The concept of "the national interest" is omnipresent in contemporary
discussions of foreign affairs--in the speeches of presidents and
senators, in the scribblings of editorialists, as well as in the
speculations of academic specialists. The influence of this idea is
one of the lasting legacies of the so-called "realist" school of
international relations, whose luminaries included the political
scientist Hans Morgenthau and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
The American proponents of realism were publicists as well as
scholars, and they engaged in a polemic against the notion that U.S.
foreign policy ought to engage in crusades on behalf of such
allegedly abstract causes as democracy, human rights, and
anti-communism. Its proponents were "Burkeans" who tried,
paradoxically enough, to wish away the reality of Jacobinism and its
ideological pedigree. As Raymond Aron suggested, the American
realists transformed historically specific periods in European
statecraft when a "moderate Machiavellianism" had prevailed--the
period between the wars of religion and the French Revolution, and
again the century between the Congress of Vienna and the First World
War--into a normative account of the permanently valid requirements
of statecraft. Theirs was a conservative, nostalgic, and even
reactionary lament against the unleashing of societal passions in an
age of ideology and mass democracy.
