Kissinger, Bismarck, Metternich, Richelieu.
To Dr. Hans Küng, Professor of Theology at the University of Tubingen in Germany and Harvard's 1999 Paul Tillich lecturer, these august names speak failure. Küng is a crusader for the "Global Ethic"; to him,  men who practice diplomacy in the shadows stand in the way of world peace. They lie, they war, and worst of all, they think of national interests before human rights.
        Whom, then, does Küng present as a model of international leadership? None other than the Peanut Farmer himself. On both February 15 and 16, Küng related a conversation he had with the former President. "Jimmy Carter," he said, "never lied in office." Perhaps. But if honesty leads to such mediocre diplomacy, there is no better argument for lying.
        Hans Küng is one of the world's most famous living theologians. His greatest work, On Being a Christian, is an attempt to revive Christianity in the modern world and render it philosophically justifiable. Swiss by birth, Küng was one of the leading theologians at the Second Vatican Council. There he focused on the dogmatic constitutions Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes, both on the state of the Church in the world. Since the death of Pope John XXIII in 1962, however, Küng has grown increasingly shrill in his denunciations of "Roman reaction." On questions ranging from women's ordination to papal infallibility to the Virgin Birth, Professor Küng has won himself a niche as a leading liberal voice within the Catholic Church. His unrelenting and sardonic attacks during the tenure of Pope John Paul II have brought the ire of the Church, leading to the revocation of his teaching license and virtually daring excommunication -- a fate worse than death for Catholics. His main focus now is promoting his "Global Ethic," an agreement among world religious leaders on certain fundamental ethical principles, the sanctity of life among them.
        In his lecture on February 15, Dr. Küng laid out what he believes to be the essential goal of modern religion -- a concordance on ethics. This "Declaration for a Global Ethic," reads much like the United Nations charter. "We must treat others as we wish others to treat us. We make a commitment to respect life and dignity, individuality and diversity, so that every person is treated humanely, without exception. We must have patience and acceptance.... Opening our hearts to one another, we must sink our narrow differences for the cause of world community.... We shall not oppress, injure, torture, or kill other human beings, forsaking violence as a means of settling differences."
        All of these notions are, of course, good and just. Yet it's not what Küng writes that is problematic. The problem is with his target audience. As holy maxims for individuals to live by, Küng's writings make sense. But for the state, they are a recipe for chaos. The "Declaration for a Global Ethic" is far more radical than one would expect. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, "You must obey all the governing authorities. Since all government comes from God, the civil authorities were appointed by God, and so anyone who resists authority is rebelling against God's decision, and such an act is bound to be punished.... If you break the law, however, you may well have fear: the bearing of the sword has its significance. The authorities are there to serve God: they carry out God's revenge by punishing wrongdoers." The distinction between moral rules for governments and for individuals is muddled. While we may not necessarily agree with Paul, the situation does not call for the extension of individual ethics to nations. After all, Paul also exhorted human beings to "put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another."
        If anything, Küng's visit was a disappointment. His theological works have inspired thousands of the befuddled. Yet his purpose for coming, the propagation of the "Global Ethic," seems more the work of a United Nations bureaucrat than that of a successor to Augustine. The tenets contained within the "Ethic" are, for the individual, mostly valid. The simple extension of this code to group action is, however, naive and misguided. Individuals may act selflessly, groups never do. In fact, it is morally questionable whether leaders should guide groups into unfavorable situations. For a man to renounce his own interests is saintly; for a leader to abandon his constituents' expedients is nothing less than callous.
The only product of the well-intentioned American intervention in Somalia was eighteen dead soldiers; of the European peacekeeping in Bosnia, hostages and letters home to Dutch mothers; of the romantic knights at Nicopolis, slaughter; of the idealistic Fourth Crusade, the brutal and tragic sack of Constantinople. Conversely, diplomacy conducted with clear regard to national interests tends to produce stable and often morally palatable systems, however imperfect. Israel's cool calculations have finally re-produced a Jewish nation. The political and economic benefit to preserving the Union led to the abolition of slavery in America. The realpolitik alliance with the immoral "breaker of nations," Stalin, allowed the Allies to defeat the even more dangerous Hitler.
        We live in a distasteful world. Chalk it up to what you will -- original sin, Freud's aggressive instinct, evolutionary pressures for survival. Man is both light and dark, charity and greed, good and evil. We shall never "conquer" the evil within us; to think we can is to invite disaster.
Carter's legacy among the nations is revolutionary Iran and the death of détente. Woodrow Wilson, whose Fourteen Points Küng wishes to resuscitate, left a Europe divided against itself. Wilson's idealism of self-determination was blinded to the bitter hatreds of Eastern Europe that still rankle between the Czechs and Slovaks, Hungarians and Romanians, Bosnians and Serbs, and so on to the present day. His foreign policy was a disaster. Küng recommended that the way to solve these ethnic hatreds was as the Germans and French had done, by simply following their leaders (here Adenauer and de Gaulle) in agreeing to lay them to rest. Of course, the only reason the Germans and French aren't killing each other as they've done ever since 1871 is that the American military has forced the Germans into submission and the French into irrelevancy. They have no choice but to like each other. Problems so deep are not solved by "dialogue." There is no fundamental misunderstanding between the Turks and the Greeks -- they understand each other very well. But that doesn't stop them from hating each other vehemently.
        With this in mind, men such as Kissinger crafted realistic international systems. It is odd that Küng should criticize Metternich on behalf of Wilson. Wilson's diplomacy led in short order to the bloodiest war the world has ever seen. The system crafted by Metternich at the Congress of Vienna secured peace in Europe for 100 years, failing only when the Germans radically undermined it at the turn of the century.

Küng's ambitions are enormous. His "Global Ethic" may indeed win a nice Nobel Peace Prize for the mantlepiece in his comfortable house in a safe country. Perhaps Küng might consider the reasons why his home is so safe. If he did, he'd understand that his safety is not due to the self-congratulatory protests of university students or the innumerable exhortations to world peace. Rather, it's thanks to the policies of Mutually Assured Destruction -- an insane concept if there ever was one. Perfectly suited to this insane world.