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Realism and Vision in American Foreign Policy

By James H. Billington
America and the World 1986
Article Summary and Author Biography

US foreign policy has a split personality, between (1) realism-conservatism, the need for military power and political will to maintain friendly alliances to contain Soviet expansion (2) idealism-liberalism, the need to perfect and spread democracy. These might be harmonized, by a foreign policy combining prudent realism with the universal appeal of 'inner aspirations' towards political accountability, economic opportunity and religious freedom. This will however entail attention to the USA's own decadence in divorcing freedom from the responsibility to protect the values on which the USA was founded. Discusses several "ideals drawn from the America of yesterday" which may be "relevant to the emerging world of tomorrow".

James H. Billington is Director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and author of Fire in the Minds of Men and The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture.

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