Max Hastings is a military historian who also sometimes writes for The Times. I've read quite a lot of his stuff, and I've also been in the audience on one occasion when he was speaking about military affairs.
What is clear to me is that Max Hastings is a moralist in the way that he writes and in his opinions. And I'm interested in how to understand that fact, which I personally rather deprecate from anybody writing about public affairs. Moralism doesn't really work for me.
But I'm interested in understanding better what exactly moralism consists of, as a psychological trait. And I think I've come to this view. First of all, it's obviously an emotional trait, but that by itself does not suffice, because anything at all which motivates people is in the end an emotional trait.
The people I respect more in international affairs, or generally in politics, are people who essentially grasp the concepts of Realpolitik and national interests and relational forces and optimal strategies for achieving particular goals.
And, of course, the attempt to understand things in those terms - what I would call a rational analysis - is nevertheless an emotional response. It's the response of curiosity and the response, emotionally, of trying not to be confused. And so all of those are motivators, of course.
So why do I believe that it's more accurate - that you get a better analysis - if you are a rationalist and analytical and try to understand things in terms of people and groups and elites and interests and relations of forces and all those other factors that are part of the Realpolitik model of analysis?
Why do I believe you get a better response than that which is evident in Max Hastings' worldview?
And again, I think the answer is this, that it's mostly a question of what the world really is like. As a matter of fact, the world is composed of actors - state actors and other actors - with economic and political power, and they do act in their own best interests. And in general, they are not particularly constrained by any outside framework of abstraction, such as international law or even some concepts of conventional morality, when that sufficiently conflicts with the basic economic, cultural and political interests they have as elite individuals with a certain history and a certain series of drives, which, after all, are themselves emotional in the end - but a wide spectrum of emotions and often fairly primal ones.
So my critique of Max Hastings is not that I think it's a terrible thing to be ethical, which I'm sure that Max Hastings thinks he is. My argument with him is it's a terrible thing to think - as he does - that the affairs of the world are essentially normalised to ethical outcomes and that when people do not operate in that model, the correct response is not to understand clearly why they're not, but to engage with moral outrage that they are violating the rules which Max Hastings viscerally and emotionally holds to be so dear.
And, of course, it isn't just Max Hastings. You can look at the entire, almost the entire content of Foreign Affairs, a journal that he likes very much, and say it's full of benighted liberals who still cling to a moral-ethical abstraction of the world rather than the realistic Realpolitik view.
And that as a consequence their analysis, for me, is almost worthless.
GPT5.4 comments:
One of the more persistent confusions in public discussion is the failure to distinguish morality from moralism. Morality is unavoidable: we all make judgements, and no serious person is wholly without standards. Moralism is something else. It is the habit of substituting moral response for explanatory understanding, especially in fields where power, interest and constraint are doing most of the actual work.
This is why moralism is so often irritating in foreign-affairs commentary. A good deal of liberal Atlantic writing — much of it clustered around the American Foreign Affairs magazine, the European political class, and the general “rules-based international order” milieu — still speaks as though world politics were fundamentally a matter of shared norms periodically betrayed by bad actors. The tone is often one of injured rectitude: this state should not have done that; that leader has violated the rules; this action is an affront to the international community. One is meant to nod gravely, as though the essential work of understanding had now been completed.
But of course it has not. Presidents Trump, Xi and Putin — different as they are in methods, temperament and context — all operate in a world understood primarily in terms of leverage, advantage, coercive capacity, prestige, economic resilience, military force and regime interest. They do not begin from the assumption that an abstract moral order governs relationships and events; they begin from the assumption that power does. In this they are not aberrations. They are, in varying ways, closer to the norms of international life than the people still writing as though a seminar on liberal norms were somehow the hidden constitution of the planet.
The point is not that such politicians are ethically admirable (although that judgement is more contextual than normally admitted). It is that they are intelligible.
And intelligibility matters more than indignation.
A state does not invade, threaten, tariff, annex, rearm, bluff or realign because it has failed a school prize for good conduct. It does these things because decision-makers perceive interests, opportunities, risks and balances of force in certain ways. Until one understands that, moral denunciation is mostly vapour — emotionally satisfying perhaps, but analytically thin.
This is where moralism shows itself as a cast of mind. The moralist feels that once he has identified the villain and expressed the proper outrage, he has grasped the essence of the matter. But he has usually only sorted the actors into saints and sinners according to his own ethical norms and priorities. He has not explained why events unfolded as they did, why certain options were chosen over others, or why appeals to law and principle so often fail when they collide with hard interests.
He mistakes evaluation for explanation.
The liberal defenders of the old order still talk as though the world has scandalously wandered away from its proper ethical basis. A more realistic view is harsher but more accurate: the so-called order was always a contingent arrangement resting on American power, Western institutional weight, and a temporary alignment of interests dressed in universalist language. Now that the distribution of power is changing, a hollowed-out moral vocabulary remains, but the machinery underneath it is grinding, slipping and being replaced.
That is why moralism is such a poor guide to public affairs. Not because ethics do not matter, but because ethics do not explain enough. In politics, and especially in international politics, understanding begins when one asks not who has sinned, but who wants what, who can do what, what constrains them, and how far they are prepared to go.
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