Morality and American Foreign Policy: The Role of Ethics in International Affairs

By Robert W. McElroy

Book Overview

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. To show that moral norms can, and do, significantly affect international affairs, Robert McElroy investigates four cases of American foreign policy-making: U.S. food aid to the Soviet Union during the Russian famine of 1921, 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.

Originally published in 1992.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069160892X
• ISBN13: 9780691608921
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Pathbreaking

McElroy's "Morality and American Foreign Policy" offers the reader a pathbreaking analysis of a subject that was put aside by the mainstream International Relations' theorists (the so called realists) since this subject was considered as an utopism (hence an unscientific sunject). Using the latters commitment to empirical observations McElroy shows quite convincingly that U.S. Foreign Policy was sometimes driven by moral arguments (namely in the cases of famine relief in Russia in 1921, the ban of chimical and biological warfare by the U.S. and the retrocession of the Panama canal). But McElroy's book also shows the limits of the moral argument in Foreign Policy. In the case of the bombing of the German city of Dresden, McElroy demonstrates that despite the generally acknowledged norm of noncombatant immunity, the American planners decided to pursue mass-bombing above Germany (and Japan, see Dower's "War without Mercy"). In the words of McElroy, "The case of Dresden testifies to the fact that the mere existence of a strong international moral norm does not guarantee norm compliance, and that there are specific conditions that contribute to or militate against compliance in the international system" (p. 167). McElroy finishes his book by drawing on this last remark and offers the reader with several conclusions on the role of morality in World politics. As I said, McElroy's book is pathbreaking in the world of International Relations theory. He really takes morality as a serious subject in the field. One can regret nonetheless that the author gives us lots of generalization despites the fact that it is an U.S. centered study. This study also lack a more in depth analysis of major conceptual problems such as to know what is a norm and what is morality. Finally, out of four study cases three of them are convincing in regard of the theoretical argumentation of McElroy but the fourth (the Panama case) is far from being convincing and let the reader quite unsatisfied. That's for these reasons that I give a four stars to McElroy's book despite being a great book overall.