THE RIGHT BOOKS

Twenty-nine years after its original publication by World Publishing, Ernest W. Lefever’s Ethics and United States Foreign Policy (University Press of America, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Md. 20706; $11.25, paper) retains all the freshness of its youth in a time when people were debating the Bricker Amendment, President Eisenhower’s handling of the Suez crisis, and Premier Khrushchev’s threat, offered to Western diplomats at a reception in Moscow: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side! We will bury you!” This quality of freshness being inherent in truth even more than in youth, much of the book’s appeal lies in simple truthfulness, while the balance is owing to the fact that the sort of truths Ernest Lefever deals in have simply not been handled in an above-board way since the late 1960s. More than a decade after Vietnam, as the country begins to creep out of its shell again, Lefever’s treatise on how to conduct a responsible foreign policy that is also an ethical foreign policy strikes me as being more than fresh: It is positively (what’s that word, now?)—positively relevant.

Ethics and United States Foreign Policy is, in the author’s words, an attempt “to relate responsibly the moral wisdom of our Judaeo-Christian inheritance to the complex and tragic realities of world politics, and more specifically to the fateful decisions of American foreign policy.” The subject —throughout Western history, but particularly during the twentieth century —has been a vexed one. There exists, Lefever writes, a widespread and profound confusion among religious and political leaders regarding the relation of ethics to international politics . . . religion is often a source of confusion rather than understanding, and . . . efforts to apply morality to foreign policy frequently end in disaster. . . . “Power politics” and ethics are often thought of as mutually exclusive and morally incompatible poles or alternatives. The writer believes there is no foreign policy, however noble, which does not include “power politics,” or, however cynical, which does not include moral considerations.

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Twenty-nine years after its original publication by World Publishing, Ernest W. Lefever’s Ethics and United States Foreign Policy (University Press of America, 4720 Boston Way, Lanham, Md. 20706; $11.25, paper) retains all the freshness of its youth in a time when people were debating the Bricker Amendment, President Eisenhower’s handling of the Suez crisis, and Premier Khrushchev’s threat, offered to Western diplomats at a reception in Moscow: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side! We will bury you!” This quality of freshness being inherent in truth even more than in youth, much of the book’s appeal lies in simple truthfulness, while the balance is owing to the fact that the sort of truths Ernest Lefever deals in have simply not been handled in an above-board way since the late 1960s. More than a decade after Vietnam, as the country begins to creep out of its shell again, Lefever’s treatise on how to conduct a responsible foreign policy that is also an ethical foreign policy strikes me as being more than fresh: It is positively (what’s that word, now?)—positively relevant.

Ethics and United States Foreign Policy is, in the author’s words, an attempt “to relate responsibly the moral wisdom of our Judaeo-Christian inheritance to the complex and tragic realities of world politics, and more specifically to the fateful decisions of American foreign policy.” The subject —throughout Western history, but particularly during the twentieth century —has been a vexed one. There exists, Lefever writes, a widespread and profound confusion among religious and political leaders regarding the relation of ethics to international politics . . . religion is often a source of confusion rather than understanding, and . . . efforts to apply morality to foreign policy frequently end in disaster. . . . “Power politics” and ethics are often thought of as mutually exclusive and morally incompatible poles or alternatives. The writer believes there is no foreign policy, however noble, which does not include “power politics,” or, however cynical, which does not include moral considerations.