In the field of foreign policy, one of the most intriguing differences between the practitioner and the theoretician lies in the realm of doctrinal controversy. The prime controversy that has agitated academicians in recent years is one that is now very familiar. It is the alleged conflict between Realism and Idealism.

At its heart this argument has to do with the connection between personal ethics and international politics. In its most explicit form this argument involves appraisals of the institutions of collective intergovernmental action our age has erected in profusion, particularly the global variety of political international organization that has taken shape in the League and the UN. It is here above all that our intellectuals have sometimes tended to become a trifle unscholarly as they hurled at each other the epithets of “Cynic” or “Utopian Dreamer”. Our diplomatic tools in the form of inter-governmental institutions have in this sense been made to carry a heavy supercargo of freight bearing on ends and means, the nature of man, and the general residuum of the eighteenth and nineteenth century debates about the perfectibility of man and the inevitability of social progress.

In sophisticated theological circles of all religious communions unqualified rejection of war is not even argued against anymore. It is just insulted. The word “pacifists” is apparently never used without the adjective “sentimental,” if not worse.

The reason for this attitude is a little difficult to understand. It would seem that there must be more deserving objects of scorn than people who are so revolted by the shedding of human blood that, sometimes perhaps without lengthy casuistic cogitations, they raise their hands heavenward and swear to abstain from all forms of direct or indirect military action.