“Can a great power afford to have moral principles?” Many experts in diplomacy would perhaps answer this question negatively. Others might add that to live by too precise moral standards is a heavy handicap for a statesman.

A very thought-provoking analysis of this question is to be found in the Pacificus articles written by Alexander Hamilton.

Self-preservation was the first duty of a nation arid though, in the performance of stipulations relating to war, good faith required that its ordinary hazards should be fairly met because they were directly contemplated by such stipulations yet it did not require that extraordinary and extreme hazards should be run. He further observed:

Indeed, the rule of morality in this respect is not precisely the same between nations as between individuals. The duty of making its own welfare the guide of its actions is much stronger upon the former than upon the latter; in proportion to the greater magnitude and importance of national compared with individual happiness, and to the greater permanency of the effects of national than of individual conduct. Existing millions, and for the most part future generations, are concerned in the present measures of a government; while the consequences of the private actions of an individual ordinarily terminate with himself, or are circumscribed within a narrow compass.

George Washington emphasized this aspect when he declared that it is a maxim, founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted further than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it. Since then an attempt was made to make it appear that moral principles coincided with the national interest. Woodrow Wilson abandoned the theory of the identity of national interest and moral principles. He ventured the view that in a given situation, national interest can be sacrificed for moral principles. In an address delivered in October 1913, Wilson declared:

It is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of material interest. It not only is unfair to those with whom you are dealing, but it is degrading as regards your own actions. We dare not turn from the principles that morality and expediency is the thing that must guide us and that we will never condone iniquity because it is most convenient to do so.

The end of World War I, and the treaty negotiations which’ followed it disillusioned Wilson a great deal. The ‘twenties witnessed a revival of the concept of national interest. The approach now advocated by the school of political realists is that the contest between utopianism and realism is not tantamount to a contest between principles and expediency or between morality and immorality. The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead.