The Age of the Unthinkable Read Online Free PDF Page B

masterwork,
Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace,
in the days when World War II was ending, he wanted to put on paper an empirical guide to how the world worked, a handbook
     that could do for statesmen what the periodic table did for chemists. It became the most influential book in international
     affairs for fifty years.
    To begin with, Morgenthau defined himself as a “realist,” a thinker of a school that set store in what he considered to be
     purely practical, “realistic” theories of policy instead of an ideology, like Nazism or Communism. You should pick ideas and
     make choices because they worked, because they were practical, and not because you dreamed, as Hitler or Lenin had, that they
     fit into some larger historical process. The international system, Morgenthau believed, was defined by nation-states ceaselessly
     wrestling in a contest for security. Idealism, the notion that history should be moved by moral principles such as justice
     or humanity, struck Morgenthau as a poor basis for policy. Who, after all, was to say what was “moral” and what was not? “The
     realist,” he wrote, “parts company with other schools of thought before the all-important question of how the contemporary
     world is to be transformed. The realist is persuaded that this transformation can be achieved only through the workmanlike
     manipulation of the perennial forces that have shaped the past as they will the future.” Morgenthau’s statesman faced the
     present with a set of reliable, time-worn tools that he could use to engineer and manipulate what he had in front of him.
     And nearly every decision of national life could and should be run through this crucial filter: “How does this affect the
     power of our nation?”
5. The Hat on the Floor
    For Morgenthau, national power was something you could apprehend at a fast glance, as you might check the weather outside
     or the level of your swimming pool. It was
the
ingredient that mattered most, the measure of security whose absence or presence was most obvious. At one point in
Politics Among Nations,
Morgenthau refers to a story from European history, the so-called Dresden interview, a famous meeting between Napoleon and
     Metternich in late June of 1813. At the time of the meeting, Napoleon has been master of Europe for more than a decade. He
     has known and even liked Metternich for years. But now, following a humiliating defeat in Russia, the French emperor, then
     just forty-three, finds himself face-to-face with the forty-year-old Austrian minister of state. The interview lasts for nine
     hours. Napoleon tries to dissuade Metternich from placing Austria in a coalition intent on demolishing France’s place in European
     power politics. The emperor leans hard on Metternich, sputtering with threats, reaching for all kinds of psychological and
     emotional tricks, like a cop trying to extract a confession. “Our conference,” Metternich wrote later, “consisted of the strangest
     farrago of heterogeneous subjects, characterized now by extreme friendliness, now by the most violent of fury.” At one point
     Metternich insults the exhausted, drained French army. The soldiers are, he says offhandedly, “no more than children.” The
     emperor explodes. “You are not a soldier,” he screams. Napoleon flings his hat into a corner — part theater, part pure rage.
     He waits, expecting Metternich to pick up the hat. He is, after all, an emperor. The prince does not move. The hat sits on
     the tiles of the Marcolini Palace like some sad symbol of lost power. Napoleon finally bends over to pick it up himself. “Sire,”
     Metternich says, “you are a lost man.” The next day Metternich places Austria in an alliance against France. Less then a year
     later, Napoleon is exiled to Elba.
    Morgenthau’s brilliance was to develop an entire physics of global affairs based on the idea that power worked in such direct
     and almost predictable ways. His