Word: kennan
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...inherent danger of basing foreign policy on an American idea of "what's right and what's wrong" in foreign affairs was demonstrated 40 years ago by George F. Kennan, a leading expert in United States foreign policy and diplomacy. Kennan condemned what he called the United States' "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems" in which the American idea of world order is imposed by force on the rest of the world...
BUSH'S COMMITMENT to "resist aggression" via U.N. resolutions smacks of Kennan's warning against "the belief that it should be possible to suppress the chaotic and dangerous aspirations of governments in the international field by the acceptance of some system of legal rules and restraints...
...Kennan explains how this mentality in foreign policy -- just the kind that inspired Bush's notion of new world order -- ironically leads to the opposite of its desired effect...
...Kennan reasonably observed, the United States must acknowledge that "our national interest is all that we are really capable of knowing and understanding." Consequently, national interest is all that we really capable of pursuing. And "national interest" requires a limited interpretation. The Communist presence in Vietnam did not constitute a national security crisis that justified U.S. intervention. And the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were not an expansionist national security threat that neccessitated hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid to the Contra rebels...
THIS IS NOT TO SAY that we must resort to complete non-intervention and Washingtonesque isolationism in our foreign policy. Kennan did not call for complete withdrawal from the international arena. Instead, he proposed that we develop a more conservative, more realistic attitude when determining whether to intervene in the affairs of external states...