Charles L. Schultze

In almost any debate about American foreign and defense policies, there is one element upon which both protagonists can usually agree-that economic considerations play a major role in shaping the substance of those policies. Indeed, the economics of national security policy makes strange bedfellows. The radical New Left is convinced that a conspiracy of vested interests shapes American foreign policy toward the protection of U.S. investments abroad and the economic exploitation of other peoples. But when pressed to articulate a rationale for an internationalist and interventionist approach to foreign policy, eminently conservative Establishment types also advance arguments of economic self-interest, citing the need to preserve American access to vital raw materials abroad and warning of the blow to general living standards which would occur should America become isolated from the mainstream of world commerce.[i]