New Dimensions in International Law

In the chilling atmosphere of the cold war, attention is more readily turned to the politics of power and to concepts of the national interest than to international law and the services it may perform. Indeed, two distinguished writers have recently warned us against what George Kennan calls “the legalisticmoralistic approach to international problems,” or “the belief that it should be possible to suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments in the international field by the acceptance of some system of legal rules and restraints,” “some formal criteria of a juridical nature by which the permissible behavior of states could be defined,” instead of by dealing with “awkward conflicts of national interest … on their merits with a view to finding the solutions least unsettling to the stability of international life.” Instead of “making ourselves slaves of the concepts of international law and morality,” Kennan writes, we should “confine these concepts to the unobtrusive, almost feminine, function of the gentle civilizer of national self-interest in which they find their true value.”