Book - Do Morals Matter? Presidents & Foreign Policy FDR to Trump, by Joseph Nye

Hardback, 255 pages, published 2020. Excellent used condition. I erased a few light pencil marks from a previous owner but this copy is otherwise like new. Binding is tight and all pages are intact. "At dinner with a group of friends, I said I was writing a book on presidents, ethics & foreign policy. One quipped "it must be a short book." Another added more seriously, "I didn't think ethics played much of a role." That conventional wisdom marks political analyses as well. An Internet search shows surprisingly few books on how presidents' moral views affected their foreign policies and how that affects our judgments of them." "Americans constantly make moral judgments about presidents and foreign policy. Unfortunately, many of these assessments are poorly thought through. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump, scoring their foreign policy on 3 ethical dimensions: intentions, the means they used, and the consequences of their decisions. He also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches work and which do not. Regardless of a president's policy preference, Nye shows that each one was not fully constrained by the structure of the system and actually had choices. Since we so often apply moral reasoning to foreign policy, Nye suggests how to do it better. Most importantly, he shows that presidents need to factor in both the political context and the availability of resources when deciding how to implement an ethical policy."