Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

At this triumphant moment for democracy, we must look back on what has been the most terrible century in Western history. Ascendant as the century began, liberal democracy then foundered, and totalitarianism seemed the answer. It could happen again. Today's democratic societies are pressure cookers: technology destabilizes as it revolutionizes them, capitalism undermines as it enriches them, and race could cause the explosion. Only public leadership and affirmative government can manage the postmodern populist age.

U.S. isolationism has risen yet again from the grave. The new Republican Congress threatens Wilson's and F.D.R.'s magnificent dream of collective security.

Reviews foreign policy issues confronting the USA from a Democratic (i.e. generally progressive) point of view, by means of an occasionally combative critique of Reagan's 'unilateralist' foreign policy (e.g. concern with Nicaragua rather than with Latin-American debt) and of its over-reliance on covert action. Western Europe is 'safe enough' from Soviet invasion and Star Wars "is not only a fantasy but a fraud". Presents his party as that of 'responsible internationalism', and concludes with a resumé of its trade policy.

Foreign policy is the face a nation wears to the world. The minimal motive is the same for all states_the protection of national integrity and interest. But the manner in which a state practices foreign policy is greatly affected by national peculiarities.