THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS: Statesmen & Prophets
AN IMAGINATIVE AND FUTURISTIC ENTERPRISE

In introducing this subject, I would like first to make a few
observations about the study of international politics, the perspec-
tives from which it can be considered, the changes in contemporary
international politics compared to previous periods, and finally the
implications for the future.

First, it is important to remember that the study of interna-
tional relations as we understand it today is relatively new. It
presupposes a number of sovereign states, some of them of at least
roughly equal strength, each attempting to assure its security or to
achieve its objectives by its own efforts.

One of the problems that Communist China has in the conduct of
its foreign relations is that she has no experience in the conduct
of foreign policy as we know it. Except for the last century, China
has always been the predominant country in East Asia. For the past
century, China was the subject of foreign powers. But never in her
history has China faced either the problem of security or of achieving
her objectives through her own efforts within a community of roughly
equal states. China's difficulty in making compromises may be partly
the result of Communist ideology, but it is also the result of a
particular historical tradition.

In the conduct of foreign policy, the minimum aim must be survival.
No state will accept a foreign policy, no matter how brilliant or how
moral, if it involves a state's disintegration.

During the nineteenth century, when the principles of nationalism
were sweeping across Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became a

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relic -- not because its government had grown more oppressive but
because the values of the international environment had changed.
Even the most enlightened Austrian foreign minister could not accept
the proposition that the only just organization of a domestic order
was on the basis of nationalism. There is, therefore, in international
politics -- sometimes explicitly, always potentially -- a certain ten-
sion between the requirements of survival and other imperatives that
may exist.

If we analyze foreign policy, we can distinguish two major schools
of thought. Those who attempt to analyze what has already happened
and those who concentrate on what they would like to see happen in the
conduct of international affairs. Machiavelli has gone down in history
as an example of immorality, yet he merely attempted to describe the
way foreign policy was conducted by the Italian city states of his
period. The relevant question about Machiavelli is whether he was
correctly describing the international affairs of his period. Indeed,
if one reads all of his writings, it is obvious that he did not parti-
cularly like what he was analyzing. But any statesman conducting
foreign policy must be Machiavellian to some extent; he must make an
analysis of international affairs as they are.

The other way of looking at international politics is from the
point of view of what they ought to be, and many philosophers have
attempted to do this. If one looks at international affairs as
they have been, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that conflict,
and war, and the struggle for survival are essential elements. If one
looks at international affairs as they ought to be, or as one might
wish them to be -- as Kant or Wilson did -- then one can describe a

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condition of permanent peace and an ideal structure for the world.
But it is crucial to remember that whichever way one approaches the
study of foreign policy, it is generally necessary to add "unprovable"
assumptions: a harmony of interest for Machiavellians; a world free
for democracy, a classless society, a state of nature, for idealists.
Both of these approaches have been dominant at various periods. They
have been represented by two major sociological types. Let me call
one, for purposes of discussion, the statesman and the other the prophet.

According to this definition, the statesman tends to look at
foreign policy as a science. His primary goal is survival; he feels
responsible not only for the best but also for the worst outcome. He
realizes that many aspirations have failed, and many good intentions have
not been realized. Therefore his tendency is to hedge against failure
of even the most elevated ideas.

The prophet, on the other hand, tends to seek total solutions.
He is less interested in the possible than in what is right. He
assumes a perfectability of man within a limited period of time, and
tends to reject gradualism as an unnecessary concession to circumstance.
The prophetic approach is justified by its mission rather than by
safety and practicality. In this sense, foreign policy is the result
of the tension between those who attempt to adjust their purposes to
reality and those who attempt to adjust reality to their purposes.
One of the difficulties Americans have in dealing with the leaders of
some of the new countries is the inability to understand this prophetic
approach to foreign policy.

The difference arises over the definition of what constitutes
significant reality. Coming from a status quo society, reasonably

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satisfied with conditions as they are, we identify wisdom with manipulating reality as we find it. To us the significant experience is what we find around ourselves; wisdom is equated with adaptability. But many leaders of undeveloped countries and all revolutionaries consider the significant reality the world that they want to create not what they find around themselves. Revolutionaries can sustain their period of opposition during which they always start from inferior strength, only because they find their basic motivation in their inspiration. The limited success of our more pragmatic and technical appeals in some of the new countries, and in almost any revolutionary situation, reflects our failure to appreciate this fact.

Both the approach of the statesman and that of the prophet have dominated various periods. Foreign policy in the eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars, was conducted essentially according to the statesman's mode, while the period of the French Revolution and the world since 1914 have been dominated primarily by the prophetic mode. The periods governed by the statesman have lacked exultation but have provided security; the periods dominated by the prophet have provided uplift but at the price of great suffering.

The dilemma of the statesman is that while equilibrium is essential to preserve the peace, it is not enough to provide inspiration. At some point, a state or leader not satisfied with the existing framework comes along and attempts to recast it according to his new ideas. The difficulty with the prophetic mode is that it destroys more effectively than it creates. Revolutionary societies always

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have a problem of continuity. Successful revolutions unite all those who are dissatisfied with the existing structure, but they are usually far from agreed about what to put in its place. To the degree that existing structures disintegrate, the sense of spontaneity disappears as well. Force has to supply cohesion. Reigns of terror are no accident. They are made necessary by a lost legitimacy.

Another distinction in approaches to foreign affairs is that between the outsider and the policy-maker. I have had the opportunity to observe both in action and have been struck by the degree to which differences in perspective account for misunderstanding.

The outsider can choose his topic. He can work on it for as long as he wishes. He has the privilege of changing his mind. He can contrast the best results of his scheme to the imperfections of the existing system. He is responsible primarily to his colleagues and his criterion is plausibility; his ultimate standard is some notion of truth.

The policy-maker faces a much different problem. Problems are not selected by him -- they present themselves. Daily, several thousand cables arrive in Washington of which several hundred require some immediate attention. Policy-makers are, by and large, overwhelmed by the immediate and current. The day-to-day requirements of foreign policy absorb so much energy that it becomes increasingly difficult to be thoughtful. This seems to be characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state and it is at least as true on the other side of the dividing line as on ours. Running the machine takes more time and more thought than elaborating the purposes which the machine is supposed to serve. Planning is carried out but really

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primarily as a sop to administrative theory. In a bureaucratic society planning tends to be a projection of the present into the future. Moreover, in a large bureaucracy the import of a memorandum depends entirely on who reads it. Executives planning papers become esoteric exercises if the top executives do not have time to read them.

The second distinction between the policy-maker and the outsider is that the policy-maker is responsible not only for the best that could happen but also for the worst. The policy-maker must always provide for the contingency of failure. For example, pacifists hold the view that if the United States disarmed unilaterally the Soviet Union would follow suit; the cold war, they feel, is largely the result of a misunderstanding. They may be right. No president, however, can ever try that experiment, because if the Soviet Union were to take advantage of its superiority rather than following suit, he could not say that he had made a terrible mistake and that he was going back to the library to write another book. In foreign policy there is such a thing as an irrevocable mistake.

One of the great dilemmas in foreign policy, for which there is no abstract answer, is how to balance the capability of a state against its intentions. In a society of sovereign states every other state is a potential threat, at least to the extent that it has the capability and the legal right to use force for its own ends. Yet if one conducts foreign policy entirely on the basis of capability, if the quest for security becomes all-encompassing, it will lead to an endless cycle of war. Absolute security for one state can be achieved only at the price of absolute insecurity for all others.

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In this sense much of the debate of the late 1940's about whether
the Soviets were aggressive or defensive was somewhat beside the point.
It is quite possible that Stalin was motivated primarily by defensive
considerations. However, the distinguishing characteristic of Stalin's
policy was not that he felt threatened -- a measure of threat is
inherent in a society of sovereign states -- but that nothing could
reassure him short of the impotence of every potential antagonist.
Thus a defensively motivated foreign policy can become indistinguishable
from aggression, and it may have even more momentum.

On the other hand, any statesman can escape this dilemma by as-
cribing only the most favorable intentions to another state. He
can always assume that another's capability represents no problem
because it is not allied to a hostile will. The problem is that
by the time another state's intentions have become clear, it may be
too late to do something about them. The policy-maker must strike
some sort of a balance between reliance on physical security and on
moral consensus. In this task he faces perhaps the most tragic,
certainly the most complicated, aspect of policy-making. The dilemma
is that when the scope for action is greatest the knowledge on which
to base such action is at a minimum, but when knowledge is greatest,
the scope for action has largely disappeared. In 1936 after the
Germans had reoccupied the Rhineland with what turned out were only
three battalions, it would have been extremely simple physically to
stop Hitler, but morally it would have been extremely difficult. In
1936 no one could know whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist
or a maniac bent on world domination. If the French had moved against

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the Germans successfully in 1936 and if the Germans then had proved
difficult afterwards, many well-meaning people today would be as-
cribing international tension to the short-sightedness of the French
who were keeping the Germans from accomplishing what every other
state considered an elementary attribute of sovereignty: to station
troops on its own territory. By 1941 everybody knew that Hitler was
a maniac bent on world domination. Morally, it had become morally very simple
to resist him but it had become next to impossible physically. Nobody
knows what suffering the world has been spared by actions that were
taken early but in ambiguous circumstances.

The real dilemmas in foreign policy arise from what I would
define as the precautionary mode of conducting foreign policy, that is,
a policy which is directed toward the potential implication of change.
Living in a society with a wide margin of survival, we have in the past
always been able to wait until threats have become overwhelming.
Other countries less favored by circumstance have had to
make their judgments on the basis of assumptions which could not be
proved correct when they were made. The United States today faces
the problem of adjusting its conduct to an essentially precautionary
mode.

The problem of the essentially theoretical and psychological
cast of the conduct of international affairs is particularly serious
in the contemporary period. Americans are a pragmatic people. In
our national history those problems which we have recognized have
always proved soluble by the mobilization of technical and moral
energy. There is a tendency to await events and to oscillate between

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excessive concern with technique and an abstract moralism which is
difficult to relate to the world as it is.

The problem of the contemporary period is that so many of its
aspects are quite novel and that there is no experience on which to
draw. Hence, pragmatism must spend more energy determining where one
is than where one is going. For example, the study of international
relations leads to the conclusion that stability definitely requires
a balance of power. In the past if one nation became too strong, its
self-restraint eroded and, in reacting, the weaker countries became
highly irresponsible. In the contemporary period, however, power
has taken on a new and very extraordinary quality. For one thing, in
the past, physical strength always meant physical protection of a
society -- at least to some extent. In the nuclear age the imper-
meability of the nation-state has disappeared. Security policy
tends to be conducted against the knowledge that nuclear war involves
a catastrophe on an unparalleled scale. Moreover, with modern weapons,
the very definition of equilibrium and balance changes. From the
purely strategic point of view, no area is essential any longer.
Neither Southeast Asia nor even Europe, are essential to American
physical survival. The power of modern weapons is such that one can
probably conduct the physical defense of the United States from the
sea and from American bases.

On the other hand, if the physical balance has become less mean-
ingful, the moral or psychological balance has become more current.
At some point a series of transformations brings about the sort of
change characteristic of the Mohammedan sweep across Northern Africa
and the Middle East; complete alteration of the value structure is

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effected. I will not attempt to define when such a point will be
reached for the United States and what areas we must defend in order
to prevent our isolation in a completely hostile world. But it is
not a trivial issue if a society which throughout its history believed
that it represented the future of mankind finds itself suddenly
irrelevant to, and hated by, the rest of the world. In addition,
the range of modern weapons has introduced into all alliances a
discussion not only about common action but also about the theater
of military operation. In 1939 Poland had only two choices -- to
resist or to surrender. It could not make its defense dependent
on a strategy which shifted the risks of devastation to somebody
else. In 1968 this precise technical ability exists. Therefore we
live in a very curious world. Given the risks posed by modern
weapons, countries will tend to fight for others not because of a
legal obligation but because their national interest seems to them
overwhelmingly at stake. On the other hand, the protected countries
may believe that nothing they do will jeopardize this protection.
President DeGaulle's policy vis-a-vis the United States probably
depends on the assumption that on essential issues American support
is so certain that it does not have to be purchased by acquiescence
in United States policy. Similarly, in 1962 when China attacked
India, Prime Minister Nehru was asked in Parliament whether he thought
he had paid a penalty for not joining a military alliance with the
United States as Pakistan had done. He replied in effect that he received
just about the same protection that Pakistan would have received
that he had to pay less for the American military equipment because he
could buy it during an emergency. In other words, in the contemporary

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period, the distinction between allies and neutrals tends to erode.

Neutrals get much of the protection that used to be reserved for allies, and allies conduct a sort of policy that used to be associated with neutrals.

At least one of my colleagues on this program will no doubt point out that all this reflects the old fashioned, benighted views of international affairs, that the real problem is to abolish the issues produced by sovereignty and to aim for a world community. There is no question that a world community might avoid some of the problems of sovereignty, but it would be difficult to convince the three hundred thousand people who were killed in Indonesia and the tens of thousands that have been killed in Nigeria that the mere fact of creating a state abolishes the problems of compatibility and consensus. It is a peculiarly American notion that police forces are always benign and that, therefore, international police forces would solve, or at least avoid, the problems that I have described. In most countries the issue is who controls the police force, not the abstract problem of whether to have a police force.

All of this suggests that the study of international affairs requires a very broad canvas. It is not enough to study existing systems, because many societies may look formally the same and yet have completely different significance to different historical evolutions. To superimpose American political institutions on other societies (often) has had disastrous consequences. I once was present, if I may digress for a moment, when an American official attempted to explain to a Vietnamese official the difference between constitutions that were easy to amend and those that were difficult to amend. I had the impression that the Vietnamese thought he was simply did not

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understand

dealing with a madman; no constitution in Vietnam since the war has

lasted more than three years. Constitutional Amendment

If the Vietnamese Amending it is not their paramount

concern. Insofar as the Vietnamese are interested in a constitution

at all, it is in the French rather than the American model. In France

a constitution is a law with a somewhat higher degree of formality

than any other law, but nothing like the almost sacrosanct instrument

of the American experience.

To compare the formal similarities either of individual countries
or of international systems may completely obscure their central
significance. One needs a perspective of history and of sociology
in order to study the impact of the domestic structure on foreign
policy, the degree to which domestic values shape international
conceptions. In addition, one needs the more traditional tools of
political science. Above all, I would argue that the deeper problems
in the study of international affairs today require a reorientation
of much that has been traditional in our thinking.

I have already mentioned that we are an essentially pragmatic
society and that our disputes tend to take place between pragmatists
and abstract moralists. Much of the contemporary debate on interna-
tional affairs seems to me to have this character; technicians of
power are confronted by technicians of morality. Some participants
in what is called the new left are exalting values which they would
be appalled to realize, are difficult to distinguish from the right wing
experience in Europe in the 1930's: rejection of any concrete analysis,
an insistence that faith and intense conviction can by themselves
provide solutions; and a belief that commitment is a value in its own
right regardless of the nature of the commitment. The dilemma of

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our period is that gradualism is the secret of lasting change - but
that we must do quickly things that in the past have taken centuries.
How to strike a balance is partly an issue for philosophy and
a making of
has partly something to do with the whole pace of our existence.

I am not maintaining that I have solved this problem or that
I have a recipe that could be followed in arriving at a conclusion.
Rather I am suggesting to you that it may be useful to address
ourselves to what may be the deeper technical and moral problems in
international relations rather than to the detailed analyses of
individual cases which have occupied us in the past.

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in its area of the world. It has warred for a century, which is now only an incident in a long history. It has been the subject of foreign policy for these other states of roughly equal strength or has faced the problem either of security or of achieving its objective through its own efforts in a community of states of roughly equal strength and the difficulty of making compromise may be partly the result of ideology but it is almost certain partly the result of a particular historical tradition.

In the study of foreign policy as I have defined it, a community of nations some of which are of roughly equal strength and all of which attempt to achieve their goals by their own efforts; the minimum condition that any society must attempt to achieve is its own survival. No foreign policy, no matter how brilliant and for that matter, how moral, is going to be acceptable to a state if it involves its own disintegration.

During the nineteenth century, when the principles of nationalism were sweeping across Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became a relic. Not because its government had grown more oppressive but because the values of the international environment had changed. On the other hand, even the most enlightened Austrian foreign minister could not accept the proposition that the only just organization of a domestic order was on the basis of nationalism, because that proposition would have involved the disintegration of the Austrian empire. There is, therefore, in international politics sometimes explicitly always potentially a certain tension between the requirements of survival and the other imperatives that may exist. This is a problem to which I shall return.

If we analyze foreign policy for those who have reflected about foreign policy, we can distinguish a number of schools of thought, which I shall group into two major ones. There are those who attempt to analyze what has in fact happened in the study of international affairs and there are others who concentrate on what they would like to see happen in the conduct of international affairs. In history Machiavelli has gone down as an example of immorality, yet he attempted to describe the way foreign policy was conducted by the Italian city states of his period. The

relevant question to ask with respect to Machiavelli is: really not whether he was moral, but whether he was correctly describing international affairs of his period. Indeed, if one reads all of his writings it is obvious that he did not particularly like what he was describing, but that is not the point. Any statesman conducting foreign policy must make an analysis of international affairs as they are.

Now then, of course, there is another way of looking at international politics, this is from the point of view of what they ought to be, and many philosophers have attempted to do that. If you look at international affairs as they have been, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that conflict and war and the struggle for survival are essential aspects of them. If you look at international affairs as they ought to be, or as you may wish them to be the way Kant did or Wilson then you can describe a condition of permanent peace, and the ideal structure of the world as you would like to see it. But it is crucial to remember, that whether you approaches it from the point of view of how foreign policy has been conducted or from the point of view how international affairs ought to be conducted, it is generally necessary to add assumptions which cannot be proved correct.

Many of those who look at it from the way it has been conducted have assumed a balance of interest. Many of those who look at it from the point of view of how it ought to be conducted describe a utopia, a world free for democracy, a classless society, a state of nature for idealists. Now I would say that throughout, if one is no imperical truth. looks at the whole development of international affairs, both of these approaches have been dominant at various periods, and they have been represented. would be characterized by what I would call two major sociological types. One I would call, for purposes of discussion, statesman and the other that of the prophet.

The Statesmen, in this definition, would tend to look at foreign policy as a science. His primary goal is survival. He feels responsible not only for the best but for the worst outcome. He realizes that many aspirations have failed, and that many good intentions have not been realized; and therefore his tendency is to erect hedges even against the most elevated ideas, becoming aborted.

The prophetic approach in foreign policy tends to seek total solutions. It is less interested in what is possible than what is right. It assumes the perfectability of man in a limited period of time. It tends to reject gradualism as an unnecessary concession to circumstance. It justifies itself by its mission rather than by safety. One of the difficulties statesmen have in dealing with prophets is that they may not understand what they are dealing with and are trying to assimilate the revolutionaires in the status quo mood.

Another way of putting the problem is if foreign policy is the result of the tension between those who attempt to adjust their purposes to reality and those who attempt to adjust reality to their purposes. Then we have the two different approaches which the former is the statesman the second is the prophetic approach. I would argue that one of the difficulties we have in dealing with some of the leaders of some of the new countries is our inability to understand this approach to foreign policy, which in turn is a part of the difficulty that exists particular phenomenon which really relates to the question of what is significant reality. Coming from a status quo society, reasonably satisfied with conditions as they are, we identify wisdom with manipulating reality as we find it.

To us the significant experience is what we find around ourselves, and a wise man is the adaptable man. To some of the leaders of some of the new countries, to all of the revolutionaires in history, I would say, the significant reality is not what they find around themselves but the world that they want to create.

If Castro had been interested in economics, he would have been a supporter of the 1959 Revolution in Cuba. [Y] president in Havana today. Revolutionaries can sustain their period of opposition in which they always start from inferior strength, only because what they want to create is more significant to them than what they find. This explains some of the limits of our pragmatic and technical appeals in some of the new countries and in almost any revolutionary situation.

During the NAPAL (National Association of Progressive Armies) period, they find their base motivation in their inspiration, because what they want to create is more significant to them than what they find. This explains some of the limits of our pragmatic and technical appeals in some of the new countries and in almost any revolutionary situation.

The limited success of their struggle reflects these failings. This explains why they are so often unable to maintain earlier success.

When one looks at history one will have to admit that both the approach of the statesman and the approach of the prophet have dominated at various periods. The eighteenth century, the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars were essentially dominated by the statesman's mode of conducting foreign policy. The period of the French Revolution, the world since 1714 have essentially been dominated by the prophetic mode of conducting foreign policy.

The periods dominated by the mode of the statesman have lacked exultation but they have provided security. The periods dominated by the prophetic have provided uplift but at the price of great suffering. The dilemma of the period that conducts policy in the mode of the statesman is that while equilibrium is essential to preserve the peace, it is not enough to provide inspiration.

At some point some state or leader comes along who is not satisfied with maintaining the existing framework and attempts to recast it according to his ideas. On the other hand, the difficulty with the prophetic mode is that it is more effective in smashing a system then in building one. Revolutionary societies always have the problem of continuity. Revolutions are made by a coming toGETHER OF ALL THOSE WHO ARE DISSatisfied WITH THE EXISTING STRUCTURE, BECAUSE THEY ARE UNusually FAR FROM AGREED WHAT? AND, IN THE DEGREE THAT EXISTING STRUCTURES DISintegrate, the sense of SPONTANeTY disappears as well, and very often FORCE has to be SUBSTITUTED. INSTEAD, COHERING, REINSURANCE ARE NEEDED. BUT TO THE DEGREE THAT EXISTING STRUCTURES DISintegrate, the sense of SPONTANeTY disappears as well, and very often FORCE has to be SUBSTITUTED. INSTEAD, COHERING, REINSURANCE ARE NEEDED. THEY ARE MADE NECESSARY BY A LOST LEGITIMACY.

The statesman, the statesman

In addition to the difference between the prophetic mode and the statesman's mode, I would like to make another distinction, of which I am not sure. [Y] have become very aware in my own experience, I think, The distinction

between the approach of the outsider to a problem in foreign policy and the approach of the policymaker. I have had the opportunity to observe both in action, and by contrast, I have been struck to the degree by which differences in perspective account for misunderstanding.

The outsider can choose his topic. He can work on it for a long time. He has the privilege of changing his mind. He can compare the best consequences of his proposal, with the admitted imperfections of the existing system. He is responsible primarily to his colleagues and his criterion is plausibility. His ultimate standard is some notion of truth. The policymaker faces a much different problem. To the policymaker problems are not selected, but by him; they present themselves. In daily, several thousand cases, he arrives in Washington of which several hundred require some immediate attention. All policymakers are, therefore, overwhelmed by the immediate and the current. It used to be axiomatic among my colleagues in the 1950's that one of the difficulties of American foreign policy was the lack of long-range purpose, and this was true even if they sometimes meant the inadequate attention paid to Harvard professors.

Nevertheless, when in 1961 this particular situation of inadequate attention to the Cambridge community was remedied, it nevertheless remained true that many of the criticisms that were made in the fifties could have been made at almost any stage in the 1960's. Not because the operators of our foreign policy did not understand the criticisms, but because the operation of the day to day requirements of foreign policy absorbed so much of their energy that it became increasingly difficult to be thoughtful. This seems to be characteristic of the modern bureaucratic state and it is my impression that this is as true on the other side of the dividing

line if not more true than on ours.

Planning is carried out in theory but really primarily as a salve
for[illegible] on a bureaucratic society planning
to administrative theory. A society does not look into the future
to be a projection of. A bureaucratic society does the planning and
because it has a planning staff. First, because you do not become the future.

a planner if you are a bureaucrat assigned the problem of planning
if he is to be a planner
and your whole style of life does not lead you spontaneously to
reflection. Secondly, any large bureaucracy is overwhelmed with

papers. The problem if one wants to analyze the actual conduct
the intent of a memorandum depends entirely on
of foreign policy is not who writes the paper but who reads it.

If one can not get the attention of the top personnel then planning
papers become esoteric exercise if the top personnel are not
suffer from today.

There is a lack of concern with the future that is independent
of the intention of the participants and that seems to be endemic
to the current situation. The second problem is that a policy-
maker in contrast to the outsider is responsible not only for the
best thing that could happen but for the worst thing that could
happen. Not all of the most brilliant ideas of our most intelligent
commentators can be accepted, not necessarily, incidentally, because
every policymaker is less intelligent than every newspaper writer,
but because the policymaker must keep in mind what might happen
if a certain policy fails.

Some of my pacifists friends hold the view, based on what they allege to be their knowledge, that if the United States disarmed unilaterally the Soviet Union would follow suit; because the cold war is largely the result of a misunderstanding. They may even be right. All I can say is I don't believe they are right but I also believe that no president can ever make that experiment because if it turns out that this theory is incorrect and that the

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throughout its history in the past has believed that it represented the future of mankind and hated by others suddenly finds itself irrelevant to the rest of the world, and hated in the rest of the world. An area of study which requires what I have called here the allusion to the problem of the moral balance. Again if you look at alliances in the past they were generally animated by the fact that the participants thought that the consequences of mutual assistance were less bad than the consequences of joined action. And again in the period in which we live this is no longer self evident. Moreover

it is no longer necessary, as I have pointed out, to add various countries together for an accretion of strength and, finally, the range of modern weapons has introduced into all alliances a discussion not only about common action but also about the theater of military operation. In 1939 Poland had only two choices--to resist or to surrender. It could not make its defense dependent on a strategy which sifted to somebody else the risks of devastation. In 1968 this precise technical ability exists and therefore we live in a very curious world. Given the risks of modern weapons countries will tend to fight for others not because of a legal obligation but because their national interest seems to them overwhelmingly at stake. On the other hand, the protector countries may believe that nothing they do will jeopardize this protection. President DeGaulk's policy viz a viz the United States may depend on the proposition that he is so sure of American support on essential issues that he feels that he does not have to purchase it by acquiescence in our policy. Similarly in 1962 when China attacked India, Prime Minister Nehru was asked in Parliament whether he thought he had paid a penalty for not joining a military alliance with the United States as Pakistan had done. He, in one of his less elevated but perhaps more accurate moments, said so.

received just about the same protection that Pakistan would have and
he would have to pay less for the American military equipment because
he could buy it during an emergency. In other words, in the contemporary
period, the distinction between allies and neutrals tends to erode.
Neutrals get much of the protection that used to be reserved for allies
and allies conduct a sort of policy that used to be associated with
neutrals.

Now I have no doubt that at least one of my colleagues on this
program will point out that all of this reflects what are the old
benighted
fashioned, united views of international affairs that the real problem
is to abolish the issues produced by sovereignty and to aim for a
world community. There is no question that a world community may
avoid some of the problems of sovereignty, but it would be difficult
thousand
to convince the three hundred people who were killed in Indonesia
that tens of thousands that have been killed in Nigeria, that the mere
fact of creating a state abolishes the problems of the living together
of people of either different values or incompatible objectives. It
is a peculiarly American phenomenon notion that police forces are
always benign and that, therefore, international police forces avoid,
the problems that I have described. In most countries the issue is
who controls the police force, and not the abstract problem of having
a police force.

world order, or at least

wherever to have.

Now I mention all of this because it suggests that the study of
international affairs required a very broad canvas. It is not
enough to study existing systems because many societies may look
formally the same and yet have completely different significance to
different historical evolutions. To apply American political institutions
in other societies often has had disastrous consequences.

NO P. I once was present, if I can digress for a moment, when a senior American, with a Vietnese constitution that was difficult to amend, attempted to explain to a Vietnamese that there was a difference between a constitution that was easy to amend and a constitution that was difficult to amend. I had the impression that the Vietnamese thought he was dealing with a madman. No constitution in Vietnam since the war, or I think, ever, has lasted more than three years. Amending it is not their paramount concern.

TO WHAT YEAR INsofar as the Vietnamese are interested in a constitution at all, which I would question, it is in one on the French not the American model, and in France a constitution is a law with a somewhat higher degree of formality than in other law, but nothing like the almost holy instrument of the American experience.

To compare the formal similarities either of individual countries or of international systems may completely miss their central essential significance. One needs a perspective of history and one also needs a perspective of sociology in order to study the impact of domestic structure on foreign policy, and the degree to which domestic values shape international conceptions. In addition, and one needs the more traditional tools of political science. Above all I would argue that the deeper problem in the study of international affairs today require a reorientation of much that has been traditional in our thinking.

I have already mentioned that we are an essentially pragmatic society and that our disputes tend to take place between pragmatists and abstract moralists. Much of the contemporary debate on international affairs seems to have this character; technicians of power on the one side are confronted by technicians of morality on the other side. I am

17.

[Y]

Some in
I am very struck by the fact that so many participants of what
is called the new left are exalting values, which they would be
~~to realize~~ that are difficult to distinguish
appalled if one said to them: *drawn from right wing experience*
in Europe in the 1930's: A total rejection of any concrete analysis,
an insistence that faith alone - unrelated to any concrete study
*insists, a belief*
provides the solution that commitment is a value in its own right
*regardless of the nature of the commitment,*
apart from what it is one is committed to and from any of the
*the basic dilemma of our period is*
concrete studies that are necessary in the real world. *How one*
*secret of living*
can get a conviction that on the one hand gradualism is the change
*of life - is the secret of change - but that we must do more*
quickly things that in the past have taken centuries. How to
strike this balance is partly an issue for philosophy and has
partly something to do with the whole pace of our existence. *One*
*does not become reflective because some bureaucracy has assigned*
*the task of reflection to one.*

*quit*

I am not maintaining that I make these remarks because I
*have solved that problem or that I have a recipe that could be*
*followed in arriving at a conclusion. Rather I am suggesting to*
*you because in a forum that addresses itself to the future of*
*international relations as a discipline, it may be useful to*
*address ourselves to what may be the deeper problems rather than*
*to the detailed analysis of individual cases which have occupied*
*us in the past.*

*technical and moral*

*in international relations*

March 1, 1968

THE STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS
AN IMAGINATIVE AND FUTURISTIC ENTERPRISE

Before you become to impressed by the list of publications
that our chairman was kind enough to mention, I think I should
repeat here what a British reviewer said about one of the books.'
He said," I don't know whether Mr. Kissinger is a great writer,
but anyone finishing his book is a great reader".

My topic here is very impressive, and I may not be able to
do justice to it. I want you to keep in mind, if this is a
university in which it gives speech courses, which I'm not
sure, that at Harvard mumbling is considered a sign of pro-
fundity, and also that no one has ever been criticised at
Harvard for excessive obtuseness.

In introducing this subject to the forum, I would like to
make a few observations first about what the study of inter-
national politics is all about.— Then to discuss with you
some of the perspectives from which it can be considered.—
The changes that contemporary international politics ex-
hibits compared to previous periods, and what this may all
mean to those of us concerned with the subject.

First of all, it is important to remember that the subject of
international relations as we understand it today is relatively
recent. It presupposes the existence of a sovereign state
attempting
to assure its security or to achieve its objectives
by its own efforts. It presupposes first that there is a
number, that there exists a number of states some of them at
least of roughly equal strength.

One of the problems that Communist China or any China has
in the conduct of its foreign relations is that it has
no
experience in the conduct of foreign policy as I have just
described it. China has always been the predominant country

in its area of the world. It has warred for a century which is
only an incident in a long history. It has been the subject of see 2A
foreign policy for these other states of roughly equal strength or
has faced the problem either of security or of achieving its
objective through its own efforts in a community of states of
roughly equal strength and the difficulty of making compromise
may be partly the result of ideology but it is almost certain
partly the result of a particular historical tradition.

In the study of foreign policy as I have defined it, a com-
munity of nations some of which are of roughly equal strength and
all of which attempt to achieve their goals by their own efforts;
the minimum condition that any society must attempt to achieve
is its own survival. No foreign policy no matter how brilliant
and for that matter, how moral, is going to be acceptable to a
state if it involves its own disintegration.

During the nineteenth century when the principals of nationalism
were sweeping across Europe, the Austro-Hungarian Empire became
a relic. Not because its government had grown more oppressive
but because the values of the international enviroment had changed.
On the other hand, even the most enlightened Austrian foreign minister
could not accept the proposition that the only just organization of
a domestic order was on the basis of nationalism because that pro-
postion would have involved the disintegration of the Austrian
empire. There is, therefore, in international politics, sometimes
explicitly always potentially, a certain tension between the
requirements of survival and the other imperatives that may exist.
This is a problem to which I shall return.

2A

[Y]

It has been the subject of foreign powers, but never in its history has China had to conduct a foreign policy viz a viz states of roughly equal strength or has faced the problem either of security or of achieving its objective through its own efforts in a community of states of roughly equal strength. And the difficulty of making compromises may be partly the result of ideology but it is almost certain partly the result of a particular historical tradition.

3

[N]

If we analyze foreign policy for those who have reflected about foreign policy, we can distinguish a number of schools of thought which I shall group into two major ones. There are those who attempt to analyze what has in fact happened in the study of international affairs and there are others who concentrate on what they would like to see happen in the conduct of international affairs. In history Machiavelli has gone down as an example of immorality. Yet he attempted to describe the way foreign policy was conducted by the Italian city states of his period. The question to ask with respect to Machiavelli is really not whether he was moral but whether he was correctly describing international affairs of his period. Indeed, if one reads all of his writings it is obvious that he did not particularly like what he was describing, but that is not the point. Any statesman conducting foreign policy must make an analysis of international affairs as they are.

Now then, of course, there is another way of looking at international politics, which is from the point of view of what they ought to be and many philosophers have attempted to do that. If you look at international affairs as they have been, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that conflict and war and the struggle for survival are essential aspects of them. If you look at international affairs as they ought to be, or as you may wish them to be, the way Kant did or Wilton, then you can describe a condition of permanent peace, and the ideal structure of the world as you would like to see it. But it is crucial to remember, that whether you approach it from the point of view of how foreign policy has been conducted or from the point of view how international affairs ought to be conducted, it is generally necessary to add assumptions which cannot be proved correct.

4

[Y]

Many of those who look at it from the way it has been conducted have assumed a balance of interest. Many of those who look at it from the point of view of how it ought to be conducted describe a utopia, a world free for democracy, a classless society, a state of nature, or whatever else the assumptions are for which there is no imperical truth. Now I would say that throughout, if one looks at the whole development of international affairs, both of these approaches have been dominant at various periods and they would be characterized by what I would call two major socialological types. One I would call, for purposes of discussion, statesman and the other that of the prophet.

[N]

The Statesmen in this definition would tend to look at foreign policy as a science. His primary goal is survival. He feels responsible not only for the best but for the worst outcome. He realizes that many aspirations have failed and that many good intentions have not been realized; and therefore his tendency is to erect hedges even against the most elevated ideas becoming aborted.

Another way of putting the problem is if foreign policy is the tension between those who attempt to adjust their purposes to reality and those who attempt to adjust reality to their purposes. Then we have the two different approaches which the former is the statesman the second is the prophetic approach. I would argue that one of the difficulties we have in dealing with some of the leaders of some of the new countries is our inability to understand this particular phenomenon which really relates to the question of what is significant reality. Coming from a status quo society reasonably satisfied with conditions as they are, we identify wisdom with manipulating reality as we find it.

To us the significant experience is what we find around ourselves and a wise man is the adaptable man. To some of the leaders of some of the new countries, to all of the revolutionaires in history, I would say, the significant reality is not what they find around themselves but the world that they want to create.

If Castro had been interested in economics, he would be a bank president in Havana today. Revolutionaires can sustain their period of opposition in which they always start from inferior strength only because what they want to create is more significant to them then what they find. This explains some of the limits of our more pragmatic and technical appeals in some of the new countries and in almost any revolutionary situation.

When one looks at history one will have to admit that both the approach of the statesman and the approach of the prophet have dominated at various periods. The eighteenth century, the nineteenth century after the Napoleonic Wars were essentially dominated by the statesman's mode of conducting foreign policy. The period of the French Revolution, the world since 1914 have essentially been dominated by the prophetic mode of conducting foreign policy.

The periods dominated by the mode of the statesman have lacked exultation but they have provided security. The periods dominated by the prophet have provided uplift but at the price of great suffering. The dilemma of the period that conducts policy in the mode of the statesman is that while equilibrium is essential to preserve the peace, it is not enough to provide inspiration.

At some point some state or leader comes along who is not satisfied with maintaining the existing framework and attempts to recast it according to his ideas. On the other hand, the difficulty with the prophetic mode is that it is more effective in smashing a system then in building one. Revolutionary societies always have the problem of continuity. Revolutions are made by a coming together of all those who are dissatisfied with the existing structure. But to the degree that existing structures disintegrate, the sense of spontaniety disappears as well and very often force has to be substituted as a means of cohesion something which we find again in many of the revolutionary societies today.

In addition to the difference between the prophetic mode and the statesman's mode, I would like to make another distinction of which I have become very aware in my own experience. The distinction between the approach of the outsider to a problem in foreign policy and the approach of the policymaker. I have had the opportunity to observe both in action. I have been struck to the degree to which differences in perspective account for misunderstanding.

The outsider can choose his topic. He can work on it for a long as he wishes. He has the privilege of changing his mind. He can compare the best consequences of his proposal with the admitted imperfections of the existing system. He is responsible primarily to his colleagues and his criterion is plausibility. His ultimate standard is some notion of truth. The policymaker faces a much different problem. To the policymaker problems are not selected — they present themselves. In daily, several thousand cases arrive in Washington of which several hundred require some immediate attention. All policymakers are, therefore, overwhelmed by the immediate and the current. It used to be axiomatic among my colleagues in the 1950's that one of the difficulties of American foreign policy was the lack of long range purpose, and this was true even if they sometimes meant the inadequate attention paid to Harvard professors.

line if not more true then on ours.

Running the machine takes more time and more thought than elaborating the purposes which the machine is supposed to serve. Planning is carried out in theory but really primarily as a salve to administrative theory. A society does not look into the future because it has a planning staff. First, because you do not become a planner if you are a bureaucrat assigned the problem of planning and your whole style of life does not lead you spontaneously to reflection. And, Secondly, any large bureaucracy is overwhelmed with papers. The problem, if one wants to analyze the actual conduct of foreign policy, is not who writes the paper but who reads it. If one can not get the attention of the top personnel, then planning papers become esoteric exercise and, this is what most societies suffer from today.

There is a lack of concern with the future that is independent of the intention of the participants and that seems to be endemic in the current situation. The second problem is that a policy-maker in contrast to the outsider is responsible not only for the best thing that could happen but for the worst thing that could happen. Not all of the most brilliant ideas of our most intelligent commentators can be accepted, not necessarily, incidentally, because every policymaker is less intelligent than every newspaper writer, but because the policymaker must keep in mind what might happen if a certain policy fails.

Some of my pacifist friends hold the view based on what they allege to be their knowledge that if the United States disarmed unilaterally the Soviet Union would follow suit because the cold war is largely the result of a misunderstanding. They may even be right. All I can say is I don't believe they are right but I also believe that no president can ever make that experiment because if it turns out that this theory is incorrect and that the

9.

[N]

Soviet Union would take advantage of its supriority rather than follow suit, he could not say I made a terrible mistake and I'm going back to the library to write another book.

In foreign policy there is such a thing as an irrevocable mistake. Then one of the great dilemmas in foreign policy for which there is no abstract answer is how to balance the capability of a state against its intentions. In a society of sovereign states every other state is a potential threat at least in the sense that it has the capability and the legal right to use its force for its own ends. Yet if you conduct foreign policy entirely on the basis of capability; if the quest for security becomes all encompassing then it will lead to a cycle of war. Absolute security for one thing can be achieved only by absolute insecurity for all other things.

I hold the view for example, that much of the debate that took place in the late 1940's about whether the Soviets were agressive or defensive is somewhat beside the point. I believe that Stalin was motivated primarily by defensive considerations, but I also believe that the distinguishing characteristic of Stalin was not that he felt threatened - part of this is inherent in a society of sovereign states - but that nothing could reassure him short of the physical disarmament of every potential antagonist - something that after all he had managed to carry out within his own country. He would continue to feel threatened and in this sense a defensively motivated foreign policy can become indistinguishable from what looks to the outside like agression.

On the other hand any statesman can escape his dilemma by ascribing

10

[Y]

He can always assume that another capability represents
no problem, and he may even be right. The problem of the
statesman in contrast to that of the academician is this -
the academician can emphasize either capability or intention
in his writings and he can describe what would happen in a
world in which everybody is united by the same values and
everybody dedicated to peace. The policy maker must strike
some sort of a balance - how much he wants to rely on physical
security and how much he wants to depend on moral consensus
and in this task he faces what I consider one of the most
tragic aspects of the actual conduct of foreign policy
which I mention because no theory of international relations
can be adequate which does not somehow account for this and
that dilemma is the following: when the scope for action is
greatest the knowledge on which to base such action is at a
minimum. When the knowledge is greatest the scope for action
has largely disappeared. For the policy maker the problem
is to balance moral as against physical capabilities. In
1936 it would have been physically extremely simple to stop
Hitler after the Germans reoccupied the Rhineland with what
it turned out were only three battalions, but it would have
been morally extremely difficult. No one in 1936 knew whether
Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist or a maniac bent on
world domination. I venture to bet that if the French had

11.

[N]

then moved against the Germans in 1936 and if the Germans had proved difficult in the next 25 weeks many well meaning people today would be ascribing international tension to the short sighted, heady approach of the French trying to keep the Germans from achieving what they had a perfect right to do, namely reoccupy part of their territory.

By 1941 everybody knew that Hitler was a maniac bent on world domination. It had become morally very simple to resist him but it had become physically next to impossible. Nobody knows what suffering has been saved if any suffering has been saved by actions that were taken early. The real dilemmas in foreign policy arise from what I would describe as a precautionary mode of conducting foreign policy - a foreign policy which is directed not against what the actuality of change but against the potentiality of change. We, living in a society with a wide margin of survival, have in the past always have been able to wait until threats have become overwhelming. Other countries less favored by circumstance have had to make their judgements on the basis of assumptions and we, I would venture to say, are facing today the same problem of adjusting our conduct to an essentially precautionary mode of foreign policy. Now this problem, the conduct of international affairs and its essentially theoretical and psychological cast is particularly serious in the contemporary period. Americans are a pragmatic people. In our national

12.

[Y]

history those problems which we have recognized as problems
have always proved soluble by the mobilization of technical
and moral energy. There is a tendency to await events and
to oscillate between excessive concern with technique and
an abstract moralism which finds it difficult to relate itself
to the world as it is and which concentrates on the world as
one wants it to be. But the problem of the contemporary
period is that so many of its aspects are quite novel and
that there is no experience on which to draw. For example
any study of history would bring one to the conclusion that
whatever else is required for international stability there
is the need for a certain physical equilibrium. If one
nation becomes too strong its self restrain erodes and the
weaker countries become highly irresponsible. The concern
with the balance of power has in the past not only reflected
shortsightedness and admiration for power as such, but it
has been based on the historical experience of hundreds of
years - that if there is too great an inequality of strengths
one becomes dependent entirely on the decisions of another
e sovereign state which by the very definition of sovereign cannot
be controlled. But in the contemporary period power has taken
on a very extraordinary quality. For one thing, in the past
physical strength always meant security to some extent for
the population. The minimum that strength was supposed to

13.

[Y]

supply was the survival of one's own people. In the nuclear age the impermeability of the nation-state has disappeared and all of security policy tends to be conducted against a background of casualties that no society in the past has ever had to confront. Moreover, given modern weapons the whole problem of what one means by equilibrium and balance changes. From the purely strategical point of view there are no essential areas anymore. It cannot be maintained that from the purely particular strategic point of view, any area - Southeast Asia or even Europe are essential to American survival. On the other hand, if the power of modern weapons is such that one can probably conduct the physical defense of the United States from the sea and from American bases. On the other hand, if the physical balance has become different I believe there is such a thing as a moral balance in the world, even though theorists in the past have not dealt with that. Somewhere and at some point a series of transformations bring about the sort of change that has been characterized by the Mohammedan sweep across Northern Africa and the Middle East.

A complete change in the value structure of the world which

*which*

is in turn characterized by the fact that what was considered worth for living previously is now altered. Now I will not abstract a theoretical lecture from this attempt to define when such a point will be reached in the world for the United States and what areas we must defend in order to prevent our isolation in a completely hostile world, but it is not a trivial question for examination of what would happen to a society which

14.

[Y]

in the past has believed that it represented the future of mankind if it suddenly finds itself irrelevant to the rest of the world and hated in the rest of the world. An area of study which requires exploration is the problem of the moral balance. Again if you look at alliances in the past, they were generally animated by the fact that the participants thought that the consequences of mutual assistance were less bad than the consequences of joined action. And again in the period in which we live this is no longer self evident. Moreover it is no longer necessary, as I have pointed out, to add various countries together for an accretion of strength and finally, the range of modern weapons has introduced into all alliances a discussion not only about common action but also about the theater of military operation. In 1939 Poland had only two choices - to resist or to surrender. It could not make its defense dependent on a strategy which shifted to somebody else the risks of devestation. In 1968 this precise technical ability exists and therefore we live in a very curious world. Given the risks of modern weapons countries will tend to fight for others not because of a legal obligation but because their national interest seems to them overwhelmingly at stake. On the other hand, the protector countries may believe that nothing they do will jeopardize this protection. President DeGaulle's policy viz a viz the United States may depend on the proposition that he is so sure of American support on essential issues that he feels that he does not have to purchase it by acquiescence in our policy. Similarly in 1962 when China attacked India, Prime Minister Nehru was asked in Parliament whether he thought he had paid a penalty for not joining a military alliance with the United States as Pakistan had done. He, in one of his less elevated but perhaps more accurate moments, said 'no, he

15.

[Y]

received just about the same protection that Pakistan would have and
he would have to pay less for the American military equipment because
he could buy it during an emergency¹. In other words, in the contemporary
period, the distinction between allies and neutrals tends to errode.
Neutrals get much of the protection that used to be reserved for allies
and allies conduct a sort of policy that used to be associated with
neutrals.

Now I have no doubt that at least one of my colleagues on this
program will point out that all of this reflects what are the old
benighted
fashioned, united views of international affairs - that the real problem
is to abolish the issues produced by sovereignty and to aim for a
world community. There is no question that a world community may
avoid some of the problems of sovereignty, but it would be difficult
thousand
to convince the three hundred people who were killed in Indonesia and the
that tens of thousands that have been killed in Nigeria, that the mere
fact of creating a state abolishes the problem of the living together
of people of either different values or incompatible objectives. It
is a peculiarly American phenomenon notion that police forces are
always benign and that therefore international police forces avoid
the problems that I have described. In most countries the issue is
who controls the police force and not the abstract problem of having
a police force.

always

(Now) I mention all of this because it suggests that the study of
international affairs required a very broad canvass. It is not
enough to study existing systems because many societies may look
formally the same and yet have completely different significance to
different historical evolutions. To apply American political institutions
in other societies often has had disastrous consequences.

16.

[Y]

I once was present, if I can digress for a moment, when a senior American attempted to explain to a senior Vietnamese the difference between a constitution which was easy to amend and a constitution that was difficult to amend. I had the impression that the Vietnamese thought he was dealing with a madman. No constitution in Vietnam since the war, or I think, ever, has lasted more than three years.

Insofar as the Vietnamese are interested in a constitution at all, which I would question, it is in one on the French not the American model, and in France a constitution is a law with a somewhat higher degree of formality than another law, but nothing like the almost holy instrument of the American experience.

To compare the formal similarities either of individual countries or of international systems may completely miss their central essential significance. One needs a perspective of history and one also needs a perspective of sociology in order to study the impact of domestic structure on the approach to foreign policy, and the degree to which inter domestic values shape international conceptions; and one needs the more traditional tools of political science. Above all I would argue that the deeper problem in the study of international affairs today require a reorientation of much that has been traditional in our thinking.

I have already mentioned that we are an essentially pragmatic society and that our disputes tend to take place between pragmatists and abstract moralists. Much of the contemporary debate on international affairs seems to have this character: technicians of power on the one side are confronted by technicians of morality on other side. I am

17.

[Y]

I am very struck by the fact that so many participants in what is called the new left are exalting values which they would be appalled if one said to them were drawn from right wing experience in Europe in the 1930's. A total rejection of any concrete analysis, an insistence that faith alone unrelated to any concrete study provides the solution that commitment is a value in its own right apart from what it is one is committed to and from any of the concrete studies that are necessary in the real world. How one can get a conviction that on the one hand gradualism is the change of life - is the secret of change - but that we must do more quickly things that in the past have taken centuries. How to strike this balance is partly an issue for philosolpy and has partly something to do with the whole pace of our existence. One does not become reflective because some bureaucracy has assigned the task of reflection to one.

I am not maintaining that I make these remarks because I have solved that problem or that I have a recipe that could be followed in arriving at a conclusion. Rather I am suggesting to you because in a forum that addresses itself to the future of international relations as a discipline, it may be useful to address ourselves to what may be the deeper problem rather than to the detailed analysis of individual cases which have occupied us in the past.