foolish to try to shirk this disconcerting
admission. The Machiavellian doctrine of "reason of state" is, in the
last resort, the accepted standard of national conduct. This does not
signify that a nation and its government admit no obligation to fulfil
their promises, or even voluntarily to perform good offices for other
nations, but that there is always implied the reservation that the
necessity, or, shall we say, the vital interests, of the nation
override, cancel, and nullify all such obligations. And when
"necessity" is stretched to cover any vital interest or urgent need, it
is easy to recognize on what a slippery slope such international
morality reposes.

International morality is impaired, however, not only by this feeble
sense of mutual obligation, but by the still more injurious assumption
of conflicting interests between nations. Nations are represented not
merely as self-centered, independent moral systems, but as, in some
degree, mutually repellent systems. This notion is partly the product
of the false patriotic teaching of our schools and press, which seek to
feed our sense of national unity more upon exclusive than inclusive
sentiments. Nations are represented as rivals and competitors in some
struggle for power, or greatness, or prestige, instead of as
cooeperators in the general advance of civilization. This presumption
of opposing interests is, of course, more strongly marked in the
presentation of commercial relations than in any other. Putting the
issue roughly, but with substantial truth, the generally accepted image
of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities,
as, for instance, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, Japan,
etc., are engaged in striving, each to win for itself, and at the
expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited
objective--the world market.

Now there are three fatal flaws in this image. First comes the false
presentation of the United States, Britain, Germany, and other
political beings in the capacity of trading firms. So far as world or
international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that
competition takes place, not between America, Britain, Germany, but
between a number of separate American, British, German firms. The
immediate interests of these firms are not directed along political
lines. Generally speaking, the closer rivalry is between firms
belonging to the same nation and conducting t