Politics Among Nations: The Science of International Politics

Hans Morgenthau

UNDERSTANDING INTERNATIONAL POLITICS:

Morgenthau wants to detect and understand the forces that determine political relations among nations and to comprehend the ways in which those forces act upon each other and upon international political relations and institutions.

International politics, for Morgenthau, must be defined distinctly from recent history and current events, international law, and political reform. With the shifting emphases and changing perspectives, an observer can only gain an objective standard of evaluation of the present through the correlation of recent events with a more distant past and the perennial qualities of human nature underlying both.

LIMITATIONS TO UNDERSTANDING:

The most formidable difficulty facing a theoretical inquiry into the nature and ways of international politics is the ambiguity of the material with which the observer has to deal. The events he must understand are unique occurrences. They happened one way and will never occur again. They are also similar manifestations of social forces that are products of human nature in action: under similar conditions they will manifest themselves in a similar manner.

Dealing with different political situations, we should ask ourselves: how does a situation differ from a preceding one and how is it similar? If one wants to understand international politics, gras the meaning of contemporary events, and foresee the future, he must be able to perform the dual intellectual trask implicit in distinguishing between the similarities and differences in two political situations. Thr complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible: knowledge of the forces that determine politics among nations and of the ways which their politcal relations would unfold, reveals the ambiguity of the facts of international politics. In every political situation contradictory tendencies are at play. All we can do make educated guesses on why one tendency might prevail over another.

UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM OF INTERNATIONAL PEACE:

The United States is impacted by international politics in a way it had never been before. Promotion of the American national interest remains the primary aim of foreign policy, the avoidance of a nuclear holocaust, aka the preservation of peace, is the prime concern of all nations. In a world whose moving force is the aspiration of sovreign nations for power, peace can be maintained only by two devices: the self-regulatory mechanism of social forces manifested in the struggle for power on the international scene: aka, the balance of power. The other is the normative limitations on that struggle as shown in international institutions.