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Foreign Policy and the American Mind
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It is only too clear that behind the tactical and strategical
problems of our relations with the rest of the world-not to
emphasize the occasional humiliations-lie some major difficulties
of perspective. They are most plainly political difficulties,
but, as the authors of The New Politics: America and
the End of the Postwar World suggest, they are also moral,
rooted in our growing tendency to identify political matters
with a transcendent moralism. As Edmund Stillman and
William Pfaff put it: "Everywhere diplomacy suffers from the
degradation of language and the parallel failure to sense the
reasonable limits of political action."
The authors are right, of course, but one might ask how
likely any government is to sense the limits of politics in
foreign matters when its modern history reveals a constantly
diminishing sense of these limits in domestic affairs. There is
also the fact that the only diplomacy of limits we have any
real knowledge of is the classical diplomacy of the 18th and
19th centuries. This was the diplomacy of professionals
operating in a finite world, not a Faustian world of boundless
ideological aspiration. Totalitarianism may have applied the
coup de grace to classical diplomacy, but it had been made
moribund by democratic insistence upon open covenants and
popular participation. I join Stillman and Pfaff in wishing for
a return to the objectivity, the empiricism, the patience, and
the sense of limits that classical diplomacy had, but it is an
open question whether American foreign policy today can be
kept any freer of ideological aspiration than has domestic
politics.
Robert A. Nisbet, - Personal Name
1st Edition
0-89617-034-9
NONE
Foreign Policy and the American Mind
Management
English
INSTITUTE FOR HUMANE STUDIES, INC
1978
USA
1-27
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