A few words from J. William Fulbright on foreign policy
It’s funny how you can find things sometimes. While Emily and I were going to the Cincinatti Oktoberfest, somehow we started talking about famous Arkansans. I ended up looking up J. William Fulbright’s entry in Wikipedia and came across some interesting quotes. In 1966, during the Vietnam War, he wrote a book called The Arrogance of Power. There are a few quotes from it on Wikipedia and I can see why they were included; they are especially poignant and very relevant even today, so much that I am ordering the book off Amazon. I’m just going to quote Wikipedia wholesale here because it’s easier.
In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:
Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But… when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.
Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:
Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work.
He was also a strong believer in international law:
Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.
