posted April 18, 2003 at 10:19 a.m. MDTReading this review of "Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War" at airstripone.blogspot [British foreign policy as if national interests mattered] brought me to this think piece:
"Why Export Democracy?: The 'Hidden Grand Strategy' of American Foreign Policy'" - "The "hidden grand strategy" of American foreign policy is reemerging into plain view after a long Cold War hibernation.
To hear critics tell it, the American preoccupation with promoting democracy around the world is the product of a dangerous idealistic impulse. In his recent book, Diplomacy (1995), Henry Kissinger cautions against this neo-Wilsonian impulse, under which American foreign policy is shaped more by values than by interests. He joins a long line of American writers, from Walter Lippmann to George Kennan to Charles Krauthammer, who call on the United States to check its idealism at the water's edge and accept the necessity of a more sober pursuit of American national interests abroad. At best, in their view, the American democratic impulse is a distraction, a nettlesome inconvenience that forces the nation's leaders to dress up needed measures in democratic rhetoric. At worst, it unleashes a dangerous and overweening moralistic zeal, oblivious to or ignorant of how international politics really operates. It fuels periodic American "crusades" to remake the world, which, as President Woodrow Wilson discovered after World War I, can land the country in serious trouble."
I started the day off readin A Critique of Absolute Will: Kantian versus non-Kantian moratily ... is what makes me such a fun, easy-going guy, yaa? *grin*
