The American People and Cold War Policy: Is Public Opinion Against Foreign Involvement?

Glazer, Nathan. "The American People and Cold War Policy: Is Public Opinion Against Foreign Involvement?" Commentary 17, 1954.

Excerpt: The series of battles over American foreign policy in recent years, and the new one shaping up around the problem of Indo-China, might tempt a literate journalist to describe the situation as one in which

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of a passionate intensity.

The “best,” most of us would agree, are those who want to stop the advance of Communism, and hope to do it without war: those who were against the idea of “preventive war” when some people were proposing it in the days before Russia had the H-bomb, and who have all along been against appeasement, against cutting armaments for reasons of economy, and against a retreat behind our own borders into an armed isolationism which would leave the rest of the world to fend for itself.

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