Customer Reviews

The Arrogance of Power

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book should be required reading for all Americans, written by a man who, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the VietNam War period, can write with some authority about international affairs. Fulbright's thesis is that Americans have two sides, one that is humanitarian and one that is puritanical.

While we may want to see others enjoy the virtues of democracy and freedom (our humanitarianism) we tend to approach them with an air of superiority and an inability to see that there are many cultures in the world and that of the U.S. is only one.

How accurate Fulbright is when he says that unilateral aid, either military or economic, can evoke anger and resentment by those who, Americans feel, should be grateful and eager to receive what we have to give.

Fulbright asks Americans to reflect on the fact that ours is a profoundly conservative society which abhors radical change. Others in the world are impatient with the lack of change and can go to extremes that would never be considered in the United States. Fulbright sees this in the discomfort Americans have with revolutions, being good only if they follow the path of our own. Any route that differs from American experience is suspect.

Fulbright rightly sees the strength of American society in the freedom to dissent and laments the fear and approbrium that dissent often receives. Humility is definitely in order instead of loud boasting and self-righteous denunciations (heard any of that lately???)

Tocqueville said of American democracy..."the smallest reproach irritates its sensibility and the slightest joke that has any foundation in truth renders it indignant; from the forms of its language up to the solid virtues of its character, everything must be made the subject of encomium. No writer, whatever be his eminence, can escape paying this tribute of adulation to his fellow citizens."

This book is Fulbright's effort to speak the truth. It's good to read at a time when we daily hear from powerful politicians who are never wrong and who seem to feel the amount of truth in a statement comes from the number of times it is repeated.

Fulbright's description of the use of fear to drum up support for foreign intervention is exactly to the point in the 21st century with talk of unilateral interventions. Having members of the United States Congress with the author's courage to speak out would simultaneously benefit the prospects for democracy and the image of the United States worldwide.

At a time when there were no heart transplants and America had yet to put a man on the moon, one man wrote a book that speaks of our country today as much as it did when he wrote it in 1966.

It is a reflection on what we have become, and the choices we make for our future. There are two competing forces for the direction we take, what the author Senator J. William Fullbright calls two Americas: One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson and the other is of Theodore Roosevelt and the Superpatriots. They are two distinct sides of the American character. The character of Lincoln is rooted in humanism and assumes that America's greatness is its recognition of its imperfections. The character of Roosevelt is rooted in American Exceptionalism, or what the senator refers to as an arrogance of power.

The dominant strand of the American fabric is the democratic humanist one. It is rooted in the principles of our Founding Fathers, humanism, tolerance and accommodation. The coexisting strand is that of Theodore Roosevelt's belief in America's superiority, or what Fullbright sees as intolerant Puritanism. It is the belief that America expresses its cultural superiority through its wealth and dominance, that superiority is measured in military might.

According to Senator Fullbright these forces of the American body politic have been at odds for years with the belief in America's superiority dominating foreign and domestic policy. This is the strand the senator contends must not prevail. This path follows previous empires that failed because rulers did not rule wisely or well. He profoundly states, "power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly 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." (Does this sound familiar)?

This superpatriot model is moralistic as well as it is imperial. It demands conformity on its citizens for whatever foreign policy it embarks upon. It fails to recognize that American values are not tied to it but separate and distinct. Fullbright contends that the very light and vibrance of a democracy can be found in its dissent; it is its greatest example of freedom and energy.

Noble intentions are not an example of a nation's greatness, as the author shows that historical interference in the affairs of others were all done with excellent intentions. This becomes a drain on a country's power that leads to political insignificance and irrelevance. Even our benevolence can be seen as humiliation, as our assistance is an embarrassing loss of face, and as we tell other nations what they should do to improve their economic or political circumstances. We are baffled by their lack of gratitude.

Just as the most effective leadership is by example, other nations will be influenced by us by the way they see the welfare of our citizens. America's greatest influence on others is the level of education, health, and standard of living we provide our citizens. They will not be influenced by our military might, a policy of solitary interest, or our "arrogance of power."

Our country is now at the height of its American Exceptionalism, which means it is at the depth of its greatness. Our continuation on this path will lead to our downfall. Our recognition that we are a partner in the family of nations and not its parent, will enhance our stature, not diminish it.

Senator J. William Fullbright died February 9, 1995. This book is one of his legacies. As long as people read and cherish this book that legacy continues.

I was no fan of Fulbright's in the '60s but this book opened my eyes to the startling parallels between then and now, forty years later. It's a "must read" for anybody who wants to put today's global events in perspective. And that his widow, Harriet, was a childhood friend of mine, does not skew this review! I read the book with an initial bias against his views but was completely converted by the end.

This book reitterates and represents the attitude of citizens who sincerely desire peace. Using a humble tone it reminds us the absurdity of war and the dangers of gross nationalism. Reading this book I enjoyed a lovely daydream of the bush administration reading this book with an open mind and appreciating it's message of alternatives to wars of ideology.

50 years too late we still have not learned ,we can not run the world but the miltary-industrial complex will continue

Having benefited directly from JW Fulbright US fellowship I bought this as a means to get inside the man. His ideas and concepts in relation to international policy and his incites into the motivation behind the many global disputes actioned by the US is phenomenal. A really good read for the intellectual incite and will give you many talking points when discussing global conflict. One star as it is not what you would call riveting reading, written mid 60s'. Great program Fulbright deserves more.

This book addresses the wise use of national power.Senator Fullbright cautions against over-extension that has led to the decline of past empires.

The author defines Arrogance of Power as "a psychological need that nations seem to have in order to prove that they are bigger, better, or stronger than other nations" and "the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission."

The Senator also was critical of wars justified by "vital national interest".

Senator Fulbright points out that domestic policy suffers when war becomes the focal point of American policy.

His warning about the side effects of pre-emptive war has proven accurate in current times.

One has to wonder how different things in America would have been had Senator Fulbright's ideas been pursued during the Viet Nam era.
This book is very much dated, but the Senator's views are timeless and he communicates those ideas very well. This is still an excellent book on foreign policy and it's definitely not a "dry read".

This book, first published in 1966, was referred to me by my friend Dave Pritchard, a South African and Englishman, as an objective view of American foreign policies as seen from abroad. This of course is quite a stretch if you consider that it was written by a "traitorous" Democratic senator at a time when a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress were fervently pursuing the Vietnam War.

The book was written, I believe, out of Fullbright's basic belief that the Vietnam War was severely damaging to the US (not that he really cared about the Vietnamese) both as a foreign debacle and as a domestic poison. There are clear lessons that we can draw to the current Iraq War, but I would urge the reader not to be too blind to the differences in the conflicts. After all, in Vietnam, we had one major enemy who was well organized and focused on a central nationalistic ideal. Additionally, Fulbright borders on being an isolationist, something that is probably not supportable now during full globalization, or even during the 1960's.

Fulbright had several key points for me, and I'll sketch them briefly:
* Just because you are one of the biggest and the most powerful nations, you don't have a responsibility to run everyone else's business to their benefit.
* You seldom can understand what another nation needs or wants, since your own subtext distorts your ability to see the other nation's perspective, or predict that nation's actions.
* Historically, all empires get embroiled in foreign adventures to the point of destroying their domestic economic base, which provides your international power.
* We hang on to stupid positions and stay embroiled in losing conflicts because we are afraid of being embarrassed in front of other nations. By the time we are in this position, we are normally already embarrassed but too self centerd to see it.
* For all our vaunted demonizing of the Red Chinese because of their strident words and bellicose statements, we appeared much more demonic through our strident military actions. They provided guns and money. We provided guns, money, and a huge occupying force.
* Dissent is healthy. A nation can have a concensus if the vast majority recognize the same basic goals and principles, but should still have a healthy dialogue or dissent on how to get there.
* Congress has failed to discharge is foreign affairs responsibilities (it is a rubber stamp). It has ceded power to the Executive Branch (and in my opinion, will seldom if ever get that power back).
* America had a conservative, nonviolent (sic), democratic revolution. No one else has much chance of pulling this one off again.
* We fundamentally mistook nationalism as a driving force for many other nations because it carried a label of communism, and this blinded us. We therefore acted often against our own best interests.
* Foreign aid should be based on our principles and our honest charity, rather than based on a ruthless effort to manipulate other countries internal policies (something we have seldom done in 200 years of foreign aid).

The tone of the book is reasonable, as if it were written by Sir Thomas More, and more than a bit pendantic. I believe that Fulbright, the center of a storm of controversy, believed his views reasonable and wanted to portray himself as a reasonable man. With this understandable context, the man is not an intriguing writer. The organization, scholarly footnoting, logic, and conclusions are all you would want, it just all tastes like Campbell's Tomato Soup.

If you want historical context, this book is ok - check it out of the library rather than buy it. On the other hand, buy all of Zbigniew Brzezinski's books, even if you never remember how to spell his name.

all rights reserved, Scott Jones