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Article: History repeating itself: liberalism and foreign policy.
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- April 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Just as there has been no genuine alternative to the liberal political tradition in America, as Louis Hartz pointed many years ago, so in foreign policy both the higher principles and the baser urges shaping America's relations with the rest of the world have always been informed by a liberal worldview. Certainly no competing foreign policy tradition, whether one calls it conservative, "realist" or something else, has ever posed a serious challenge. No American statesman has ever conducted international relations without regard to liberal ideological considerations. Even Henry Kissinger, America's high priest of real-politik, did not in office attempt to fashion a foreign ...