The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In 1968, America was a wounded nation. The wounds were moral ones; the Vietnam War and three summers of inner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul, challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble and honorable people.
Ronald Reagan, who led the larger New Right project of re-sanctifying U.S. foreign policy after its Vietnam disaccreditation, felt compelled to drape his support for Central American death squads in the rhetoric of American exceptionalism.
The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.
The principles that should guide American foreign policy are simple: the world is safer when America leads, only strength ensures peace and freedom, and America must stand with its allies and challenge its adversaries.
When the new wave of terrorism came on the modern world, which is the late 1960s, early 1970s, I think we spent about a decade, the United States and our allies, trying to figure out how to deal with it.
The Obama foreign policy, in broad strokes, has been a disaster.
When our interests matched, the Americans have been good to us, and when the interests differed, they wanted us to mold ourselves to them, which we refused.
I think there is a failure in foreign policy. And you have to acknowledge that under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was the architect of that foreign policy. Whether it was malevolent or not, I don't know.
Then as now, whatever disagreements over policies existed among Americans - and there were many such bitter policy disputes - the purposes and goals for which Americans fought were clearly understood.