On empathy, and other words I don’t want going within ten feet of international relations thought

Damir has a thoughtful post on moralism in foreign policy. Rather than respond in kind, I’ll be slapdash and kind of tendentious about it.

I go back and forth on the whole morality thing. Given how it’s almost inevitably wielded as a club in service of promoting factional interests or ideological superiority, it’s awfully tempting to, as Damir suggests, just wash one’s hands of the whole thing.

The neoconservatives famously employ it (every single one of Michael Gerson’s Post columns just bleed from every pore with it). But so do the liberal realists, who as far as I can tell are basically just representatives of center and somewhat left-of-center establishment thinking + hostility to neocons.

The post on Steve Clemons’ blog that Damir references epitomizes that conflation of moral concerns with strategic logic that I take it he doesn’t much like. And I get it. Besides being frequently subject to abuse, moralism leads to conceptual fuzziness. The writer laments that our strategic partnerships are all-too-often a function of getting what we want from other countries. Well, unfortunately, that’s pretty much what a strategic partnership is.

There’s an entire branch of IR theory, constructivism, that’s largely concerned with trying to change these dynamics on an intellectual level, moving away from narrow definitions of interests. In fairness, they have half a point. The problem is that it’s very difficult to recreate the elements that make an alliance more than just a temporary confluence of interests. There are just scads of reasons too numerous to delve into in a late-night blog post why our relationship with Great Britain is stronger than our relationship with, say, Pakistan.

And when it comes to empathy, and understanding, and cooperation, and trust-building and all those wonderful things, advocates seem to have a difficult time operationalizing their new, hoped-for approach. What exactly does it entail? Better cocktail parties for foreign diplomats? Sleep-overs? Wife-swapping?

That said, there is a point in there that Mr. Katcher could have made better, and that I think Damir elides. The willingness to take another state’s interests seriously is a strong hedge against moralism in our own foreign policy — after all, if they have no valid interests or security concerns, then they’re simply evil. The ur- realist Hans Morgenthau made this idea a key platform in his theory. No less a conservative than Edmund Burke remarked that

“Nothing is so fatal to a nation as an extreme of self-partiality, and the total want of consideration of what others will naturally hope or fear.”

If we recognized that other nations had fears and honors and interests no less significant to them than ours are to ourselves, and embedded this idea in our foreign policy without sacrificing our own interests, I suspect it would have a useful moderating effect on our approach.

The problem, and the one I think Damir is attuned to, is in clinging too hard to this notion of “empathy,” and thus substituting one form of dangerous moralism for another. This is a surprisingly easy trap to fall into. Even Morgenthau ended his career advocating a world state.

(By the way, can anybody who’s met Steve Clemons inform me if that photo in the upper left-hand corner of the page is a good likeness? Because he looks like he’s either squinting or trying to do Clint Eastwood: “I’ve got your number, Dick Cheney.”)