U.S. President Donald Trump, during his first and second administrations, has broken with American tradition and rejected international law and institutions. Washington’s foreign policy is fully militarized and is characterized by power politics. The present long-planned war against Iran is a war of aggression and is contrary to international law.
A once supporter
In the past, from its founding as a representative, constitutional and federal republic, the United States valued constructive diplomacy and the ideal of international law with an emphasis on justice and peace. This concern for cooperative relations and for the moral and legal dimension in international relations carried the United States through the 19th century. In the 20th century, it influenced Washington’s cooperation in the activities of the League of Nations—the first worldwide intergovernmental organization that was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1946—and the U.S. role in the founding of the United Nations.
The U.S. proposed the formation of an international court of justice at the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907. A spirit of internationalism in support of diplomacy and international law, rather than a spirit of militarism and power politics, was in the minds of American leaders in the past but not today.
After World War II, the United States supported several international organizations in the effort to promote worldwide peace and economic, social and scientific development.
“The upheaval produced by a world conflict has again confronted public opinion with the necessity of reexamining the basic institutions of world society,” Manley O. Hudson, an American judge on the International Court of Justice, wrote in 1944. “The generation that is bearing the brunt of the present struggle may seize the opportunity to reshape many of these institutions for the better serving of future needs.”
Is the current global turmoil and economic upheaval caused by Washington’s war against Iran a similar turning point requiring the reshaping of international institutions and a reaffirmation of, and a return to, international law?
Power politics in foreign policy
Washington pursues a foreign policy of reckless, amoral and lawless “power politics,” what 20th-century Germans called Machtpolitik (power politics). Such policy was implemented under both Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. The U.S. and allies, including China, fought two world wars to defeat it.
Louis Fisher, an expert on the U.S. Constitution, presented a detailed study of the problem in his book, Presidential War Power (2004).
“In our time, there is a tendency to dismiss what the framers said about the war power, as though contemporary conditions have eclipsed their 18th-century models,” he said. “Yet on the willingness of presidents to go to war for personal (or partisan) reasons rather than the national interest, the framers gave clear warning of a presidential weakness that has been in full view, particularly since World War II.”
‘Might makes right’
Washington today is awash in cult-like power politics “might makes right” thinking. Christian Zionists, Jewish Zionists and Neoconservatives promote war in the Middle East. The military-industrial complex feeds the fire in the minds of assorted hawks in the Washington “swamp” like U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
Such alien and aggressive Machtpolitik foreign policy thinking entered the U.S. at the university level during the 1930s, primarily through professor Hans J. Morgenthau, a Jewish émigré from Nazi Germany. Morgenthau taught at the University of Chicago. His so-called “Realist” school of international relations became influential in the Cold War era and, unfortunately, persists today in Washington.
Christoph Frei, a professor in Switzerland, wrote a revealing and definitive study, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography. Frei documented how Morgenthau’s “might makes right” thinking derived mainly from the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
A core concept within Nietzsche’s philosophy, that of the “will to power,” influenced the rising European militarism of the late 19th century which, in turn, led to the clash of European empires in World War I (1914-18)—British, French, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman.
Frei explained Morgenthau’s method. “He set out to wrap his distinctly German theory in entirely new clothing,” he said. “The most obvious, if laborious, approach was to cite Anglo-Saxon authors as well as classical authorities in support of his position.” The use of the cynical 17th-century British writer, Thomas Hobbes, comes to mind.
Morgenthau’s “Realism” was given respectability by deceptively camouflaging it as “Hobbesian.” Hobbes argued that international relations consisted of a vicious “war of all against all.” Morgenthau praised the 20th-century British historian,
E. H. Carr, who is also considered a contributor to the Realist school of international relations. The erratic and cynical Carr, a former British official who once supported Hitler, promoted Hobbes.
For Nietzsche, and for Hobbes, power was the ultimate goal in a grim and lawless world. Both reduced international relations to a psychological model. Theirs was a psychology of amoral cynicism. Frei explained that “Nietzsche explores human impulses in all their diversity, only to reduce them to a single basic drive, the will to power.” Adding a vulgar Darwinian and Spenserian biological “survival of the fittest” cast to such a theory, it serves to justify aggression and war.
The United States must drop its cynical power politics, militarism and imperialism. Washington must abide by its own Constitution, must respect the UN Charter and international law, and must pursue peaceful coexistence and international cooperation. –The Daily Mail-Beijing Review News exchange item
