113 BOOK REVIEWS Nye, J. S. Do morals matter?: Presidents and foreign policy from FDR to Trump. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $24.95 Do morals matter in American foreign policy? Joseph S. Nye, Jr. attempts to answer this question in Do Morals Matter?: Presidents and Foreign Policy from FDR to Trump. Nye, who served as an advisor in the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, examines the foreign policy leadership of every president from World War II to 2020. Each president’s leadership is assessed through their ethical scorecard, which includes categories for the president’s intentions. Such intentions are divided into three broad categories. Moral vision (attractive values) is grouped with prudence (balance of values and risks). Means refers to force (proportion, discrimination, and necessity) and liberal, which includes respect for rights and institutions. Finally, consequences has three aspects: fiduciary, success for long-term U.S. interests; cosmopolitan, minimal damage to others; and educational, truthful with a broad moral discourse (p. 37). For each of these, Nye grades each president as poor, mixed, or good. In his introduction, Nye explains the founding of the modern international order following 1945. To do this, he explains American exceptionalism, Wilsonian liberalism, and the liberal international order after World War II. As a rationale for the importance of his work, Nye is critical of President Trump’s rejections of Wilson’s liberal legacy of intervention: “Our history provides quite different answers to what constitutes a moral foreign policy, but Trump rejected both the democratic interventionalist and the international intuitionalist dimensions of Wilson’s liberal legacy” (p. 11). In the second chapter, Nye explains the development of his ethical scorecard. This chapter demonstrates his methodology to create the scorecard used in later chapters to grade the presidents. The chapter assesses how moral and ethical evaluation occurs in most significant studies of international relations, realism, cosmopolitanism, and liberalism. Chapters three, four, five, six, seven, and eight are case studies of the presidents’ foreign policies graded through the scorecard. Chapter 3 includes Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, whom Nye describes as the founders of the modern liberal order. Chapter 4 focuses on the presidents during the Vietnam era, including Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. Chapter 5 examines Presidents Ford and Carter in post-Vietnam America. Chapter 6 examines Reagan and George H.W. Bush as America adapted to the end of the Cold War. Chapter 7 examines Clinton and George W. Bush and addresses America in a unipolar world after the break-up of the USSR. Chapter 8 concludes by examining Obama and Trump in the modern era.
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