The national interest and its interpretation

Review of Politics

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 29-55

  Nincic, Miroslav ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248094708     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500028126     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), p. 147. 2.1 am assuming that the international interest is considered no more valid a guide to the national interest than are parochial interests.
2. See R. M. Hare, 77K Language of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), especially chap. 1, pp. 5-8.
3. Charles A. Beard, The Idea of the National Interest: An Analytic Study in American Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 22.
4. Stanley I. Benn and Richard Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), p. 358.
5. For example, Glendon Schubert, The Public Interest: A Critique of a Political Concept (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), p. 17.
6. For example, attempts (generally associated with religious fundamentalism) to equate the national interest with a theological tenet. Or else, various forms of the claim, attributed by misquotation to former Secretary of Defense Edwin Wilson, that "what is good for General Motors is good for the United States."
7. Although the contemporary form of political realism in the United States is largely rooted in the work of George F. Kennan, Hans J. Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Walter Lippmann, its historical roots are best traced in Friedrich Meinecke's classical work, Machiavellism: The Doctrine ofRaison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).
8. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 6th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 5
9. Ibid., p. 37.
10. Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics: The Western State System in Transition (New York: The Free Press, 1941), pp. 261, 265.
11. See, for example, Joseph Veroff and Joanne B. Verrof, Social Incentives: A Life-Span Approach (New York: Academic Press, 1980), especially chap. 3.
12. David G. Winter, The Power Motive (New York: The Free Press, 1973), especially pp. 11-17.
13. George Lichteim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 150.
14. See, for example, Warren R. Phillips and R. C. Crain, "Dynamic Foreign Policy Interactions: Reciprocity and Uncertainty in Foreign Policy," in Sage International Yearbook of Foreign Policy Studies, ed. Patrick J. McGowan (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1974)
15. and Charles W. Kegley Jr., "Neo-Idealism: A Practical Matter," Ethics and International Affairs 2 (1988): 173-198
16. Arnold Wolfers, "The Pole of Power and the Pole of Indifference," in International Politics and Foreign Policy, ed. James N. Rosenau (New York: The Free Press, 1969), p. 175-181
17. In a related vein, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 103-104
18. and Raymond Aron, Peace and War: Theory of International Relations (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1966), p. 595
19. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 238.
20. Helen Milner, "The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique," Review of International Studies 17 (January 1991): 67-85.
21. Roger D. Masters, "World Politics as a Primitive International System," World Politics 16 (1964): 595-619.
22. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
23. See also, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Power and Interdependence: World Politics in Transition (Boston: Little Brown, 1977), especially pp. 11-19;
24. and Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 35-50.
25. Especially Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
26. John A. Vasquez, The Power of Power Politics: A Critique (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 216.
27. Particularly successful applications of some variant of the realpolitik paradigm to the study of the relation between war and power redistributions, are Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
28. and Thomas Cusack and Richard Stoll, Exploring Realpolitik (Boulder, CO: Lynn Reiner, 1990).
29. On this, see John W. Burton, International Relations: A General Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 49-51.
30. George F. Kennan, "Lectures on Foreign Policy," Illinois Law Review 45 (1951): 730.
31. Ibid., p. 723.
32. Waltz, Theory of International Politics.
33. Ibid., p. 105.
34. Joseph H. Grieco, "Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism," International Organization 42 (August 1988): 498.
35. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 134.
36. Ibid., p. 94 (emphasis added).
37. As Helen Milner has persuasively argued.
38. For example, Robert O. Keohane, "Institutional Theory and the Realist Challenge After the Cold War," in Neorealism and Neolibemlism: The Contemporary Debate, ed. David A. Baldwin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 269-300.
39. Ibid., p. 275.
40. Edgar S. Furniss and Richard C. Snyder, An Introduction to American Foreign Policy (New York: Rinehart, 1955), p. 17.
41. Fred A. Sonderman, "The Concept of National Interest," Orbis 21 (Spring 1977): 133.
42. Stephen Krasner, Defending the National Interest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), especially chaps. 1-2.
43. Ibid., pp. 11-12.
44. Ibid., p. 43.
45. Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 5-7.
46. Ibid., p. 6.
47. Aron, Peace and War, pp. 73-76.
48. Donal E. Neuchterlein, America Recommitted: United States National Interests in a Restructured World (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), p. 17.
49. Kennan, for example, has explicitly excluded ideological goals from his notion of the national interest, for example, "Morality and Foreign Policy," Foreign Affairs 64 (Winter 1985-1986): 205-219
50. While it may be less difficult to agree on the "bads" that should be avoided, it seems inherently hard to agree on the "goods" that should be pursued as a matter of high national priority-a reflection of a more general dilemma, very well described by Barrington Moore, Jr., in Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), chap. 1
51. George and Keohane, pp.223-225
52. For example, as discussed in the sociological literature on the effects of status inconsistency. For early examples, see Gerhard Lenski, "Status Crystallization: A Non-Vertical Dimension of Social Status,"American Sociological Review 19 (1954);
53. John Gaining, "A Structural Theory of Aggression," Journal of Peace Research 2 (1964);
54. James A. Gerschwender, "Continuities in Theories of Status Inconsistency and Cognitive Dissonance," Social Forces 46 (December 1967): 160-171
55. I have discussed the economic consequences of defense spending in, Miroslav Nincic, The Arms Race: The Political-Economy of Military Growth (New York: Praeger, 1982), especially chap. 3.
56. Bruce M. Russett and Elizabeth C. Hanson, Interest and Ideology: the Foreign Policy Beliefs of American Businessmen (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975), pp. 70-72
57. Reported in "Bosses Favor Trimming Defense But Oppose Any Delay in Tax Cuts," Wall Street Journal, 13 April 1982.
58. "Business Chiefs See Need to Cut Military Spending to Trim Deficits," New York Times, 11 October 1982.
59. See also, "Executives Bid Reagan Cut Deficit," New York Times, 13 March 1982.
60. Accordingly, Charles Beard may have referred with only slight exaggeration to a more general phenomenon when he reported, more than half a century ago, studying thousands of actions justified by the appellation "national interest," I was tempted to conclude that the conception was simply a telling formula which politicians and private interests employed whenever they wished to accomplish any particular design in the field of foreign policy" (Beard, The Open Door at Home [New York: Macmillan, 1935], pp. v-vi).
61. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, I960), p. 336.
62. Alfred T. Mahan, The Problem of Asia and Its Effects Upon International Politics (Boston: Little Brown, 1900), p. 187.
63. Unless one could demonstrate (which is inherently very difficult to do) that the nondemocratic form of government was itself the product of a democratic consensus: that, for example, the society declared itself content to consider whatever its leadership chose to do as being an expression of its own interests.
64. See, for example, William H. Riker, The Art of Political Manipulation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
65. For a discussion of the possible intransitivity of aggregated preferences, see Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1963).
66. Also Steven Brains, Paradoxes in Politics: An Introduction to the Non- Obvious in Political Science (New York: The Free Press, 1976).
67. William H. Riker and Peter C. Ordeshook, An Introduction to Positive Political Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1973), p. 114.
68. For example, Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics: The American and British Experiences (Boston: Little Brown, 1967).
69. Hans J. Morgenthau, for example, has maintained that "thinking required for the successful conduct of foreign policy can be diametrically opposed to the rhetoric and action by which the masses and their representatives are likely to be moved. The peculiar qualities of the statesman's mind are not always likely to find a favorable response in the popular mind. The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil. The statesman must take the long view, proceeding slowly and by detours, paying with small losses for great advantage; he must be able to temporize, to compromise, to bide his time. The popular mind wants quick results; it will sacrifice tomorrow's real benefit for today's apparent advantage" (Politics Among Nations, p. 168).
70. In George Kennan's opinion: "Democracy is . . . similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin; he lies there in his primeval mud and pays little attention to his environment: he is slow to wrath-in fact, you practically have to whack his tail off to make him aware that his interests are being disturbed; but once he grasps this, he lays about him with such blind determination that he not only destroys his adversary but largely wrecks his native habitat" (American Diplomacy: 1900- 1950 [New York: New American Library, 1959], p. 59).
71. Walter Lippmann, inter alia, has argued that "the chief complaint against Congress, and it is well founded, is that it does not succeed in representing the national interest, that its members are preoccupied with their own special interest in re-election, and that to this end, in an effort to placate, cajole, and even to bribe their constituents, they will as a general rule sacrifice every other consideration" ("The Ideal of Representative Government," in The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy, ed. Clinton Rossiter [New York: Random House, 1963], p. 255).
72. On this claim, see Miroslav Nincic, Democracy and Foreign Policy: The Fallacy of Political Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), chap. 4.
73. For example, Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), chaps. 12,13, 20, and 21.
74. This suggests that a two-tiered conception of the national interest-one defined at the margins of core national needs, the other by democratic agreement- should not be necessary.
75. See, for example, Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991);
76. Robert Shapiro and Benjamin I. Page, "Foreign Policy and the Rational Public," Journal of Conflict Resolution 32 (1988);
77. Bruce M. Russett, Controlling the Sword: the Democratic Governance of National Security (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), especially chaps. 2-4;
78. and Nincic, Democracy and Foreign Policy, chaps. 2-4.
79. On the more general topic of the average voter's ability to engage in competent political reasoning, see Samuel L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
80. See for example, Bruce W. Jentleson, "American Diplomacy: Around the World and on Pennsylvania Avenue," in A Question of Balance: The President, the Congress, and Foreign Policy, ed. Thomas E. Mann (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1991);
81. also, Nincic, Democracy and Foreign Policy, chap. 3.
82. Arthur F. Bentley, The Process of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908);
83. Earl Latham, The Group Basis of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1952);
84. David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1964). 69 Bentley, Process of Government, p. 222.
85. Earl Latham, "The Group Basis of Politics," American Political Science Review 46 (June 1952): 390.
86. For example, see Miroslav Nindc, United States Foreign Policy: Choices and Tradeoffs (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press, 1988) chaps. 3-5.
87. Benn and Peters, Social Principles and the Democratic State, p. 273.
88. Ibid..