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tivated by considerations of personal power than most other British politicians, and genu-
inely sought to assure peace and happiness to all concerned. But his policies brought untold
sufferings to millions. Winston Churchill, on the other hand, was, in fact, motivated by na-
ked considerations of personal and national power, but his policies resulted in an unrivaled
moral effect. (Paul Wolfowitz, the former American deputy secretary of defense, was mo-
tivated by the best of intentions in arguing for an invasion of Iraq, believing it would im-
measurably improve the human rights situation there, but his actions led to the opposite of
what he intended.) Enlarging on this point, simply because a nation is a democracy does
not mean that its foreign policy will necessarily turn out to be better or more enlightened
than that of a dictatorship. For “the need to marshal popular emotions,” says Morgenthau,
“cannot fail to impair the rationality of foreign policy itself.” Democracy and morality are
simply not synonymous. “All nations are tempted—and few have been willing to resist the
temptation for long—to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral pur-
poses of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law,” he goes on, “is
one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations
among nations is quite another.”
Furthermore, states must operate in a much more constrained moral universe than do
individuals. “The individual,” Morgenthau writes, “may say to himself … 'Let justice be
done, even if the world perish,' but the state has no right to say so in the name of those
forgive him his mistakes so long as he means well. But a state must protect the well-being
of millions of strangers within its borders, who in the event of a failed policy will not be so
understanding. Thus, the state must be far wilier than the individual.
Human nature—the Thucydidean pantheon of fear, self-interest, and honor—makes for a
world of incessant conflict and coercion. Because realists like Morgenthau expect conflict
and realize it cannot be avoided, they are less likely than idealists to overreact to it. They
understand that the tendency to dominate is a natural element of all human interaction, es-
pecially the interactions of states. Morgenthau quotes John Randolph of Roanoke as saying
that “power alone can limit power.” Consequently, realists don't believe that internation-
al institutions by themselves are crucial to peace, because such institutions are merely a
reflection of the balance of power of individual member states, which, in the final analys-
is, determines issues of peace and war. And yet the balance of power system is itself by
definition unstable, according to Morgenthau: since every nation, because it worries about
miscalculating the balance of power, must seek to compensate for its perceived errors by
aiming constantly at a superiority of power. This is exactly what initiated World War I,
when Habsburg Austria, Wilhelmine Germany, and czarist Russia all sought to adjust the
balance of power in their favor, and gravely miscalculated. Morgenthau writes that it is,
ultimately, only the existence of a universal moral conscience—which sees war as a “nat-
