Ethics and Statecraft: The Moral Dimension of International Affairs (Humanistic Perspectives on International Relations)

This revised edition of Ethics and Statecraft has been reorganized to better situate chapters that play to one another thematically, on peacemaking, the ethics and statecraft of war, and the statecraft of major international reform, and two new chapters, on Theodore Roosevelt and the Vietnam War, respectively, have been added to this classic work. The contributions remain centrally concerned with moral reasoning about important decisions taken by key statesmen in times of war, peace, and transformation, arguing that national leaders―including realists―have always concerned themselves with normative constraints on power, both their own and that of others.

This book posits that the problems of ethics in international relations are always conditioned by uncertainty, actors' inexact knowledge of real-world conditions, and morally ambiguous outcomes. Contrary to the course assumptions of much IR theory, individual leaders remain the major conduit by which ethical concerns are deployed or ignored in the foreign policy of states. To ignore moral norms, which already govern international relations, is to ignore a key dimension of the subject; such an oversight will necessarily lead to a shallow analysis and a basic misunderstanding of how and why states behave as they do.