America: An Honest Broker

Each of us has experienced the phenomenal central European revolution of 1989, its preliminaries in Poland and its continuing aftermath, particularly in Germany and the Soviet Union. But each has done so from his or her own window on the world.

Having spent much of my life as a policy planner, I tend to focus on the future, on what lies ahead, on what is desirable and perhaps practical, and on what policies would most successfully help to bring about these aims. I also tend to translate this forward-looking perspective into American terms: What should we in this country view as our role in collaboration with others in moving the world toward this desired future?

In charting a road to the future, it is sometimes wise to look back on relevant turning points of the past. For over forty years the foreign and defense policies of the United States have been guided by a central theme, a well-defined basic policy objective. That goal, throughout the Cold War, was for the United States to take the lead in building an international world order based on liberal economic and political institutions, and to defend that world against communist attack.

The political-strategic situation is now changed. We are in an important period of transition. Our postwar policies appear to have achieved their principal objective, and a new conception of our foreign and defense policies is required as we face a future less dominated by an ideologically driven U.S.S.R. Before we can formulate a new strategy, however, it is first in order that we review our postwar policy of containment, its origins and rationale, and where and the degree to which it has succeeded.

II

In the summer and fall of 1943 fragments of discussion could be heard in Washington about U.S. postwar relations with the Soviet Union. Much of World War II remained to be fought, but for the first time Hitler's eventual defeat seemed probable. It was not too early to think about what kind of peace and relations among the leading powers we wished to see established in the postwar world.