Three Hard Choices

Abstract

Since this chapter is going to evaluate a number of historical political decisions, it is worth making a few preliminary remarks about what may and what may not be expected from such an evaluation. This historian, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper,¹ can only present, not solve moral dilemmas. It would certainly be presumptuous to flaunt an “obvious” moral answer to these dilemmas, with the benefit of hindsight, as though the people involved at the time had no perception of the moral as well as the prudential issues, and the complexity of the interaction between them. But it would be equally wrong to claim that we should make no moral judgement at all about the political decisions of the past. We have argued in this book that moral concerns are germane to current decisions in international relations. The relevant differences between the present and the past in this context are that we can judge with more accuracy what the consequences of past decisions were, and at the same time we are less sure of what the climate was in which these decisions were made. We are, therefore, in one way in a better position to make a judgement, and in another way in a worse one.