The True Meaning of Power: What the Godfather of Realism Can Teach Trump
Foreign Affairs · David Sacks ·
What the godfather of realism can teach Trump.
“International politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power.” Hans Morgenthau wrote this sentence from his desk in Chicago at the dawn of the Cold War, as the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on an open-ended competition for global dominance. Politics Among Nations, the volume that Morgenthau ultimately produced, would quickly become the most widely adopted international relations textbook in the United States and provide an intellectual framework—realism—that would guide generations of scholars and policymakers.
Although much has changed in the nearly eight decades since Morgenthau’s most influential work was published, the fundamentals remain the same. Human nature, which for Morgenthau drove the struggle for power, is unmoved. States are still the most significant actors in the international system and compete for influence. Great powers continue to drive the course of history. Much of today’s world would seem to affirm Morgenthau’s conclusions: Russia’s attempts to establish a sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, China’s quest for hegemony in East Asia, and the United States’ revival of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere all suggest the enduring primacy of national interests over moral aspirations and international norms.
For many, Morgenthau’s contributions begin and end with his identification of power as the key determinant of state behavior. But this reading misses one of his core observations: that even if humans tend to be power-maximizing creatures, they are also moral beings who seek to limit their own power. Morgenthau’s writings reveal a dialectic between power and morality—two seemingly incompatible concepts that he spent his life attempting to reconcile. Far from romanticizing power, Morgenthau saw the need to tame it.
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