In the 1940s and 1950s, George Frost Kennan, Reinhold Niebuhr, and William Appleman Williams presented differing assessments of the effectiveness of American foreign policy as it was applied, as well as differing contentions as to how it should be applied. American foreign policy is examined in this paper within the critical perspectives of Kennan, Niebuhr, and Williams as that policy was applied during the periods immediately preceding and during the Korean War.
Although the perspectives of Niebuhr and Williams with respect to the conduct of American foreign policy were couched in different terms, the underlying approaches they proposed were often quite similar. Kennan, by contrast, tended to differ dramatically from both Niebuhr and Williams with respect to how American foreign policy should be conducted.
Niebuhr though that the compelling justification for democracy as an institution was not well served by American foreign policy.1 In essence, Niebuhr thought that often the practice of American was often inconsistent with democratic principles because it was often characterized by an irresponsible and uncontrolled use of power. He unabashedly advocated the incorporation of Christian principles in both the development and application of American policy.2 Niebuhr feared particularly the growing reliance on technological means of achieving foreign __________
1Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1944), 119 152.
policy outcomes, as opposed to a stronger reliance on traditional moral values in conjunction with technological innovations. He also objected to the American penchant to dismiss as unimportant and irrelevant the positions and opinions of sovereign countries where such positions and opinions conflicted with American views.3 Niebuhr had no trouble in seeing the need for the United States to counter the growing power of the Soviet Union, as he h...