The most important issue is coming up now, as our week is winding down, the one Michael Contarino raises in his last posting, namely regarding the role of morality in foreign policy. I could not agree more that the next president must work to restore the "moral credibility" of the United States.

A good place to start is for the US to take the Hippocratic Oath: First Do No Harm.
The US should engage in war only if all other means of resolving a conflict have been exhausted, and if its vital interests are truly threatened. War--I know from personal experience--is neither heroic nor uplifting, but a killer. It undermines people's character, divides nations, and devastates others.

Second, the US should recognize that the less power it has--economic, military, cultural--the more important the morality of setting priorities becomes. It is a sort of lifeboat ethics. If we cannot save everyone and secure everything, we must carefully assess where we shall use up whatever resources--political capital included--we still have.

As I see it, morally speaking, our first duty (beyond attending to our vital interests) is not to force democratization on people but to stop genocides--all other good deeds pale in comparison. Sick people may be nurtured to good health; homeless people may be helped to build huts; hungry people, to be fed. However, dead people cannot be brought back to those who love them, and those who are killed are denied all other rights.

For more discussion see Part I of Security First (Yale 2007). Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international relations at The George Washington University. To contact him, write comnet@gwu.edu.
www.securityfirstbook.com