Few commentators on current affairs would challenge the assertion that the present period is one of uncertainty and confusion in American foreign policy. The United States is involved with the external world to a greater extent than ever before in its history, yet at few times in the nation’s history has there been more debate and disagreement among leaders and public alike concerning the purposes of American foreign policy and the means appropriate for the realization of these objectives.

In retrospect, I believe, it will become apparent that the present debate over ends and means in foreign policy is an inevitable culmination of the post–World War II revolution in America’s relations with the outside world. Prior to the twentieth century, the internationalist and interventionist thrust implicit in the American self-vision lay concealed behind a hard-headed realism in the choice of foreign policy objectives and in the actual conduct of relations with other nations;¹ hostility and conflict among real or potential adversaries coupled with a fortuitous geographic position made possible a policy of isolationism or, more accurately, nonalignment, which concealed from the American people the importance of an effective foreign policy to the survival of nations in a world of anarchy. Thus it was, as Charles Burton Marshall has noted, that the United States “came to maturity without having, in Whitman’s phrase, to ‘learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled and sullen hymns of defeat.’”² Neither did the various international adventures of the early twentieth century or even Wilson’s “great crusade” of 1917 mark any significant departure from the earlier tradition. There is little evidence suggesting that the nation as a whole fully appreciated the significance of the Spanish-American War, especially the territorial acquisitions which followed in its wake; and surely neither Mr. Wilson nor his constituents viewed World War I as marking a permanent commitment by the United States to active participation in international politics. Indeed, for Wilson himself, as his critics are fond of noting, America fought the Great War out of a conviction that “the world must be made safe for demoracy,”³ and in order to usher in a new era in world history in which an institutionalized rule of law would replace war as the final arbiter of disputes among nations.⁴ The rapidity and fervor with which the nation re-embraced nonalignment when it became apparent that Wilson’s dream bore little relationship to reality is fitting testimony to the twentieth-century strength of the isolationist tradition, however transmogrified in inspiration that tradition may have become since its origins in the eighteenth century.

It was not until after World War II, therefore, that the United States came to regard its own vital interests, not to mention its ultimate hopes and expectations for mankind, as depending upon the nation’s assumption of an active role in world affairs. This was the ultimate significance of the much-discussed “revolution in American foreign policy:”⁵ the operational vistas of United States policy began to encompass the globe. The contrast with the decade of the thirties was particularly sharp, as more than one commentator has observed:

In the 1930’s the United States had retracted into a pathological isolation: Americans had rejected even the non-compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court, made the decision to retire from the Philippines, refused to build up fortifications on Guam, and abandoned their neutral rights at sea. . . . Yet during the following decade Americans fought a global war, led the mightiest coalition in history, became deeply involved politically in all parts of the earth, made the pivotal decisions that affected the future everywhere, and an American President bestrode the world like Caesar Augustus of old. In the light of its traditional foreign policy this stridden stupendous global influence of America constituted a veritable revolution, one of the most dramatic in history.⁶

The consequences of this rather sharp change in the operational pattern of America’s relations with the external world have been many, and in fact are only beginning to be understood. But surely among the most important is one which until recently has been little observed: For the first time in its history, the United States has been compelled in recent decades to act on the basis of its traditional, imperfectly examined and articulated understanding of international politics, and for the first time as well has been forced to confront the consequences and implications of its classic definition of national purpose. Is the United States in its principles and behavior fundamentally different from the other national units which participate in international relations? Is the American political system the embodiment of the natural rights of man, and thus of a set of political values felt to be the legitimate political inheritance of all mankind? Is the United States destined to help other men to achieve that inheritance? How—by what means is it to accomplish this end?

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Needless to say, these are difficult questions, involving ultimately nothing less than the self-vision of the nation itself and the relationship between the vision and the nation’s behavior in world affairs. It was therefore inevitable that as the United States sought to implement its newly assumed global role in the late 1940s there would be errors at the level of design and reverses at the level of execution; and it was no less inevitable that these errors and reverses would stimulate a reaction at home. Indeed, from the beginning of the nation’s postwar involvement in international relations there have arisen frequent charges that our policymakers have acted unwisely in one particular or another, and dissatisfaction with the results of policy has also led from time to time to a questioning of the general sweep of the nation’s global strategy itself. Resistance to the postwar “revolution” in American policy, it is worth remembering, came from both ends of the political spectrum.⁷ The Henry Wallace Democrats of the middle and late ’40s, rejecting the mounting evidence that Roosevelt’s “grand design” for postwar cooperation with the Soviet Union was doomed, bitterly denounced the gradual development of the containment policy, and anticipated as well the central thesis of later New Left critics in insisting that the United States bears the principal responsibility forthe onset of the Cold War. Taft Republicans, on the other hand, although harboring few illusions concerning the goals of Soviet foreign policy, strongly opposed any advance military guarantees to the nations of Western Europe, while appearing to suggest at the same time that the United States ought to have done more to prevent Mao’s accession to power in China.⁸ The discontent in both camps was fed by the rather ambiguous outcome of the Korean War, and it is clear that public dissatisfaction with our initial efforts to “contain” communism in Asia had a considerable impact on the foreign policy of the Eisenhower-Dulles Administration: the much-maligned policy of “massive retaliation” included within its operating assumptions the thesis that native forces should be used wherever possible in conflicts abroad, with the primary American role to be that of providing ancillary sea and air power.⁹ If American foreign policy during the Eisenhower years seemed to suffer—as many critics from all points on the political spectrum have charged—from a severe case of muscle paralysis, it is not only the faulty understanding of the nation’s leaders which must be blamed: that faulty understanding only mirrored the state of mind of the nation at large. Indeed, there is little indication that matters have improved much in the interim.

To be sure, the Kennedy era was to have changed all this. The torch of leadership, we were told, had been passed to a new generation, more wise and more able than that which it had succeeded, and we could thenceforth anticipate in the period ahead a foreign policy at once relevant and efficacious. The rhetorical seeds of the 1961 Inaugural rather quickly fell on the stone ground of Cuba, Laos, and the Vietnam quagmire, however, and it soon became apparent to most interested observers that the seemingly vast military and economic power of the United States was succeeding neither in improving American security nor in promoting international order and stability. Increasingly, then, a new kind of criticism of American foreign policy began to beheard: the motives and intentions of our policymakers began to be called into question, and a gap discerned between the end desires of the national leadership and those of thepeople at large—or, at least, of the more informed and intelligent among them.¹⁰ Our elected officials, according to these critics, have betrayed the national purpose. They have been corrupted by exposure to power, and turned arrogant in its exercise. Indeed, in many respects they have become only mirror-images of the adversaries whom they oppose, and consequently their policies have not only helped create enemies where none exist, but moreover constitute a significant cause of disorder and war in contemporary world politics as well. Such criticism, of course, logically should culminate in a call to replace that leadership with a new group more in harmony with both the desires of the populace and the ultimate purposes for which the nation stands. Some such view as this seems to have constituted part of the inspiration of both the Robert Kennedy and the McCarthy presidential campaigns prior to the Democratic convention of 1968.

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