Top Highlights

• When it came to making and executing foreign policy, Kennan had little respect for democracies. “I sometimes wonder,” he told his Chicago audience, “whether . . . a democracy is not uncomfortably similar to one of those prehistoric monsters with a body as long as this room and a brain the size of a pin” (70). The problem with liberal democracies, h...
• of the problem, he maintained, is that when a state bases its foreign policy on liberal ideals, it invariably finds itself thinking that “state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment” (107). Once that happens it is virtually impossible to think about “employing force for rational and restricted purposes rather than for purposes which are emot...
• The United States, however, undermined its own security by pushing for total victory over Germany in World War I. “We were then as strong as anybody else in our determination that the war should be fought to the finish of a total victory” (71).
• This decision seems rather attributable to the state of American opinion, to the fact that it was a year of congressional elections, to the unabashed and really fantastic warmongering of a section of the American press, and to the political pressures which were freely and bluntly exerted on the President from various political quarters.
• The tendency to achieve our foreign policy objectives by inducing other governments to sign up to professions of high moral and legal principle appears to have a great and enduring vitality in our diplomatic practice. It is linked, certainly, with the strong American belief in the power of public opinion to overrule governments. It is also linked, ...