In Search of the National Interest

Extract

There are fads in scholarship as well as in fashion. Just JL now, the current fad, with respect to American diplomatic history, is to belabor what is called “Wilsonianism” with all the sarcasm and dignified invective at the writer's disposal. It is almost de rigueur to expatiate upon the prescient wisdom of the Founding Fathers, to pass over most of the period between John Quincy Adams and William McKinley as relatively unimportant, and to concentrate the heaviest guns of criticism upon the “Utopianism” of the first half of the twentieth century. Only now, and belatedly, we are told, is the United States beginning to come down from the clouds of illusion and to survey realistically the true nature of the world with which its diplomatists and policymakers must cope. Only now are we beginning once again to measure possible policy decisions by the yardsticks of power and “the national interest.”