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 realpolitik, did not in office attempt to fashion a foreign policy in which American liberal principles were somehow excised from a definition of American interests. Kissinger may have tried to make American foreign policy less ideological; he did not attempt the impossible task of making it non-ideological.

Much less did any of Kissinger’s historical predecessors believe that such a separation could be made between American interests and American liberal ideals. The eighteenth-century Anglo-American settlers who spread out from the Atlantic littoral carried with them the Enlightenment liberal’s convictions that nature was something to be conquered, that land was something to be cultivated and improved, that ownership of property was the cornerstone of human freedom, that progress was possible and desirable, that stubborn human nature could be channeled in beneficial directions, if not “perfected,”