Andrew – My apologies if I was unclear . Let me try again. You write: “Just because governments have acted in a certain way historically, that doesn’t mean that they should have done so.”

To which I would say, No sale. Governments have never acted strictly on their national interest — as defined by your typical realist — because it is not in their nature to do so. Indeed, many hard realists seem to argue that governments should act only out of a narrowly defined self-interest but, in a creepily materialist way, that they do only behave according to their narrowly defined interests (which is why, they say, we shouldn’t worry about Iran getting nukes). But this, I think you’ll agree, is absurd. Kings indulged their egos. Nationalities indulge their national pride and tribal loyalties at the cost of both blood and treasure. They may convince themselves that their national interest is at stake, but we know that’s really not always the case. When Hitler asks “Is Paris Burning?” or when Ahmadinejad, God forbid, one day asks the same question about Tel Aviv, or when nations simply act out of pride and honor realists complain that such behavior is “irrational.” Okay, so it’s irrational. But humans are irrational and so are their governments sometimes. And if states only act in their rationally determined self-interest, why are there so many examples of states doing otherwise?

“The common practice of calling such motives ‘irrational’ reveals how narrow the professional understanding of what matters to people has become in our day,” Donald Kagan writes in Honor Among Nations. “The notion that only economic benefits, power and security are rational goals is a prejudice of our time, a product of the attempt to treat the world of human events as though it were the inanimate physical universe, susceptible to scientific analysis and free to ignore human feelings, motives, and will. Such an approach is no more adequate to explain current behavior than to explain the actions of human beings throughout history.”

So, that’s what I’m getting at. Realists work on the assumption that government follow their national interests which they then define in incredibly narrow terms of power, security and money. In effect, realists are a breed of utopian because they expect governments to be purer than the people they represent.

Second, I think it is impossible identify clear and bright lines between what is morally right and what is right simply in terms of national interest. Cost benefit analysis is unreliable when dealing with the question of, say, whether we should honor a commitment to an imperiled ally or persecuted minority. We dishonorably abandoned the Kurds and Shiites during the first Gulf War in the name of realpolitick and we paid a price in terms of realpolitick later.

Similarly, the global perception of being a moral nation is valuable in terms of realpolitick, just as the social perception that one has good character is valuable in everyday life. But, you can’t fake good character, at least not for long. And separating moral behavior from play-acting is an impossibility particularly when constituencies in and out of government emphasize different motives for the same actions. Some supported the Iraq war primarily for idealistic reasons, some primarily for realpolitick reasons, but most for a mixture of the two. In fact, the people who gripe that something isn’t in our national interest end up simply being the losers in a policy debate. It’s hardly as if many of these new “realist” liberals are against, say, intervening in Darfur or fighting global poverty. Even Pat Buchanan who plays the realist card quite often when it comes to the Middle East and elsewhere also favored the US coming to the military defense of Dubrovnik.

Lastly, doing the right thing when you can where you can is always defensible, in foreign policy and everywhere else. Obviously, figuring out what you can afford to do and whether it’s doable at all can be difficult. But the existence of hard cases doesn’t justify inaction in the easy ones. If we could end the slaughter in Darfur very cheaply and with no loss of life, I think it would be morally indefensible not to do so — even if you could somehow prove it wasn’t in our “national interest.”