The Foreign Service Journal, February 2004

in our international environ- ment for its own sake, indepen- dent of our own aspirations and problems here at home. It does not signify things we would like to see happen in the outside world primarily for the sake of the outside world. Why is this? It’s because we do not live just for our relations with others — just in order to conduct foreign policy. It would be more correct to say that we conduct foreign policy in order to live as a people, joined together in a social com- pact, for a purpose related pri- marily to ourselves and not to others. It is not an expression of national selfishness to say that our first duty, as a nation, is to ourselves. It is an expression of self-respect. A nation which is meeting its own problems, and meeting them honestly and creditably, is not apt to be a problem to its neighbors. And, strangely enough, having figured out what it wants to do about itself, it will find that it has sudden- ly and mysteriously acquired criteria, which it did not have before, for knowing what to do about its relation with others. … On every side of us we see the proof of this thesis that our American civilization is still something exper- imental, unfinished, not fully tested. We see it in our failure to bring our lives into balance with the natural resources of this continent; we see it in our failure, to date, to find a happier and more orderly answer to the problems of labor and wages and prices; we see it in the depressing and flimsy aspect of great portions of our sprawling big cities; we see it in the pathetic shal- lowness and passiveness of our recreational habits, we see it in our bewilderment as to how to handle the forces which modern technology has released among us — the telephone, the automobile, the television sets, atomic energy. That being the case, we must preserve a certain modesty about what we conceive to be our role on the stage of international affairs. We have no right to rec- ommend our institutions to others — we have no right to expect others to understand entirely what it is we are doing here in this country; and by the same token — not having yet finally demonstrated to our- selves the permanent validity of our own system — we have no right to be too emphatic or crit- ical in our views about the validity of others. … I want to hoist my second warning flag. It would be this: the national interest does not consist in abstractions. And we will not get closer to it if we try to think in abstractions. What do we mean by peace? Is it just an absence of interna- tional violence? You can have that sort of peace very easily. All you need is non-resistance. That sort of peace prevails today in the Kremlin’s satellite area. Well, you may say, that’s all right; but what we mean is a just peace. That, again, is a fine idea, within lim- its. But beware of carrying it to extremes. Beware of the assumption that in every one of the quarrels which wrack the lives of other peoples in this world there is always distinguishable some moral issue — that there is always some party which is “right” and another party which is “wrong” by our standards. Too often you will find hatred pitted against hatred, error against error, treachery against treachery. … Now for the third. National interest is not primari- ly a question of purpose or objectives. It is a question of method. It is a question of the “how” rather than the “what.” This is not to say that we do not have an interest as a nation in what we do and in what results stem from our action; but I would submit that we have a greater interest still in how we do those things we feel we must do. Remember that none of us can really see very far ahead in this turbulent, changing, kaleidoscopic world of foreign affairs. A study of the great decisions of national policy in the past reveals that too often the motives of national action are ones dictated for gov- ernment by developments outside of its control. Its freedom of action, in these cases, lies only in the choice of method — in the how rather than the what. F O C U S 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 4 We should be extremely careful what we say to the peoples who are materially less well endowed; and should be careful to talk to them in terms of their problems and aspirations — not our own.