I am grateful to Kerry Whiteside for reviewing my book, and wanted to respond to his two mildly critical comments.
As he says, my book is “never polemical.” I wanted the facts and my reasoning to speak directly to readers. Whatever readers' political leanings, had they made it to the last chapter, they would have been persuaded, I think, of the case for multilateralism. They would know that by cooperating, the world had achieved great things, such as the eradication of smallpox, and that by not cooperating, the world had overseen unforgivable failures, like the Rwanda genocide. They would also know the reasons for both outcomes. A theory that can explain this range of outcomes has something to offer, and that was what I wanted to communicate. Whiteside is disappointed that my book “does not set up a debate,” but that was not its purpose. His tastes and mine are obviously very different in this respect. His own book is all about a debate, and my response to his book was characteristic of the approach I took in my own book. We have real problems. How do we address them? That is what interests me.
Whiteside worries that I may have put too much stress on the paradigm that states act to further their self-interest. He also notes, however, that I step outside “the confines of this paradigm” quite often and that my recognition of the moral, humanitarian motivation “is evident on every page” of my book. He may feel uneasy with how these two motivations compete for attention in the book, but this conflict is evident in the conduct of foreign policy. We say “never again,” and then we fail to intervene in Darfur. We acknowledge that the rich countries have a responsibility to assist the poor to adapt to climate change, but then we offer very little assistance.
Whiteside is right that “nations, like individuals, see themselves as moral actors as well as self-interested ones.” No modern state today can defend its foreign policy without appealing to both of these motives. But there is a built-in tension here. The book exposes this tension.
The introduction and the conclusion to my book quote from Franklin Roosevelt's 1945 State of the Union Address: “International cooperation on which enduring peace must be based is not a one-way street…. In a democratic world, as in a democratic nation, power must be linked with responsibility, and obliged to defend and justify itself within the framework of the general good.” In the quintessential public goods game, the prisoners' dilemma, no player feels content with the outcome in which cooperation fails, but all players together find it difficult, because of self-interest, to sustain the outcome in which cooperation succeeds fully. The moral imperative to act “within the framework of the general good” may not always be enough to sustain cooperation, but it does at least impel countries to try. If countries try, they may fail, but if they do not try, they will surely fail.
