post–
Second World War era into a period of deglobalization and conflict much like the
first half of the twentieth century, or a new period in which non-Western powers,
especially China and India, play a larger role in sustaining a co-operative global
order.”3 Such a new world poses new challenges for an ethical foreign policy.

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3 Martin Wolf, “The Long and Painful Journey to World Disorder,” Financial Times, January 5,
2017. See also, Fareed Zakaria, “The Self-Destruction of American Power,” Foreign Affairs 92
(July/August) 2019, pp. 10–16.