Word: altruism
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...their popularity is by no means universal. In certain circles at Harvard, "I-banking" and "consulting" are dirty words. Students seeking jobs in these fields are branded as "sell-outs," people who have forsaken their altruism and liberal ideals for lucrative careers...
...problem with altruism as the prime mover of foreign policy is that altruism is a sentiment, not a strategy. And to paraphrase Lord Palmerston, America has no permanent sentiments, only permanent interests. The Emir of Kuwait, living high on the hog in Saudi Arabia waiting to be returned to his palace by American troops, was no more worthy or sympathetic a figure than Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But it did not matter much. America had more than altruistic reasons for going into Kuwait. Real, tangible, important things were at stake: oil, nuclear weapons, the future of the Middle East...
Kissinger, a European refugee who read Metternich more avidly than Jefferson, is unabashedly in the realist camp. "No other nation," he writes, "has ever rested its claim to international leadership on its altruism." Other Americans might proclaim this as a point of pride; when Kissinger says it, his attitude seems that of an anthropologist examining a rather unsettling tribal ritual. The practice of basing policy on ideals rather than interests, he points out, can make a nation seem dangerously unpredictable...
...realist, the first in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt. To support this contention, he quotes from Nixon's annual foreign policy reports, which Kissinger himself wrote. But as Kissinger admits, Nixon placed a picture of the unabashed idealist Woodrow Wilson in the Cabinet Room and repeatedly proclaimed the altruism of American policy. It amounted to a combination that Kissinger rather disparagingly calls "novel" but which seems to me quintessentially American...
Having been involved in the Harvard undergraduate community's recent drive to send humanitarian aid to Bosnia, I have a few experiences I would like to share with the purveyors of the conventional wisdom. During this effort, I came into contact with many students who astonished me with their altruism. For anyone who is confronted by a slick marketing type condescendingly writing our generation off with that "X," I offer the following few vignettes. Each one is an anecdote about people who are idealists, and who are willing to give of themselves to a communal cause. I give them...