The Challenge to Political Scientists in Recent American Foreign Policy: Scholarship or Indoctrination?

Abstract

This effort is impelled by a growing conviction that most of our people and much of our responsible political and intellectual leadership are so hopelessly confused in matters of foreign affairs, as actually to be becoming dangerously irresponsible. The paper is not meant to appear spectacular, nor is it aimed at being pleasing. It will attempt a bit of plain speaking to a very important segment of our intellectual leadership, with whatever persuasiveness it may attain. Most of it will consist of simple statements of readily verifiable fact. In the very nature of my space and personality limitations, my statements will have to be somewhat dogmatic, and readers are invited each to pursue his own confirmations of them.Implicit in the title are two propositions: (1) that our recent and current foreign policies and strategies have been basically so poorly conceived and so increasingly dangerous that they have been largely unworthy of the apparently dominant intellectual support they have received, and (2) that too much of what has been passing for political science scholarship has been little more than footnoted rationalization and huckstering of those policies.