The Age of the Unthinkable (4 page)

Disney, by the way, would have been the perfect home for such a tale, for Democratic Peace Theory was at heart as much an
encapsulation of every triumphalist American dream as Mickey Mouse. Democratic Peace Theory held in its DNA the notion that
what was true and sacred about America was the very thing the planet needed most, that the whispered sound of the American
Constitution was on the lips of every suppressed soul on earth. By making the world more, well, more American, the United
States could not only guarantee its own security but also elevate those poor masses to a world they surely dreamed of, one
that looked very much like Phoenix — even if they lived in Peshawar or Tashkent or Beijing.

But, elegant as Democratic Peace Theory looked on paper or on some computer screen, it often stumbled when confronted with
reality. In 1999, American bombers struck at the democratically elected government of Serbia in Belgrade — a reminder that
ballots were as capable of generating horror as they were of producing allies. In fact, once you got out of your political
science department — or walked away from your hobbyist spreadsheets — you inevitably began to find ways in which The Idea
fell apart.

Part of the elegant logic of Democratic Peace, for instance, was something like this: if your country is open and democratic,
then my open and democratic country can see what you are thinking. You can see what we are thinking. So we should be able
to get along. International relations scholars Bernard Finel and Kristin Lord have called this “positive transparency,” the
idea that more clarity should mean more stability. So a big, open, transparent, democratic world should, according to this
reasoning, be the most stable we could hope for. (This argument is echoed in another classroom-lovely and real-world-deadly
notion: that an interconnected global financial system should be more stable, since it allows easier movement of money and
goods. Did more markets
really
mean more stability? Not quite. In fact, as we’ll see, more markets only made finance more confusing and dangerous.)

Imagine for a moment that political transparency actually runs the other way. What if seeing into other nations makes you
more nervous rather than less? What if it confuses your policy making? If your neighbor’s house was transparent and you could
watch him polishing his gun collection, would this make you more nervous or less? What if you just watched him doing nothing
at all, simply watched him while he watched you? In fact, when Finel and Lord studied a number of historical conflicts, they
concluded that a “negative transparency” was often at work. Openness made countries nervous, confused their leaders, and quite
often made crises worse rather than better.

Once we think about it, this idea of “negative transparency” may not be all that surprising. Democracies are extremely chaotic
and messy. This isn’t a judgment about whether they are good or bad, but a reflection of the fact that democracies have been
defined as the most unpredictable form of government in the world. And certainly the process of
becoming
truly democratic, as we’ve seen in places as different as Russia and Taiwan and Iraq, never follows a smooth path. Without
a basis of economic development, without a culture of politics that fits democratic discourse, becoming democratic was often
a guarantee of instability. Democratizing Arab countries, for instance, might not make them less militant — particularly given
cultures that tended to thrive on violent conflict.

And even if countries could manage the transition to democracy, national policy in an elected government can change dramatically,
even unrecognizably, from one month to the next. This ebb and flow of open politics might create so much unpredictability
that any sane enemy would decide that the safest thing to do is to assume the worst. This is probably the best way to explain
why the United States, worried that its interests were at risk, decided to manipulate democratic processes in Iran, Guatemala,
Indonesia, British Guiana, Brazil (twice), Chile, and Nicaragua over a period of about forty years. Even if some of these
interventions were vitally important to American national interests in the face of Cold War dangers, the record hardly suggests
that democracy alone created a stable basis for trust and cooperation. This isn’t simply a historical matter: elections in
Gaza, Russia, and Iran in recent years all challenge the notion that a democratic process delivers a reliable ally.

Finel and Lord also found numerous examples of “good” traits of democracies that often accelerated conflict instead of easing
it. A free press? A magnificent feature of open systems but given at times to war-speeding jingoism. The transparency of democratic
systems? An essential part of what makes democracy great — but makes it difficult to conduct secret negotiations that can
forestall or shorten conflicts. Responsive democracies, when you begin to look at the tensions and problems that animate national
life, at the many-sided virtues that come with a vote, might make the globe more confusing rather than less.

If there was one man who had worked hardest and with the most inventive spirit on the problem of making global power into
something more scientific it was Morgenthau, and it is worth understanding the nature of his genius, not only because of his
huge influence but also because he represented a very particular way of thinking, one that put states first, assumed countries
were rational, and made the bet that pure power was the solution to any problem. Morgenthau was trying to shuffle all the
quirks of the global system into some sensible order, to explain wars with the precision that Darwin, say, had brought to
biology or Newton to physics.

The idea that international relations could be thought of in such a scientific way had roots in some of the oldest concepts
of Western thought, and particularly in the beautifully architected ideas of men like Kant, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, whose
voices echo in Morgenthau’s work. All were men who prided themselves on developing systems and guidelines. On paper, Morgenthau’s
ideas looked very similar to that other historical work. But Morgenthau was also very much a man of his turbulent times. You
can still feel, on every page of his books, the slow ticking of his psychology: the refugee’s demand for pragmatism over daydreams,
an inescapable belief in the logic of might and right — and the hope that this sort of brutal calculus could defend against
chaos of the sort that had demolished his German childhood. When he sat down to write his masterwork,
Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,
in the days when World War II was ending, he wanted to put on paper an empirical guide to how the world worked, a handbook
that could do for statesmen what the periodic table did for chemists. It became the most influential book in international
affairs for fifty years.

To begin with, Morgenthau defined himself as a “realist,” a thinker of a school that set store in what he considered to be
purely practical, “realistic” theories of policy instead of an ideology, like Nazism or Communism. You should pick ideas and
make choices because they worked, because they were practical, and not because you dreamed, as Hitler or Lenin had, that they
fit into some larger historical process. The international system, Morgenthau believed, was defined by nation-states ceaselessly
wrestling in a contest for security. Idealism, the notion that history should be moved by moral principles such as justice
or humanity, struck Morgenthau as a poor basis for policy. Who, after all, was to say what was “moral” and what was not? “The
realist,” he wrote, “parts company with other schools of thought before the all-important question of how the contemporary
world is to be transformed. The realist is persuaded that this transformation can be achieved only through the workmanlike
manipulation of the perennial forces that have shaped the past as they will the future.” Morgenthau’s statesman faced the
present with a set of reliable, time-worn tools that he could use to engineer and manipulate what he had in front of him.
And nearly every decision of national life could and should be run through this crucial filter: “How does this affect the
power of our nation?”

For Morgenthau, national power was something you could apprehend at a fast glance, as you might check the weather outside
or the level of your swimming pool. It was
the
ingredient that mattered most, the measure of security whose absence or presence was most obvious. At one point in
Politics Among Nations,
Morgenthau refers to a story from European history, the so-called Dresden interview, a famous meeting between Napoleon and
Metternich in late June of 1813. At the time of the meeting, Napoleon has been master of Europe for more than a decade. He
has known and even liked Metternich for years. But now, following a humiliating defeat in Russia, the French emperor, then
just forty-three, finds himself face-to-face with the forty-year-old Austrian minister of state. The interview lasts for nine
hours. Napoleon tries to dissuade Metternich from placing Austria in a coalition intent on demolishing France’s place in European
power politics. The emperor leans hard on Metternich, sputtering with threats, reaching for all kinds of psychological and
emotional tricks, like a cop trying to extract a confession. “Our conference,” Metternich wrote later, “consisted of the strangest
farrago of heterogeneous subjects, characterized now by extreme friendliness, now by the most violent of fury.” At one point
Metternich insults the exhausted, drained French army. The soldiers are, he says offhandedly, “no more than children.” The
emperor explodes. “You are not a soldier,” he screams. Napoleon flings his hat into a corner — part theater, part pure rage.
He waits, expecting Metternich to pick up the hat. He is, after all, an emperor. The prince does not move. The hat sits on
the tiles of the Marcolini Palace like some sad symbol of lost power. Napoleon finally bends over to pick it up himself. “Sire,”
Metternich says, “you are a lost man.” The next day Metternich places Austria in an alliance against France. Less then a year
later, Napoleon is exiled to Elba.

Morgenthau’s brilliance was to develop an entire physics of global affairs based on the idea that power worked in such direct
and almost predictable ways. His statesmen saw their interests clearly. The very word
states-men
told you a lot: these were men who thought, moved, and acted on the scale of nations. Diplomacy was work for wood-paneled
rooms, ideally insulated from the pull of domestic tension, an idea known as
das Primat de Aussenpolitik,
or the primacy of foreign affairs. And national power could be tracked with the clarity of that thrown hat: Metternich’s
refusal to stoop for the emperor told you all you needed to know about the history unfolding there. Sure there were unpredictable
moments in battle or in diplomacy, but generally the system should be predictable, since its actors were all rational. Was
Napoleon’s tantrum irrational? No, it was simply the calculated act of a leader looking for an edge and a man who believed
he could achieve face-to-face what his armies might not be able to achieve on the field of battle. Realism, Morgenthau wrote,
“shares with all social theory the need, for the sake of theoretical understanding, to stress the rational elements of political
reality.” He saw his statesmen as working out balances in a system of power that reflected the physics of Newton: capable
of equilibrium, predictability, linearity. Using realist precepts, great men like Metternich and Castlereagh could see and
measure the threats they faced, could balance them one against the other.

This view of the global stage as a kind of workshop was revolutionary. It was an attack on ancient, persistent schools of
thought that saw the progress of history as a result of divine forces, for instance, or saw in history an inevitable working
out of some ideological magic, whether it be the natural right of Nazi fascism to rule the planet or the economic inevitability
of Marxism. It was an answer as well to the ideas of men like Woodrow Wilson, who had thought that with the right institutions,
such as a League of Nations, it would be possible to fashion a stable, peaceful global order that appealed to the higher instincts
of men. Morgenthau dismissed such views as fantasy. He ran his world order on that old refugee calculus that power equals
survival, and violence is inevitable. In the end, he said, for men and nations alike, only one instinct mattered: the twitch
toward mastery of others.

With his “workshop” view of the world, Morgenthau established, more or less, the whole discipline of international relations
as a science of sorts. Seventy years after he published
Politics Among Nations,
realist theory still dominates international-relations thinking in most universities. It shapes everything from how we make
alliances to how we build institutions that are supposed to control everything from disease to financial panic. And its fundamental
premises and language inform even competing schools of thought such as liberalism, internationalism, or bureaucratic-politics
theory; they serve as the basis for a Scrabble board of similarly named ideas like
defensive realism
and
neoclassical realism.
Frankly, you can’t even begin a serious discussion of international relations without reference to Morgenthau, which is part
of the reason I’ve introduced him here.

Politics Among Nations
is one of those rare books of politics that is as beautiful and inspiring as it is sharp. You can see in every sentence why
Morgenthau bewitched presidents, diplomats, and theorists. But there is also, on nearly every page, something else: a gnawing
sense that he knows he is proposing a way of looking at the world that, like those elegantly naive models of Dean Babst, simplifies
the international order to the point of near-irrelevance. Sometimes you only glimpse this wistfulness in passing, buried in
footnotes. Moving your eyes from page to footnote and back again in
Politics Among Nations,
you sometimes feel you are reading a pharmaceutical ad, in which a miracle treatment is offset by a host of potentially lethal
complications, listed in fine print. Morgenthau will make an expansive and promising and reasonable statement — “The greater
the stability of a society, the smaller are the chances for collective emotions to seek an outlet in aggressive nationalism”
— only to balance it out with a footnote warning that there are many situations in which this might not be true. Richer, more
stable countries should be free from the internal
dangers that pushed places like Germany and Japan to insanity and war. But, he says in a note, that assumes such nations are
free from “class struggle, revolution, urban violence and civil war” — the very forces that do make history.