Hans 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 1949 issue of The American Scholar Footnote ¹ titled “The National Interest and Moral Principles in Foreign Policy.”Footnote ² As William Scheuerman observes, “The concept of the ‘national interest’ first takes on a special analytic status in this essay.”Footnote ³ In the essay, the national 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 1949Footnote ⁴ and the vexed questions of the new demands of an atomic age.Footnote ⁵ But Morgenthau's use of the national interest as a framework for understanding the new requirements for an American foreign policy appeared before the Russian test (the forum was organized in late 1948), and relates rather to the steady institutionalization of the cold war that had occurred throughout 1948: the signing of the Brussels Treaty by Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, creating a collective defense alliance; the U.S. decision to go ahead with the Marshall Plan absent Soviet concurrence; and the development of the Atlantic security pact. More pertinently, at the end of 1948 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 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 commitment to the classic principles of diplomacy in 1946, in a response to the emerging idea that with the establishment of the United Nations traditional diplomacy had become outmoded.Footnote ⁶ 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 1950, with the breakup of Allied cohesion, he would openly support a negotiated settlement 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, 1919–1939. 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 1948, 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 establishing 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: “realism/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.”Footnote ⁷ It was these requirements that Morgenthau intended the concept 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 international claims in his 1929 doctoral dissertation.Footnote ⁸ 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.

But the critical question in 1949 was not the technical content of national interest, 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, resulting 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 1950 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 1951 piece for the British Yearbook of World Affairs, his third excursion on the subject. There, he castigated the Machiavellian continental tradition (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 precondition 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.Footnote ⁹ 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,Footnote ¹⁰ echoed this view in the subsequent discussion, with an argument for “the normal and sometimes inevitable choice between conflicting moral values.”Footnote ¹¹ There was also a more muted chorus of arguments that there was “no national interest, only class interests,” reflecting the continuing influence of Charles A. Beard's The Idea of National Interest (1934).Footnote ¹²

When the Soviets exploded their atomic device in August 1949, 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 demonstration, arguing that it had only enhanced the significance of negotiations and diplomacy.Footnote ¹³ The polemics brought him to the attention of the president of the University of Chicago, who invited him to give the 1950 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 necessity 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 “interest”; 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 policy and principle were brought together.Footnote ¹⁴ In the fourth of the lectures he laid out his “Conditions for a Negotiated Settlement,” setting out the case as between the alternatives 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”Footnote ¹⁵ ), 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 influence unlikely.”Footnote ¹⁶ Raymond Aron had already disputed the idea in his Le Grand Schisme of 1948, arguing that such agreements generally rested on a shared political vision, and that the ideological aspects of the superpower confrontation made a spheres of influence agreement impossible. But especially damaging for the task 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 1951; the second and more significant was entitled “The Balance of Power versus the Coördinate State,” appearing in the Political Science Quarterly of June 1952. 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, implied and demanded an “equal dignity of all states,” irrespective of wealth or power. As examples of “federalism in international relations” he proffered the organization 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 policymaking. In June 1952 the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences organized 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,Footnote ¹⁷ 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 substantive content than speaking or writing.”Footnote ¹⁸

A participant, Morgenthau took the opportunity to stipulate American interests, 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 booksFootnote ¹⁹ ) was to prepare a much more substantial account than anything he had attempted so far, addressing the charges of vagueness, the 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 charges. He also attempted to define precisely what was at the heart of a national interest in an article entitled “Another ‘Great Debate’: The National Interest of the United States,” which appeared in September, following the conference.Footnote ²⁰

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 definition] 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” interests 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 nation which is conscious not only of its own interest but also of that of other nations 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 1952, arguing that while the national interest did indicate a general direction of policy, in the sense of “demands that are ascribed to nations rather than individuals . . . beyond this, it has very little meaning.”Footnote ²¹ 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.’”Footnote ²² 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 1952—at best as an essentially contested concept, at worst in a conceptual limbo. In any event, a three-power agreement on German reconstruction had sealed the fate of a policy of negotiations,Footnote ²³ 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 published In Defense of the National Interest, and who had provided Morgenthau with “enthusiastic support and wise council,”Footnote ²⁴ wanted the concept of national interest incorporated into a second edition of Politics Among Nations, to appear in 1954. Initially doubtful, Morgenthau accomplished it, but only by abandoning the idea that the national interest could serve as a via media between ideals and interests. 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 1954 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, maintenance, and expansion of a state's power. It was no longer a set of historical variables, 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 1994, Robert Jervis, summarizing the importance of Morgenthau for U.S. foreign policy, stressed the centrality of Morgenthau's concept of the national 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 legitimately be considered to have concerns of its own; and moreover, that “the concerns of segments of the population” could “legitimately be put aside” in favor of “the wider good.”Footnote ²⁵ Jervis's understanding of Morgenthau's national interest is a variant of raison d’état, tamed to an American understanding.