Struggle Against History [antikvár]

Foreword Foreign Policy and Social Blindness in the United States 1 Carl T. Rowan, "Crisis of Leadership," Arizona Daily Star, October 5, 1966. 2 See Department of State 1963: A Report to the Citizen, Department of State Publication 7530, General Foreign Policy Series 187, May, 1963. For sale by Superintendent of Documents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. ix NEAL D. HOUGHTON Basic Concepts of this Great Convulsive Transition Period Perhaps no other people in modern history has ever been in more urgent need of a working understanding of its era than we now are. And, frankly, I see too little evidence that even our highest and most responsible political and intellectual leadership has that basic understanding. In the fall of 1966, one alert newsman reported, just as a matter of news, that our people are "simply . . . confused; they know we are in a mess and they don't know what to do."^ There is, of course, plenty of official assertion and reasser-tion of good intention and dedication to the pursuit of goals, in foreign policy and international politics, which are largely unattainable. They are unattainable because they are just not fj compatible with the great human technological forces which, currently and prospectively, are reshaping the world. The position of the United States in Vietnam, for example, as of the mid-1960s and prospectively, is untenable, simply because the policy upon which it rests is in defiance of those same forces. This policy, in Asia and elsewhere, rests on our officially proclaimed purpose to "shape the course of history" in those vast areas, "in our favor."^ I: