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The impotence of power: Morgenthau's critique of American intervention in Vietnam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2011

LORENZO ZAMBERNARDI
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Abstract

While a superb scholarship on Morgenthau as a political theorist has literally exploded over the past ten years, his analysis of foreign policy has been generally neglected, overlooking the intimate relationship between theory and policy in his practical philosophy. This article presents Morgenthau's public opposition to the Vietnam War by placing it in the broader framework of his theoretical work. In doing so, I illustrate and clarify the meaning of three theses that are at the very centre of his political reflection: the critique to any type of universalistic understanding of world politics; his claim about the intangible roots and social bases of political order; and, finally, the dangers of the ‘military displacement of politics’. Writing about Morgenthau's critique of American intervention in Vietnam today is neither a purely academic exercise, nor a mere historical reconstruction of a great scholar's position on one of the most important military conflicts of the twentieth century. In fact, this article aims to shed light on some intellectual categories which seem to be useful in order to understand current political phenomena, and to criticise philosophies and faulty modes of thought that still enjoy a predominant but unjustified political status.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 1335 - 1356
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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59 The principal supporter of this strategy was Walt Rostow, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, who thought that Hanoi would surrender in order to protect the industrial and transport systems it had heavily invested in, see Schultz, Richard, ‘Breaking the Will of the Enemy during the Vietnam War: The Operationalization of the Cost-Benefit Model of Counterinsurgency Warfare’, Journal of Peace Research, 15:2 (1978), p. 116Google Scholar . For a study of the effects of the air warfare see Clodfelter, Mark, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989)Google Scholar .

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88 Morgenthau, ‘Bernard Johnson's interview with Hans J. Morgenthau’, p. 383. A detailed examination of Morgenthau's CBS debate with McGeorge Bundy can be found in Rafshoon, ‘A Realist's Moral Opposition to War’, pp. 65–7.

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