Morality Is the Enemy of Peace

French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) was an accomplished political survivor who managed to serve the French revolutionary government, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the postwar Bourbon restoration. He was a subtle and accomplished statesman, remembered today primarily for his sage advice to his fellow diplomats: “Above all, not too much zeal.” Wise words, indeed: Overzealousness, rigidity, and excessive moralizing are often obstacles to any effort to find effective solutions to difficult international issues.

Unfortunately, political leaders routinely frame disputes with other countries in highly moralistic terms, thereby turning tangible but limited conflicts of interest into broader disputes over first principles. As Anderson University’s Abigail S. Post argued in an important article in the journal International Security last year, leaders engaged in international disputes use moral language to rally support at home and abroad and to enhance their bargaining position vis-à-vis their adversaries. When they do, disagreements over potentially divisible issues (such as disputed territory) turn into zero-sum conflicts between competing moral claims. Unfortunately, moral principles are hard to abandon or relax without inviting accusations of hypocrisy and charges of betrayal. Once governments use moral arguments to justify their positions, cutting a deal becomes much harder, even when it would be in everyone’s interest.

Post’s article illustrated these dynamics with a revealing case study of the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas dispute between Argentina and Great Britain. To back its claim to the islands, each side invoked familiar moral norms. Argentina relied on the norm of territorial sovereignty, and its case was straightforward: Britain had illegally seized the islands in 1833 and therefore should give them back, full stop. The British responded by invoking a different moral principle: the norm of self-determination. In their view, it didn’t matter how Britain had gained control of the islands; as long as a majority of the residents wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom, their preferences should prevail.

Once these two positions were firmly established, compromise became nearly impossible. Despite the islands’ limited economic and strategic value, reestablishing control became a potent political issue in Argentina. But British governments could not cede them to Argentina without appearing to abandon a group of British citizens who wanted to remain under British rule. Given these entrenched positions, a military confrontation was probably inevitable.

In short: Moral claims transform divisible and potentially solvable disputes into indivisible and much less tractable conflicts. Among other things, this finding suggests an important revision to the so-called bargaining model of war. This framework views most conflicts as being over potentially divisible issues and argues that, rationally, states could reach mutually acceptable solutions if they had perfect information about each other’s capabilities and resolve and could overcome the “commitment problem” (i.e., the inability to assure others that a deal will be kept). Wars occur because the necessary information is typically lacking and states have incentives to misrepresent it, and fighting is the only way to determine who should get what share of the issue(s) in dispute. Scholars using this framework acknowledge that wars can also arise over indivisible issues where compromise is impossible, but such issues are presumed to be relatively rare. Post’s research suggests that framing disputes in highly moralistic terms transforms divisible issues into indivisible ones, making solutions harder to reach and war more likely.qq

Examples of this problem dominate today’s headlines. The present conflict over Taiwan resembles the dispute over the Falklands in certain respects: China claims Taiwan as its sovereign territory by historic right and insists that the past events that left it outside its control should now be reversed. From this perspective, anything short of Taiwan’s full reversion to Chinese sovereignty is unacceptable. By contrast, supporters of Taiwanese autonomy argue that the island’s 24 million inhabitants want to govern themselves and oppose being ruled by the Chinese Communist Party. In this view, restoring Taiwan to Chinese control would violate the political rights of the people who live there. Compromise is difficult because both moral claims have some validity, and anything that falls short of each side’s stated position will immediately be viewed as a betrayal of a fundamental political principle.

Now consider how the war in Ukraine is framed by each side. The war arose from a set of concrete and tangible disagreements that were potentially amenable to negotiation and compromise. These issues included Ukraine’s possible entry into NATO; its degree of economic, political, and security integration with Russia and the EU; the status of Russian-speaking minorities within Ukraine; basing rights for the Russian Black Sea Fleet; the supposed role of allegedly neo-Nazi groups within Ukraine; and several others. Difficult issues to be sure, but in theory any or all of them could have been resolved in ways that might have satisfied each side’s core interests and spared Ukraine and Russia a costly and brutal war.

Today, however, the conflict is widely framed by each side as a clash between competing moral principles. For Ukraine and the West, what is at stake is the post-World War II norm against conquest, the credibility of the “rules-based order,” and the desire to defend a struggling democracy facing a ruthless dictatorship. For Ukrainians, it is a war to defend the nation and its sacred territory; for some of Kyiv’s supporters in the West, helping it win is necessary to uphold the moral principles upon which the Western order supposedly rests.

Russia’s justification for the war increasingly rests on moral assertions of its own, such as the accusation that NATO reneged on an earlier pledge not to expand beyond Germany, the claim that there is a deep cultural unity between Russians and Ukrainians that must be preserved, or the insistence that preserving Russian culture requires defending the rights of Russian-speakers in Ukraine and ensuring the permanent “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. One need not accept any of these claims to recognize that they go beyond a mere assertion of narrow strategic interests: Russian President Vladimir Putin and his associates now frame the conflict as essential to preserving Russian national identity (and national security) in the face of hostile foreign pressure. Rhetorically, at least, it is far more than just a quarrel over minority rights in the Donbas or even Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment.

Unfortunately, framing this conflict in moral terms makes it harder to reach a peace settlement, because anything short of total victory inevitably invites a powerful backlash from critics fearing that these critical values are being sacrificed. If the United States or NATO were to push Ukraine to cut a deal short of total victory, they would face a chorus of denunciations from those who believe that only a humiliating Russian defeat and Ukraine’s entry into NATO will satisfy the demands of justice. If Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tried to negotiate a cease-fire today, he might well be ousted by hard-liners seeking to fight on. Putin faces fewer internal constraints, but even he might be leery of a compromise at odds with the moral claims he has used to justify the war and retain public support.

And then there’s Gaza, the latest unhappy episode in the long conflict between Jews and Arabs that began when Zionist settlers began arriving in Palestine in the late 19th century. As with Ukraine, there are numerous tangible issues involved in this dispute, and there have been repeated efforts (beginning well before Israel’s founding) to find some sort of solution. Unfortunately, the two sides’ positions ultimately rest on competing moral claims to the territory lying between the river and the sea, claims that combine one-sided historical narratives, religious beliefs, and firm conviction that the other side has committed numerous crimes in the past and continues to do so today. These competing moral claims inspire extreme responses by Hamas and by the Israelis, and they have made it far more difficult to devise a solution that would satisfy the legitimate national aspirations of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

Americans are as susceptible to this problem as anyone. Realists like Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan lamented the tendency of American leaders to frame every rivalry in moral terms, which they correctly saw as a serious impediment to a more effective foreign policy. Moral language can be useful for rallying citizens and winning support, but it makes the United States look hypocritical whenever it acts otherwise, which turns out to be quite often. It also makes it harder for U.S. officials to bargain effectively with potential adversaries, either because we refuse to have diplomatic relations with them, or because even a mutually beneficial deal with a supposedly “evil” regime is seen as a cowardly failure to uphold key moral principles.

But let’s not kid ourselves: In the end, conflicts often conclude in messy and morally imperfect bargains. Even after one-sided victories, the winners often settle for somewhat less than their moral justifications would require. The United States demanded and got “unconditional surrender” in World War II, for example, only to tolerate (and in some cases, actively support) the reentry of former Nazis into political life. It held war crimes trials in Japan and executed some former Japanese leaders but left Emperor Hirohito on his throne. U.S. leaders weren’t happy watching the Iron Curtain descend in Eastern Europe after the war, but they understood that accepting Soviet domination there was the price of postwar peace.

The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine will end with agreements that won’t satisfy anyone completely. None of the parties will get everything they want, and the strident moral declarations that leaders and pundits have issued while these wars were underway will ring hollow. The longer the participants cling to them, the harder it will be to bring the carnage to a close. If Talleyrand were alive today, I suspect he’d say, “I told you so.”