Volume 11, Number 4 · September 12, 1968
Impossible Dreams
By Ronald Steel
Intervention and Revolution: The United States in the Third World
by Richard J. Barnet
New American Library, 288 pp., $5.95
The Discipline of Power
by George W. Ball
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 363 pp., $7.50
The Insecurity of Nations
by Charles Yost
Praeger, 276 pp., $6.50
Gulliver's Troubles, Or the Setting of American Foreign Policy
by Stanley Hoffmann
McGraw-Hill, 552 pp., $11.95
Conditions of World Order
edited by Stanley Hoffmann
Houghton Mifflin, 397 pp., $6.50
Since the beginning of the cold war, nearly a quarter-century ago, there has been happy agreement about the methods and goals of American foreign policy. We were the torch-bearers of liberty, the 'watchmen on the walls of world freedom,' in John F. Kennedy's overwrought phrase. We launched NATO and the Marshall Plan to stop the aggressionbent Soviets from engulfing Western Europe. We fought in Korea and Vietnam to preserve the rule of law and hold the line against what Vice President Humphrey last year referred to as 'militant, aggressive Asian Communism, with its headquarters in Peking, China.' Although we frequently had to revert to arms in the defense of freedom, our ambitions were noble and disinterested. 'What America has done, and what America is doing now around the world,' President Johnson declared shortly after he began bombing North Vietnam, 'draws from deep and flowing springs of moral duty, and let none underestimate the depth of flow of those wellsprings of American purpose.'
Review, 3590 words
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