Of Virtue & Foreign Policy

Extract

Once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for transmitting its inner doubts into hesitation.

—Henry Kissinger

The search for virtue in the Western world had its origins in ancient Greece and Rome, where-lhe terms arete and virtu embodied valor, courage, chivalry, manliness, fortitude, loyalty, rectitude and excellence. Perhaps our word magnanimity comes closer than any other to these connotations. Virtue was, for the most part, secular, not religious; its implications were public rather than private. It applied to those who, in the words of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, “knew that the secret of happiness was freedom, and the secret of freedom a brave heart, and who did not stand aside from the onset of the enemy.”