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The Purposes of American Power

By Robert W. Tucker
Winter 1980/81
Article Summary and Author Biography

Once again we have reached a major turning point in American foreign policy. On this, at least, there is widespread agreement. The conviction that the nation has come to a critical juncture in its foreign relations is broadly shared by those who may disagree on virtually everything else. Everywhere the signs point to the conclusion that for the third time in the post-World War II period we are in the throes of far-reaching change in the nation's foreign policy. What these signs do not divulge are the eventual scope and magnitude of the change.

Robert W. Tucker is Professor of Political Science at The Johns Hopkins University, co-director of studies at The Lehrman Institute, and the author of The Inequality of Nations and other works. The author wishes to express his gratitude to David Hendrickson for his invaluable assistance in preparing this essay.

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Once again we have reached a major turning point in American foreign policy. On this, at least, there is widespread agreement. The conviction that the nation has come to a critical juncture in its foreign relations is broadly shared by those who may disagree on virtually everything else. Everywhere the signs point to the conclusion that for the third time in the post-World War II period we are in the throes of far-reaching change in the nation's foreign policy. What these signs do not divulge are the eventual scope and magnitude of the change.

Yet the same was true of the two earlier occasions in which American foreign policy underwent significant transformation. The observer in 1947 could not know from the events of that year the form that the emerging policy of containment would ultimately take. In its inception containment had no determinate outcome. Neither the external circumstances in which containment arose and which conditioned the immediate development of that policy nor the domestic reaction to these circumstances dictated the form that containment would ultimately take. It is true that in the sweeping language of the Truman Doctrine-"We must assist free peoples to work out their destinies in their own way"-as well as in its sense of universal crisis-"At the present moment in world history every nation must choose between alternative ways of life"-we can see the subsequent course of a policy that led to the equation of American security with world order, world order with the containment of communism, and the containment of communism with the conflict-Vietnam-that brought an end to the policy of global containment.

But the Truman Doctrine did not foreordain Vietnam, whatever the intent of its authors. Instead, it was the Korean War, and the sudden extension of containment to Asia that the war precipitated, which led to Vietnam. It was the American intervention in Korea-prompted far more by conventional balance-of-power calculations than by the universal pretensions of the Truman Doctrine-that led to the extension of containment in Asia, which was divisive from the start and never supported by more than a negative consensus.

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