The Robert MacNeil Report; Morality and Foreign Policy

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good Evening. Jim Lehrer is off tonight. Last week in Kansas City the Republican Convention adopted a so called "morality" preamble to its foreign policy platform. On the Democratic side, Jimmy Carter has been talking a lot about restoring morality to our foreign policy and is currently working up a major speech on human rights. What went into the Republican platform was morality with a different emphasis than Carter`s. Reagan supporters, unhappy with Henry Kissinger, wanted to repudiate some of the pragmatism of detente with the Soviet Union, and in the interest of part unity President Ford acquiesced.

Carter has been talking more generally about bringing the basic values of our society more into play in our relations with other countries. But both appear directed at a common frustration, the sense some hold that in the past eight years, American foreign policy has been conducted on too amoral, or expedient a plane. Tonight we examine what all this fresh talk of morality in foreign policy really means. And, is it likely to have any effect on the way we conduct our relations with other countries? Roger Morris was a member of Henry Kissinger`s National Security Council staff until he quit because of what he felt to be the immorality of administration actions. Mr. Morris then served as Senator Mondale`s foreign policy advisor. He is currently a contributing editor to The New Republic and working on a book about his former boss, Henry Kissnger.

Mr. Morris, what do you think all this new yearning for a moral foreign policy springs from?

ROGER MORRIS: I think it`s a response in part to what happened in Vietnam and a number of other events over the past decade in which the American people have come to see part of what was a subterranean reality in American foreign policy, that is the whole concept of intervention abroad, and really a very flagrant betrayal I think, as most people see it, of the ideals that this country has stood for traditionally. There is a very natural reaction and a revulsion in the country at large I think to this feeling that foreign policy has somehow gone off track. Carter and Reagan and also Ford are all responding to that in the sense that they do feel a temper of criticism and of yearning for something new and more idealistic. I think all of them sense that a democratic foreign policy has to have the support of the people if it is to succeed, and there is the feeling that foreign policy no longer has the trust and support of the American people.

MacNEIL: To use very simple words, how would you make our foreign policy more moral?

MORRIS: In a sense this is a false question. I think morality plays anywhere along the political spectrum. One can be quite moral and napalm children in Vietnam; one can for moral purposes intervene in Chili and overthrow a legal government there. One can, for moral reasons, do almost anything up to and including a first nuclear strike against potential adversaries. The real question is whether morality or moral considerations can be somehow played into a portrayal of the national interest; whether foreign policy can be in the service of the national interest and at the same time conducted with what Jefferson called a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Moralism and morality in foreign policy per se are obviously totally elastic concepts.

MacNEIL: I take it you do not mean moralizing to the world and preaching to the world about what we think or think at a particular moment the world should be?

MORRIS: No, I don`t mean that. I think that we have had quite enough of that over the last decade. I think that really belongs under the whole category of arrogance of power and a presumptiveness on the part of the American body politic that somehow we knew how the rest of the world ought to be ordered. Now we have learned the hard way that not only are we for the most part incompetent and ignorant about our own affairs, but even tragically so about others. So that the question really becomes how the United States conducts its foreign policy in the national interest and whether in fact that foreign policy is of benefit to its own people and in a more general sense to the people in the world.

MacNEIL: Aren`t all human relations between people or institutions or countries necessarily a mixture of principle and expediency though? Aren`t we going to have to do inevitably some things, as we do in our own personal relations, things which are merely expedient?

MORRIS: I think that`s true. I think that there are obviously compromises to be made in terms of our own survival. I don`t think one can liberate Eastern Europe or attack the Soviet Union on questions of human rights without suffering a retaliation, and therefore you are into a compromise. What I have in mind is a national interest foreign policy which expresses more clearly what I think are really at root, the interests of the nation as distinct from the interests of corporate power, or the interests of a few isolated individuals who have made foreign policy. We are talking here about foreign policy as it exists on one hand, and foreign policy as it ought to exist. All of this prattle in the campaign about a more moral foreign policy has no significance at all for Carter, or for Ford, or for whoever is elected unless the next President is willing to take some very drastic reforms in the way foreign policy is conducted and in the way it is managed, and in terms of the people who are responsible for foreign policy, because those are the underlying realities.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Hans Morganthau is a widely respected political scientist who has taught at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of the text, Politics Among Nations, and contributes regularly to magazines such as The New Republic.

Dr. Morganthau, do you think our foreign policy because of the way it has been conducted in recent years, needs a moral regeneration?

HANS MORGANTHAU: I certainly would think so. I by and large agree with what Mr. Morris has said. I only would like to elaborate a little bit on it. Any human action has a moral connotation, because man is a moral animal. Secondly, when you deal with foreign policy, and for that matter if you deal with domestic politics, you are dealing on a different plane than when you deal with personal relations among individuals as such. In other words, you are struggling for very high stakes, and the rules of conduct which we expect individuals to obey in their private relations with each other do not necessarily apply to political matters. Let me quote the great Italian statesman, Cavour, the unifier of Italy in the 19th century, who said, "If we had done for ourselves what we have done for Italy, what scoundrels we would have been."

MacNEIL: Do you feel that American foreign policy in the last eight years, shaped as it has been, largely by Dr. Kissinger, has been disturbingly amoral?

MORGANTHAU: I would not say so. What I would say is that, for example, you see assassination plots for which certain agencies of the American government have been responsible.

MacNEIL: Which dated from an earlier period.

MORGANTHAU: From an earlier period, came as a shock to the American public at large, for we had believed in the whole moral atmosphere, you may say of the world, led us to believe that those assassinations which were common, let me say since the 18th century; you think that the Republic of Venice had an official poisoner whose records are still available; that this is a thing of the past. Our moral sensitivity has made it impossible for any civilized government to plot the assassination of the erstwhile statesman. We had a rude awakening, and naturally asked ourselves where are the moral limits within which we thought American foreign policy was to operate? Those limits are wider than we thought they are, and it troubles us.

MacNEIL: Are they too wide?

MORGANTHAU: If you ask me personally, I would certainly say that we are in a period of history where those moral restraints which were characteristic of the Victorian and Edwardian age have conquered, and this is a bad thing for civilization. So I would hope and wish, even though I am not very optimistic about it, that those moral restraints were to be re-established, and especially were to be obeyed by our own government.

MacNEIL: Which ones specifically?

MORGANTHAU: The ones with respect for human life in the case of peace in general; the respect for human life in war, insofar as disabled soldiers are concerned, soldiers who are ready to surrender, and civilian populations. But of course, the whole technology of warfare militates against those fine distinctions which were made in the 18th, 19th,. and the beginning of the 20th century.

MacNEIL: I would like to ask you this, and then ask Mr. Morris`s reaction. Is it misleading to promise the American voters, or appear to promise the American voters this year, that our dealings with other countries can be transformed to some new, moral plane; to imply that?

MORGANTHAU: I would say it is misleading if you interpret this promise in the way that you assume that the American foreign policy will obey and respect certain moral restraints which it hasn`t respected in the past. But if you assume that this promise refers to the moral impetus which has been the mainstay of American government at home and abroad, I would say that a morally moderated President, a strong President, can infuse a new vitality into those moral principles which after all, are the raison d`etre for the American politic.

MacNEIL: What do you think, Mr. Morris, the public should believe of all this new talk of foreign policy; that it is just going to change the restraints, as Dr. Morganthau says, that have been observed in the past, or just re-infuse the traditional morality of this country?

MORRIS: I think it will change the restraints. There is a political restraint on any new President against the kind of policies that we have followed in the past in terms of assassination, and also in terms of overt, military intervention. I am always perplexed by these discussions because they always take place at a kind of, what seems to me, a very superficial level. One does these things in international politics for a reason. You plot the assassination of Castro because you have fundamental reasons for opposing his regime in Cuba. Those reasons stem from your view of the world, and your view of your own social and economic system. You plot the assassination of Allende for similar reasons. The question of moral or immoral behavior in foreign policy it seems to me, is inseparable from what kind of foreign policy you are conducting, and what interests you are really protecting. If it is the national interest of the United States and the national policy of the United States to protect Kenicott Copper in Chile, or to make the world safe for General Motors in South Africa, then one applies whatever means are necessary to that end. The rest of it becomes a kind of public relations maneuver in which you don`t do assassinations this year because it is hot with the Congress and the press. I think that that kind of morality would be very easy to come by in the next administration, and one will not send marines to Southeast Asia, and one will not in the immediate future, at least, reactivate the assassination plots in the CIA. The basic motivation for those actions, the basic attitude toward the world will remain very much the same, and that`s deeply rooted in the concept of the kind of people who manage American foreign policy, and very much, I might add, in the institutional interests of the American government which the President will inherit. So all of this in a sense is superficial, and I think a bit irrelevant.

MacNEIL: Do you agree with that?

MORGANTHAU: No, I don`t agree with that at all for Mr. Morris assumes a kind of inevitability with regard to policy that follows from the conception of the national interest, but the national interest can be pursued in different ways. And I can say, hypothetically, I am against the Castro regime in Cuba and try to bring about his downfall. But one thing I will not do is try to poison him. My conception of the national interest may be identical with the conception of those who plotted his assassination, but still I may arrive at a different policy conclusion because I apply different moral standards. I stop at a point where the CIA was not willing to stop.

MacNEIL: Let me bring in another guest here. Clyde Ferguson Jr. is a former Dean of Howard Law School who now teaches las at Harvard. But he has had a lot of practical as well as theoretical exposure to foreign policy rights and wrongs, including tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Uganda for three years from 1970 to `73. A week ago tonight, Ambassador Ferguson was in Plains, Georgia where he was one of the foreign policy experts chosen by Jimmy - Carter to come on the "brain bus" to help the candidate chart his international economic policy.

Ambassador, on a day to day level, thinking of a country with a regime like Uganda`s, what practical effect would a new, moral posture have on American foreign policy?

CLYDE FERGUSON JR.: There might be some practical effect. I`d like to go back to something Roger said: the whole problem of national interest and what is national interest in foreign policy. I read, or heard Roger to say something I think much more fundamental than simply that it is superficial. The problem is that there is no hard line between "domestic policy" and foreign policy. At the same time you have the Castro assassination problems, you have the FBI out of control domestically. The real problem is who is going to do the execution over seas, but the policy imperatives are what we are. And what is frightening about it is to look back over the last eight, ten to twelve years to see what we are as Americans, and that is the thing that I think most Americans don`t want to tolerate and want to change. What we do overseas is a reflection of ourselves, and it`s something that most of us don`t like. On an operational level, there are difficulties. I was in Uganda; we`ve had other problems: Burundi for example, Ethiopia, even Nigeria, Biafra. The question of the so-called diplomatese of relations among sovereign states in which one is not to interfere in internal affairs. That has been a stumbling block. I think it is an unfortunate erection in international law, but it is an attribute of the developed sovereign state. In Uganda, for example, where I spent I guess 18 months, dealing solely almost with the problem of getting some recompense for three Americans who were murdered by the Ugandan army. The problem there is, in this kind of sovereign interchange which grew out of the Treaty of Vienna, to what extent can you bring your moral force to bear to-get people to do what "is right." Firstly, I think you have to distinguish between saying "we, the United States, thinks you ought to do that." That`s arrogance, and arrogance of power. Our credibility is not that good. Morally, over the last ten years, our credibility has not been that good. But there are at least some international standards, most of them embodied in documents in the UN. Despite the double standard to which we could repair in saying, "This is not a question of US dictate on your own conduct, but in fact, calling attention to the fact that you are not living up to something that you assumed yourself." I think we could be much more rigorous in that regard; much more rigorous in Uganda; much more rigorous in South Africa; and much more rigorous in a number of places around the world in terms of the international standard that allegedly all of us adhere to the fact that we call attention to a deprivation of human rights is not a dictate of the United States, but is rather calling attention to the fact that you are acting in an uncivilized manner.

MacNEIL: I see that. There seems to be a considerable difference of emphasis among the three of you here. Mr. Morris, as I understand him, thinks that we need a fundamental recasting of what the American interest is in foreign policy. Dr. Morganthau I think, thinks we need to re-inspire our foreign policy with our values, and you feel that what we represent as a people domestically is inevitably affecting our foreign policy. There may be some common ground between the three of you, but I`d like to know what you are proposing.

FERGUSON: We`ve got to start at home. Our credibility in terms of the execution of foreign policy depends upon what we are at home, and obviously Watergate has put us in a position where we are not in a position to go talking to other people about governmental abuses depriving rights of their own citizens.

MacNEIL: Haven`t we impressed the world by having our institutions survive and surmount Watergate?

FERGUSON: Certainly I think that is beginning to repair our credibility.

MORRIS: Could I add, Clyde, at that point, that while Watergate was healed ostensibly in the American body politic, most of the rest of the world was watching an American foreign policy which was dominated by quite opposite forces. That is, if you are a black in South Africa and you are looking at American foreign policy, you are looking at Coca-Cola, IBM, General Motors, and Polaroid, and all the rest who represent the United States. If you were in the Dominican Republic or elsewhere in Central America, you`re looking at United Brands or Gulf and Western. If you are in Iran or in the Middle East, you`re looking at quite different interests. American foreign policy has been conducted, it seems to me, without any major impact from Watergate. Watergate was a reflection at its worst of techniques and methods that have been used in American foreign policy for at least a generation, but I see no comparable reform or cleansing, or purge of American foreign policy to parallel with Watergate. And I wouldn`t think that we would experience anything like a reformed foreign policy as a result of that.

FERGUSON: Yes, but I would suggest, Roger, that as I said before, it starts at home. It`s a spectrum; there`s no hard line between domestic and foreign policy. When you talk about General Motors, or GE, or the banks, and the face that we show overseas, this is a reflection of what is here.

MORRIS: Oh, I agree.

FERGUSON: And we cannot deal with one without the other.

MacNEIL: Dr. Morganthau.

MORGANTHAU: I emphatically disagree with the conception that foreign policy is determined by domestic politics. If you look at the history of great powers: Germany, Italy, France, Russia, Great Britain. You find a consistency of foreign policy because of the objectivity of the national interest which is quite separate, which is quite ind6pendent from the drastic changes in the political regime at home which has occurred in those countries. Take the balance of power policy of Great Britain from Henry the VIII to Edward VII. It has been consistent Domestic changes have not in the slightest affected the foreign policy of Great Britain.

MORRIS: Some would argue, Professor, that there have been no fundamental domestic changes in Great Britain.

MORGANTHAU: Who would argue? Nobody can seriously say . . .

FERGUSON: I would not like to be heard as saying it is solely .a matter of domestic politics and of party politics, but it`s a structure of our society which determines our interest, and our foreign policy is a reflection of that.

MORGANTHAU: But take for instance the Monroe Doctrine, or take our consistent interest in the balance of power in Europe, from Jefferson to the present. Those interests would remain in tact even if you had a socialist political regime at home, or if you had a dictatorship or a monarchy at home, because they grow out of the objectivity of a rational foreign policy from the American`s point of view requires.

MacNEIL: We`re just at the end of our time. Could I ask each of you very briefly to say what you think on how our foreign policy should change with respect to a new infusion of morality. A brief restatement, Mr. Morris.

MORRIS: I think American foreign policy ought to be a reflection of what both Professor Morganthau and Clyde Ferguson are talking about, a reflection of the best of America at home, and I think that that follows from some fundamental changes in the way we organize our economic and social system. That kind of foreign policy would be a foreign policy in which one had a decent respect for the rights and views of other people around the world; one which would spurn intervention abroad; one which would work for peace without the kind of emphasis which we have today which is . . . .

MacNEIL: Could I hear from you, Ambassador?

FERGUSON: I would agree with Roger, but I would add one footnote: that the reason for this is to have a foreign policy with that kind of a moral input and content is in the best interest of this country. It is not do-goodism or going out to do good for the heathens. Consequently I would agree with Roger with the footnote that this is in our best interests.

MacNEIL: I`m awfully sorry; I haven`t got time to give you a final word.

MORGANTHAU: Next week.

MacNEIL: Next week. Thank you very much. Thank you all. That ends it for this evening; I`ll be back tomorrow night. I am Robert MacNeil. Good night.