Do Morals Matter? Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump: Joseph S. NYE, Jr. New York, Oxford University Press, 2020,272 Pages, ISBN: 9780190935962.

• Author: Yalcin, Mustafa Onur
• Position: BOOK REVIEW

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been considered to be one of the major forces in world politics. Any slight change in its foreign affairs affects international issues. Although the country's institutional structure is considered to be the main pillar of its foreign policy, presidents also stand in the middle of this structure as important figures. Donald Trump is indeed an interesting and unusual president in the history of United States. In April 2018, former FBI Director James Comey declared that Trump was morally unfit to be President. (1) This claim leads to some questions. What is being morally accurate? What makes a president's decisions moral or immoral? Is it possible to judge or measure a president along with moral or ethical attitudes? These are the exact questions that Joseph S. Nye, Jr. tries to find out an answer in his new book that was published in January 2020.

In his book, Nye lays out a unique framework for evaluating moral and ethical sides of presidents' foreign policy decisions and discusses the implications of transnational threats that future presidents will have to consider producing a moral foreign policy. Regarding the time he served in the Departments of State and Defense, it is understandable why Nye has been interested in the moral dimensions of foreign policy. When it comes to morality or ethical questions, in analyses of foreign policies, these concepts seem like they are regarded as having too little an impact. Traditional foreign policy analyses tend to replace these concepts with national interests. However, Nye believes that there are instances where a president's moral beliefs have changed the way history turned out. To judge the morality of presidents' foreign policy decisions, according to Nye, first, one needs to lay out what morality actually means (p. 29-30). Nye defines morality as doing things because you feel you ought to. And, in US, he says that 'ought' is shaped in part by American exceptionalism and Wilsonian liberalism (p. 16-17, 20-21).

The book consists of nine chapters in total. The first two chapters introduce American Moralism and explain what a moral foreign policy actually is. In the second chapter, Nye explains his methodology and how to evaluate the moral sides of the foreign policies of presidents. According to him, presidential decisions do not just center on national interests but also have moral reasoning. In this sense, Nye uses a three-dimensional moral...