Nearly 60 years have passed since the political scientist Hans Morgenthau took to the pages of Foreign Affairs to ask: When is a war worth fighting? It’s a question that U.S. policymakers and scholars are still asking today, as the United States’ campaign against Iran—by some measures, the least popular American war since polls began—enters its sixth month, and the Trump administration mulls potential military action elsewhere.
In his 1967 essay, Morgenthau argued that Washington had been under the “ideological spell” of its “opposition to communism” during its recent interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam. Yet in Vietnam in particular, where the U.S. military operation at the time was turning into “a major war,” the communist threat to American interests was “at best remote.”
Washington needed to apply stricter standards when deciding to get involved in conflicts abroad, Morgenthau wrote. The choice to intervene should be “determined not by sweeping ideological commitments nor by blind reliance upon American power but by a careful calculation of the interests involved and the power available.” If the United States followed that guidance, he promised, it would “intervene less and succeed more.”
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