Nisbet, Robert A. "Foreign Policy & the American Mind." Commentary Magazine. 1961.

Abstract:

Robert A. Nisbet here contributes the fourth in our series of re-appraisals—written from differing points of view—of the key problems that confront American foreign policy in the 60’s.

It is only too clear that behind the tactical and strategical problems of our relations with the rest of the world—not to emphasize the occasional humiliations—lie some major difficulties of perspective. They are most plainly political difficulties, but, as the authors of The New Politics1 suggest, they are also moral, rooted in our growing tendency to identify political matters with a transcendent moralism. As Stillman and Pfaff put it: “Everywhere diplomacy suffers from the degradation of language and the parallel failure tosense the reasonable limits of political action.”…

Read online on Commentary Magazine: Foreign Policy & the American Mind