For those who take time to read it, this is an interesting and surprisingly timeless article from the archives. I think it's also wrongheaded in a number of ways, particularly in labeling "utopian" the view (here attributed to Kennan and Fulbright) that America's unique role in international affairs is primarily to serve as a kind of republican beacon to the world. Not only does this suggest the uselessly flexible meaning of the epithet "utopian" as it was employed by numerous writers in the postwar conservative literature (it turns out that anyone whose thoughts a conservative writer finds impracticable is almost always a "utopian"); but it would also seem to consign pretty much *all* mainstream American political thought about foreign affairs up to Wilson and even beyond to the Utopian dustbin. How helpful is that? High-flown rhetoric in a quintessentially American vein, grating as it may sometimes be, is not the same as the true-believer zeal of the ideologue. After all, just look at the different consequences of these ways of thinking.
I'd be interested in learning what anyone out there thinks of Dornan's argument....
