American Interests, American Purpose: Moral Reasoning and U.S. Foreign Policy

by George Weigel

American Interests, Amercan Purpose explores the relationship between moral norms and U.S. foreign policy. The book does not so much attempt to provide a theoretical framework for the ongoing debate of morality and foreign policy as to examine four different controversial aspects of the argument. Weigel begins with a discussion of the cultural Protestant moralism that characterized Woodrow Wilson's approach to world politics. Here, the author suggests that the discussion involves the fundamental question, What is morality or moral reasoning? The book goes on to examine the pressures put on the foreign policy debate by the rise of modern totalitarianism. Weigel examines the modern cleric's arguments against nuclear deterrents. Finally, the book sketches the moral, strategic, and empirical case for U.S. foreign policy in which support for indigenous democratic forces throughout the world has a high priority.

118 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 1989

About the author

American author and political and social activist. Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel was the Founding President of the James Madison Foundation.

Each summer, Weigel and several other Catholic intellectuals from the United States, Poland, and across Europe conduct the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society in Krakow, in which they and an assortment of students from the United States, Poland, and several other emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe discuss Christianity within the context of liberal democracy and capitalism, with the papal encyclical Centesimus Annus being the focal point.

He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

[John Seymour · Rating 4 out of 5]

As clear and insightful as most of his work, Weigel first distinguishes between moralism, the tendency that has tended to dominate American foreign policy since Wilson and that is marked by the idea that why an act is done is perhaps even more important that the nature of the act or the result. Does one act with good intentions? Such Wilsonian moralism is also animated by the implicit idea that smart men acting with good intention will reform the world so as to end moral conflict. Weigel suggests serious moral reasoning requires a return to an older form of Christian moral reasoning, one based in an understanding that "the Kingdom of God would not be a work of human hands."

Published in 1989, it generally bears up well, though the rapidity of the change that is about to crash down upon the world is illuminated by a few passages that state that no one is so foolhardy as to suggest that the Soviet Union's iron grip on Eastern Europe is likely to be relaxed in any significant manner at any time in the near future.

I have a humongous TBR pile. Weigel didn't help as his references have added at least a dozen books to the lists.

A short book, I highly recommend it as an introduction to the idea that serious moral thinking belongs in foreign policy discussions and needs to be more rigorous than has tended to be the case.