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print. Morgenthau will make an expansive and promising and reasonable statement — “The greater
     the stability of a society, the smaller are the chances for collective emotions to seek an outlet in aggressive nationalism”
     — only to balance it out with a footnote warning that there are many situations in which this might not be true. Richer, more
     stable countries should be free from the internal
dangers that pushed places like Germany and Japan to insanity and war. But, he says in a note, that assumes such nations are
     free from “class struggle, revolution, urban violence and civil war” — the very forces that do make history.
    Morgenthau knew better, and his worries leak out in his speeches and in the most personal passages in his writing. He had,
     after all, lived with the Nazis, had lived the costs of those footnoted forces. You could no more edit such dangers out of
     your models than you could out of your life. “Political reality,” he confesses, not without some sense of frustration, “is
     replete with contingencies and systemic irrationalities.” And he knew the limits of using science to model humans, a tension
     he had explored with masterful fluency in
an earlier book,
Scientific Man Versus Power Politics.
The truth was, he wrote, the world wasn’t a math problem. It wasn’t simply replete with contingency and irrationality; in
     some ways it seemed to be nothing but contingency and irrationality. Yet in their eagerness to bring some sense of order to
     that reality, many of Morgenthau’s more enthusiastic acolytes pushed these dynamic parts of the system off to the side.
6. The Price of Simplicity
    “Systematic irrationalities” have always tripped up simplicities like Democratic Peace Theory, have always challenged policy
     makers, whether they are American presidents or Roman generals. This is one of the reasons that, when they finally do get
     their hands on real power, many foreign-affairs academics or economic masters are quick to leave their beautiful scholarly
     ideas behind. Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist who became secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton and then head
     of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, once said to me that the most important thing he had learned from Robert
     Rubin, his predecessor at the Treasury and a rigorously practical former Goldman Sachs trader, was to “adopt a probabilistic
     view of the world and discard the black-and-white models that make for success in academia.” During talks with the Chinese
     premier Zhou Enlai that reestablished U.S.China relations, for instance, there was a memorable exchange in which another former
     Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger (then national security advisor), said to the Chinese leader that many of the ideas the
     two of them were discussing were almost exactly the opposite of what the theories he once taught would have suggested. Lovely
     as they were in the classroom, those Cambridge models were largely useless in reality.
    The complex physics of our world now makes this even more apparent. The more beautiful a theory is in the lab or those Heidelberg
     halls or some guy’s basement, the less it seems to hew to a reality in which, to give just one example, states and their leaders
     aren’t always rational. (Or they may be rational in a way we think is crazy — a conundrum captured in a popular quip about
     Iran at the turn of the millennium, that the country needed to decide “if it was a nation or a jihad.”) The idea that two
     nations could ever see their interests in the same way assumes a sort of objectivity that’s impossible. And the allegedly
     clear, stable, knowable interests of states are often none of those things. They change and move as rapidly as our personal
     idea of our “interest” changes as we age, confront crises, strike it rich. National interest can be jarred and reshaped in
     an instant. Pearl Harbor transformed many Americans’ view of the