Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace is a political sciences book by Hans Morgenthau

Hans Morgenthau

Hans Joachim Morgenthau was one of the leading twentieth-century figures in the study of international politics...

 published in 1948.

The book introduces the concept of political realism, presenting a realist view of power politics

Power politics

Power politics, or Machtpolitik , is a state of international relations in which sovereigns protect their own interests by threatening one another with military, economic, or political aggression...

. This concept played a major role in the foreign policy

Foreign policy

A country's foreign policy, also called the foreign relations policy, consists of self-interest strategies chosen by the state to safeguard its national interests and to achieve its goals within international relations milieu. The approaches are strategically employed to interact with other countries...

 of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, which made it exercise globe-spanning power in the Cold War

Cold War

The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

period. The concept also called for a reconciliation of power politics with the idealistic ethics of earlier American discussions about foreign policy.

Quotations

• "The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman’s thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil."
• "Realism maintains that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states (...). The individual may say for himself: "Let justice be done, even if the world must perish", but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care. (...) While the individual has a moral right to sacrifice himself in defense of such a moral principle, the state has no right to let its moral disapprobation of the infringement of (that moral principle) get in the way of successful political action, itself inspired by the moral principle of national survival."