Joseph Nye on "Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump"
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2020
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. Why do certain countries make certain decisions? What are the interests of the players in question? What are the consequences and, of course, the legality of foreign policy choices. In a new book, Joseph Nye, professor emeritus and former dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, asks another question about foreign policy. Do morals matter? Jack Goldsmith sat down with Nye to discuss his new book "Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump." They discussed the ethical and theoretical factors by which Nye judged each president before going through many of the cases he focuses on in the book.
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
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| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | The best way I think I've heard somebody putting this is George Schultz. |
| 0:37.0 | When he said, look, foreign policy is like growing a garden. |
| 0:43.0 | It's not like a commercial transaction. |
| 0:45.0 | And you have to be a long-term patient garden. |
| 0:48.0 | And for Donald Trump, it's just the opposite. |
| 0:51.0 | Each transaction, every tub on its own bottom, the corn phrase. |
| 0:55.0 | And you look at it in a very, very narrow terms. |
| 0:58.0 | And if you go back to Bob Axelrod's pioneering work on the evolution of cooperation, |
| 1:03.0 | and he showed us, yes, prisoners of dilemma is a zero-sum game. |
| 1:08.0 | If you play it once, each transaction on its own bottom. |
| 1:11.0 | But if you play iterative prisoners of dilemma, |
| 1:14.0 | you develop what's called a long shadow of the future. |
| 1:17.0 | And institutions can contribute to that long shadow of the future. |
| 1:21.0 | So educating for institutions for thinking broader than transactional terms is a crucial role. |
| 1:29.0 | I'm Michaela Fogel, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, March 7, 2020. |
| 1:36.0 | We ask a lot of questions about foreign policy on this podcast. |
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