Joseph S. Nye

Joseph S. Nye's latest book is Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump.

From the transcript of his interview with Fareed Zakaria:

ZAKARIA: So give us an example. We think of American Presidents following the national interest, doing what they needed to do. When did morality, you know, change a big decision?

NYE: Well, a great example is Harry Truman. Remember, Truman dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, he had said he didn't lose any sleep over it. People don't realize that he also had a third bomb and refused to drop it because he didn't want to kill more women and children.

Five years later, when we were losing the war in Korea, Douglas Macarthur said, I want the right to drop 25 to 40 bombs on Chinese cities. And Truman said no. And he said no because of moral concerns.

Now, imagine that he had decided yes, and nuclear weapons became normal weapons. The world would look very different today. That's case where morals mattered.

ZAKARIA: In many cases, there were Presidents who were sort of trying to navigate between doing what they thought was the strategically important thing but still worried about morality, right?

NYE: That's right. I mean, it's rare that you could have a decision which is purely moral or sometimes Presidents will try to think of something which is in between, which is where...[read on]

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Also see: Joseph Nye's top 5 books on global power.

Writers Read: Joseph S. Nye (August 2007).

The Page 99 Test: Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era.

--Marshal Zeringue