NY.: Praeger, 1969. — 252 p.
The country is pregnant with a new foreign policy, conceived—as with life—in passion rather than reason. We know what we have been through, the anguish and failure of intervention and war, its repudiation and the exhausting controversies; but what is to come of it now? Logic, one suspects, will have fairly little to do with it. What we will do is compromised by what we have done and can do—and by the national character itself, the American temper and customary belief.
The political expectations of America have always been very high; but then are we not, as Jefferson said, the world's best hope? The national messianism has always possessed an external dimension. We will serve as an example to man, model of the new political dispensation. Thus, historically, the United States has vacillated between an isolationist foreign policy, standing aloof from the corrupt foreign world, from the bad past—and Wilsonian action to redeem history.
This has been the popular temper, but that of intellectuals and academic men as well. Indeed, established America—until Vietnam, at least—has been more marked by this bland optimism about America's merits and destiny than the American disestablished; political cynicism is common enough among the people, uncommon among theorists and officials. This is one reason that Hans J. Morgenthau has always been a controversial figure. His dry arguments of national interest, geopolitics, national advantage, contradict the mainstream assumptions not only of policy but of the American sense of national identity. He stands in a second American tradition, a dissenters' tradition which nonetheless has been important to national policy. The “realists” were largely responsible for the early postwar policy of this country, for the conservative and defensive policy of “containment” of Soviet power in Europe and Asia Minor.
