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diplomatic actions, humanitarian relief aid, or global economic and environ-mental policies, it seems obvious that nations are motivated by national interest. Take the United States, for example. In some situations little if any action is taken to stop forms of obvious genocide, while in other cases mili-
tary force is used to wage the so-called war on terror. In both cases the driv-ing impulse is what advances national interest and state security. This is true of all of the nations on this earth.Depending on the way in which the “moral substance” of the Republic or
the scope of rights and freedoms are understood, differences of foreign policy occur. If the rights of freedom and self-determination are understood to hold for human beings as human beings, rather than just for members of a specific state, then the nation may have moral cause to spread democracy around the
world, as President George W. Bush believes. On the same grounds, as former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan said in his last speech at the Truman Presidential Museum, “respect for national sovereignty can no longer be used as a shield by governments intent on massacring their own
people, or as an excuse for the rest of us to do nothing when such heinous crimes are committed.”the affairs of nations. Of course, the political shape and force of US action to spread democracy will always be formulated as an attempt to further national (^23) The idea of human rights can warrant intervention in
security. Conversely, conceptions of national sovereignty rooted in the heritages of nations have constrained intervention even for humanitarian purposes.global stage. People worry that the spread of liberal democracy requires the The tensions found in the US domestic situation are now writ large onto the
alteration of the moral substance of cultures, as, for instance, in the debate about the possibility of Islamic democracy. Still others wonder about the disregard for the rule of law. While the United Sates insists that nations abide by the terms of international law, especially the agreements of the United Nations, it frequently
rejects those same laws and agreements as binding on policy. Finally, the discon-nection of political participation from personal and cultural comprehensive beliefs is reflected in the failure of the United States to consider the cultural forms and beliefs of other nations when executing foreign policy objectives.
Hot button issues, like the war in Iraq, environmental policy, or international legal tribunals, reveal but also conceal deeper tensions and problems.the global field? Along with some other contemporary neohumanists, we How then is theological humanism to think about the social challenges of
advocate a cosmopolitan outlook.that somehow a person can be a “citizen of the world.” As we have stressed throughout this book, our social lives are always located in time, place, and community. The idea of citizenship only makes sense in local communities.^24 The idea is not the ancient Stoic one