“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually—memory yields.
–Friedrich NietzscheFootnote 1Fear of responsibility is not only stronger than conscience but even stronger, under certain circumstances, than fear of death.
–Hannah ArendtFootnote 2In Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (1946), Hans Morgenthau celebrated the noble role of the statesman, whose tragic destiny entailed accepting the agonizing moral burden of committing lesser evils as the inescapable price for securing the greater good.Footnote 3 In this elitist vision, the statesman is primarily accountable to personal conscience rather than to the poorly informed, undisciplined judgment of any democratic electorate.Footnote 4 In focusing on the statesman's pivotal role, Morgenthau glossed over the ways the New Deal and the Second World War had transformed the institutional context within which American presidents made foreign policy.Footnote 5 As he shifted his attention to American policy toward Vietnam in the late 1950s and the 1960s, however, his view of presidential leadership and the executive branch changed significantly. Morgenthau came to see the growth of the national security state and the unaccountable exercise of executive power as a twin threat to the foundations of republican government.Footnote 6 His critique emphasized the pathologies of policymaking insulated within this state apparatus. He learned that one problem with the lesser-evil approach is that the moral distinctions on which it is predicated are relative and contingent in practice: that which was once proscribed from the policymaker's toolbox can readily become the prescribed instrument after the justifying precedent has been established.
Scholars examining the evolution of Morgenthau's postwar thought have called attention to his shift from an elitist conception of statesmanship to an increasingly republican one that emphasized the importance of the citizenry in the democratic process and identified the national interest with the common good.Footnote 7 Morgenthau's emergence as a prominent, fearless critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam has long been seen as a key part of this story. However, in explaining this evolution, scholars have largely ignored a fundamental change in the historical context during this era: namely, the establishment of the permanent institutional apparatus of the national security state, as exemplified in the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council, among other institutions. The declining influence of traditional diplomatic methods in favor of a more militarized foreign policy was reflected in the growing prominence of the Department of Defense over the Department of State in shaping policy.Footnote 8 At the same time, Congress and the courts entrusted the executive branch with broad authority over the collection and use of intelligence information, which facilitated the expansion of the government's secrecy system.Footnote 9
Morgenthau's Critique of American Policy toward Vietnam
The roots of Morgenthau's opposition to American military intervention in Vietnam can be traced back to his critique of the 1947 Truman Doctrine and the national security policy framework it reflected. In cloaking the cause for rendering aid to Greece and Turkey as part of a global crusade against communism, Truman had bound the United States to the defense of “free” people everywhere, a position that ignored the practical limitations of American power and resources. By sharply dividing the world between the forces of freedom and the forces of authoritarianism, the ideological rationale for this crusade obscured the geopolitical variables that differentiated particular cases from one another and clouded their relationship to specific American strategic interests. In short, by focusing on checking Soviet ambitions, the Truman national security policy framework inclined American decision-makers to reflexively prioritize military means over political or diplomatic ones in addressing policy challenges.Footnote 10
By the early 1950s, Morgenthau had already concluded that military means could not advance American security interests in Vietnam; and he warned that the national liberation movements would likely prevail over the long run. Siding with colonial forces or their puppet governments, therefore, placed the United States on the wrong side of history. More immediately, any prolonged engagement in this losing effort would drain American resources and would undermine the country's moral prestige by identifying American policy goals with repressive action.Footnote 11 As President Lyndon Johnson escalated the war, Morgenthau concentrated more of his energy on opposing it. Given the nature of the war, he contended that the victory the administration sought could only be achieved through the total destruction of the enemy, which would entail not only massive bombing but also a protracted and overwhelming deployment of American combat forces. In his view, the administration's determination to conduct a limited war in pursuit of a negotiated settlement would not only fail, it also demonstrated how poorly U.S. policymakers understood the motivations of the enemy. Conversely, Morgenthau argued that justifying the immense war effort necessary to win would only be possible if the Vietnamese enemy actually posed an existential threat to American interests, but the U.S. government had not and could not make a plausible case to that end. Since victory was not possible, perpetuating the war was immoral and unjust. Coming to terms with this reality, however, would require facing up to some unpleasant truths, ones deeply at odds with conventional assumptions of U.S. policymakers about the intrinsic goodness of American intentions and ideals.Footnote 12
Elite Policymaking in the National Security State
In considering retrospectively how the experience of the 1960s had altered his understanding of policymaking, Morgenthau acknowledged his earlier mistake in expecting “that if power were only made to see truth it would follow that lead.”Footnote 13 But the Johnson administration's backlash against even the most distinguished critics of its Vietnam policy had shown this expectation to be naive. Government officials, Morgenthau concluded,
are under a compulsion to protect at all costs, intellectual and moral, their imaginary world from contact with the real one and they must force themselves and the world to believe that their imaginary world is real, that their myths are the truth. For if they did not do that they would have to change their policies radically and in effect admit that they have been consistently wrong for years and that they cannot be trusted with the fate of the nation. Thus disastrous policies consistently pursued serve the self-protection of those who have initiated or inherited them. We are here in the presence of an issue not of foreign policy or military strategy, but of psychopathology.Footnote 14
In his view, the growth of the national security state fostered a dangerously insulated policymaking apparatus. From inside this bubble, American policymakers not only perceived the world through their own lens of power and authority, they also screened out any information and opinions that controverted their assumptions, such as those of journalists reporting from Vietnam.Footnote 15 The Pentagon Papers, Morgenthau argued, revealed that policymakers had lost the capacity for prudent judgment or critical thinking. Instead, they engaged in an “endless bureaucratic repetition of certain clichés, certain stereotypes” without “any attempt to understand the consequences of their action.”Footnote 16 Since their modes of expression concealed even from themselves the meaning of what they were doing, their techno-rational discourse shielded them from having to face up to the consequences of their actions.Footnote 17
This self-deception among policy elites, Morgenthau emphasized, went hand in glove with their systematic lying to the general public. While this kind of governmental deceit was hardly new, it had become increasingly sophisticated, owing to techniques of modern public relations and advertising.Footnote 18 The executive branch developed new tactics to “silence, discredit, or corrupt” dissidents through intimidation, vilification, and rewards.Footnote 19 Indeed, the Johnson administration created a “Project Morgenthau” to find information that could be used to undermine the credibility of one of its foremost critics.Footnote 20 This manipulation of domestic public opinion, Morgenthau argued, succeeded in undermining any effective democratic check on policymakers.Footnote 21 However, as Morgenthau pointed out, even the most sophisticated public relations campaign will eventually lose its effectiveness as the gap between image and reality grows. When the public realizes that its government has been deliberately deceiving them, he warned, the result will undermine not merely support for a particular policy agenda but, more broadly, public trust in the governing institutions.
The Republic at Risk
For Morgenthau, the American disaster in Vietnam was indicative of the pathologies in policymaking that had emerged with the rise of the national security state. By advancing a “shift of the effective power from the people to the government,” this rise posed an acute threat to the survival of the American form of republican government.Footnote 22 In his view, the growth of a vast secret infrastructure of government institutional networks whose decision-making processes, information collection, and core operations were not subject to public scrutiny was incompatible with the fundamental principles of rule by popular consent and rule of law in a free society.
Referencing President Dwight Eisenhower's famous admonition, Morgenthau emphasized the corrosive effects of the “military-industrial complex” on the “integrity and independence of government” through the spread of reciprocal relationships of material self-interest connecting government officials, industry representatives, and the scientific community.Footnote 23 At the ideological level, he argued, this trend had been facilitated through the propagation of “a demonological conception of the world in which the United States is pitted in ineluctable conflict against other nations of incalculable power and infinite cunning.”Footnote 24 At the material level, he contended, the many powerful special interests benefiting from the largesse of the military-industrial complex secured its continued dominance. Within the orbit of this complex, Morgenthau included institutions of higher education, pointing out that the allocation of government grants and other rewards often exercised considerable influence both in promoting and discouraging various kinds of scholarly inquiry.Footnote 25
Coupled with these trends, Morgenthau observed, the growing role that science played in government policymaking inevitably shifted authority to a technocratic elite, whose claims and analysis most citizens lacked the competence to evaluate effectively. Rule by such an elite, he argued, posed significant dangers for preserving the republican constitutional order. Morgenthau warned that, taken as a whole, these developments had reached a point where
the determination of foreign and military policies has become virtually free from democratic controls. It is of course in the nature of things that the determination of such policies is within certain limits an executive prerogative, which can be subject to democratic scrutiny only after the event . . . . Thus small elites within the executive branch can commit us to informal alliances and undeclared wars, they can choose military strategies and weapons systems—and what public debate exists is like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, praising or bewailing what has already been done.Footnote 26
This problem, he contended, was exacerbated by the public realm's decay into little more than an arena for private interests to compete for government benefits and to manipulate public power to their own ends. He saw the party system as not only corrupt but corrosive to a vibrant public realm.Footnote 27 In Morgenthau's view, the significance of the citizenry's lack of effective means for scrutinizing the conduct of government officials and for holding them accountable for misconduct was rendered more acute by the erosion of any ethic of responsibility among policymakers. As a result of this erosion, he observed:
Shame, the public acknowledgement of a moral or political failing, is virtually extinct. The members of the intellectual and political elite whose judgments on Vietnam proved to be consistently wrong and whose policies were a disaster for the country remain members of the elite in good standing; a disgraced former President moves easily into the position of an elder statesman receiving confidential information and giving advice on affairs of state. Thus the line of demarcation between right and wrong, both morally and intellectually, is blurred. It becomes a distinction without lasting moral or political consequences. To be wrong morally or politically is rather like a minor accident, temporarily embarrassing and better forgotten. That vice of moral and intellectual indifference is presented and accepted as the virtue of mercy, which, however, as forgiveness and dispensation with the usual reaction to vice, supposes a clear awareness of the difference between virtue and vice.Footnote 28
Morgenthau described here a corruption of ethical standards at their root. This corruption, in turn, erodes the distinctions necessary for judging issues of responsibility, either with respect to the consequences of one's own conduct or to that of others. The poor judgment that American policymakers displayed, then, was not the result of their own personal foibles, but rather reflected the broad character of the insulated world in which they operated. In such a political culture of impunity, he recognized, his earlier supposition of the moral burden weighing on the statesman's conscience and restraining imprudent actions had lost its plausibility as a practical ideal. Morgenthau never developed any alternative approach to the problem of political ethics, and remained pessimistic that new democratic means of accountability could be found to provide an effective remedy.
Conclusion
In Why Leaders Lie (2011), John Mearsheimer complains that few scholars have examined the role of lying in international politics.Footnote 29 However, he curiously ignores Morgenthau's contributions to this subject.Footnote 30 In developing his analysis, Mearsheimer appears to work from a simple model: leaders lie for both good reasons and bad, though not as often as many of us may suspect. His approach assumes that leaders actually know the truth or accurately comprehend the factual reality of the case at hand; thus, his concerns are why leaders decide to lie in such instances and the consequences that flow from that choice.Footnote 31 Morgenthau, however, saw lying as part of the self-deception, willful blindness, and moral atrophy of policymakers within the institutional context of the national security state.Footnote 32 Unlike Mearsheimer, Morgenthau also underscored how lying was but one of many tactics employed—including bribery, intimidation, and domestic spying—to manipulate public opinion and silence dissenting voices.Footnote 33
Morgenthau posited his ideal of the virtuous statesman exercising prudent self-restraint on the conduct of policymaking just as the American government was creating the permanent institutional foundations of a national security state.Footnote 34 This ideal offers the chimera that the immense power entrusted to this administrative Leviathan will be managed responsibly even if its operations remain largely shrouded in secrecy, and even if its existence could not have been contemplated by the framers of the Constitution in designing their system of checks and balances. Given his emphasis both on the lust for power as the most common driving motive of political actors and the strong propensity of everyone to rationalize their egotistical conduct in the higher name of some ethical good, Morgenthau's pessimistic view of human nature did not provide a reassuring foundation for grounding such an ideal.Footnote 35
