Description
Most international relations specialists since World War II have assumed that morality plays only the most peripheral role in the making of substantive foreign policy decisions. Robert McElroy shows that moral norms can, and do, significantly affect international affairs by their influence on individual decisionmakers, domestic public opinion, and national reputation abroad. He investigates four cases of American foreign policymaking in the twentieth century: U.S. food aid to the Soviet Union during the Russian famine of 1921, President Nixon's decision to alter U.S. policies on biochemical weapons production in 1969, the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties in 1978, and the bombing of Dresden during World War II. Three of these cases illustrate the influence of ethics in foreign policy: questions of conscience led U.S. decisionmakers to provide food aid to the Soviets despite its potentially stabilizing effect on a regime they despised, domestic support for the international moral norm against chemical warfare persuaded Nixon to endorse a radical revision of U.S. biochemical policies, and the existence of a moral ban on territorial colonialism enabled the Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos to rally international opposition to continued U.S. occupation of the Panama Canal Zone. The limits of international norms are demonstrated in the case of Dresden, where, for a variety of reasons, U.S. air forces felt compelled to violate the moral norm of noncombatant immunity.
