There is accumulating evidence that President Nixon appreciates more fully than his immediate predecessors the moral and political limits of American power and influence in the larger world, primarily because he understands the vital distinction between national security and political reform. He knows that the U. S. Government's mandate abroad is far more limited than it is at home.

It was in his speech in Rumania in August, 1969 that Mr. Nixon most clearly distinguished the proper domains, of domestic and foreign policy: “We seek normal relations with all countries, regardless of their domestic systems. We stand ready to reciprocate the efforts of any country that seeks normal relations with us.” He added: “We know mankind cannot build a just and lasting peace until all nations recognize and respect the sovereignty and rights of other nations.”

There are many discouraging things about the ongoing debate over Vietnam. One is the bewildering tendency of participants to try to rest their case on concepts and arguments that are themselves in question. An example is the frequent reference to "national interest" and "national security" as though they clinched the debate. On close inspection, such terms are found to mislead and becloud.

In the widely acclaimed book, The Limits of Intervention, Town send H copes rests his conclusions on these same dubious notions, His thesis is that the "limits of intervention" are defined for the United States by its "vital national interest."

This seminar has dwelt, in the papers presented, on general—universal if you will—aspects of the ethical dilemmas of violence, revolution, and reform. I want to address myself to the personal problems involved in the ethical response to these same issues. I am not a theologian and therefore cannot speak with authority on the religious, at least the doctrinal, aspects of that ethical response. For me personally, the touchstone of any religion is not its revelations but its ethical teachings. I therefore see no essential difference between the religious and the ethical response to the questions of violence, revolution, and reform. Thus, I can speak to you only as what I am: an historian whose outlook upon revolution.has been determined by the study of history and by living in this revolutionary age.

Josef Hromadka was a man of controversy his whole life long. A quarter of a century ago, as the second world war was nearing its end, a refugee from his native land and a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in the U.S.A., he published a testament and a prophecy for Western bourgeois civilization under the title Doom and Resurrection. The world had reason to be cautiously optimistic in these last days of 1944. The first atomic bomb had not yet exploded. The wartime partnership between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies was in full emotional swing; "cold war" and "iron curtain" were still unknown concepts. D-Day was a fact; the Nazi armies were in retreat; the United Nations had been conceived, if not yet born. Against the terrible darkness of the previous years, the future gave promise of a new and better world.

I confess at the outset that I speak of America and the revolutionary option as one who wishes to be informed by, and faithful to, the biblical tradition. I use "confess" here not as an admission of weakness, but as one who would be a "confessor," clearly positioning himself in terms of the myriad beginning points one might choose for serious personal statement. I am increasingly unhappy with an. intensified and highly politicized atmosphere in which one is pressed to distinguish his position by relating it to the prevailing, and usually false, alternatives of political debate. Christians and Jews who take their religious tradition seriously must demonstrate more emphatically the connection between their political posture and the referents in that tradition. For me this means discovering political commitment and style that square with the gospel of the oncoming Kingdom of God, which is what I think the tradition is all about.

Devil theories of history and politics are the offspring of curiosity and frustration. Sensitive participants and observers of the human drama want to know why events have turned out as they have, especially when they end in disaster. Why World War I? Why the "fall" of China? Why are we "hogged down" in Vietnam?

Every modern man pays lip service to the reality of multiple causation, but the very mystery and complexity of untoward events compel some people to search for the central flaw, the fatal error, the demonic force beneath the misfortune. In this quest modern man is not far removed from his primitive cousin.

When viewed within the perspective of a possibly new American foreign policy, two sets of dramatic and apparently unrelated current events display a clear relationship. On the one hand are particular influences upon the thought of the radical left in America and elsewhere, notably the neo-Marxist ideas of men like Herbert Mareuse'and the Third World revolution ideas of men like Frantz Fanon. On the other hand there are recurring references to differences in the way clerical defections are taking place in the United States and Europe. An interesting framework for unifying these apparently unrelated phenomena suggests itself from the broader perspective of traditional Western political theory.

There is a curious unreality about the way in which Americans have been discussing foreign policy: they seem to lie speaking in terms having only tenuous relationship to reality. This partly explains why many people find discussions of Vietnam awkward and frustrating: their vocabulary is not equipped to cope with their country's behavior. This poverty of vocabulary stems from a more serious conceptual vacuum.

Part of the responsibility for this conceptual inadequacy lies in academia, where in the last two decades foreign policy has slipped sharply in appeal. In contrast to other areas of social science, foreign policy studies have adopted a non-theoretical—almost anti-theoretical-posture.