It stands to reason that not all foreign policies have always followed so
rational, objective, and unemotional a course. The contingent elements of
personality, prejudice, and subjective preference, and of all the weaknesses
of intellect and will which flesh is heir to, are bound to deflect foreign
policies from their rational course. Especially where foreign policy is conducted
under the conditions of democratic control, the need to marshal
popular emotions to the support of foreign policy cannot fail to impair the
rationality of foreign policy itself. Yet a theory of foreign policy which
aims at rationality must for the time being, as it were, abstract from these
irrational elements and seek to paint a picture of foreign policy which
presents the rational essence to be found in experience, without the contingent
deviations from rationality which are also found in experience.
Deviations from rationality which are not the result of the personal
whim or the personal psychopathology of the policy maker may appear
contingent only from the vantage point of rationality, but may themselves
be elements in a coherent system of irrationality. The conduct of the
Indochina War by the United States suggests that possibility. It is a question
worth looking into whether modern psychology and psychiatry have
provided us with 'the conceptual tools which would enable us to construct,
as it were, a counter-theory of irrational politics, a kind of pathology of
international politics.
The experience of the Indochina War suggests five factors such a theory
might encompass: the imposition upon the empirical world of a simplistic
and a priori picture of the world derived from folklore and ideological
assumption, that is, the replacement of experience with superstition; the
refusal to correct this picture of the world in the light of experience; the
persistence in a foreign policy derived from the misperception of reality
and the use of intelligence for the purpose not of adapting policy to reality
but of reinterpreting reality to fit policy; the egotism of the policy makers
widening the gap between perception and policy, on the one hand, and
reality, on the other; finally, the urge to close the gap at least subjectively
by action, any kind of action, that creates the illusion of mastery over a
recalcitrant reality. According to the Wall Slreet Journal of April 3, 1970,
"the desire to 'do something' pervades top levels of Government and may
overpower other'common sense' advice that insists the U.S. ability to
shape events is negligible. The yen for action could lead to bold policy as
therapy."
Morgenthau, H. (1948). Politics among nations: The struggle for power and peace (pp. 7, 8). New York: Knopf
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