Stanley Hoffmann

Every nation sees itself as being in some way exceptional. Only the United States, though, has tried to develop foreign policies that reflect its exceptionalism. While other countries are content — or obliged — to practice a balance-of-power politics in the world, from the beginning most American leaders have argued that the United States, by […]

The horrors of September 11 confronted the United States with an extraordinary challenge and an extraordinary opportunity. The challenge was to increase our “homeland security” by measures that might have averted disaster, had they been implemented before the attacks, and that would minimize the risk of similar assaults in the future. The opportunity was to […]

It wasn’t its innocence that the United States lost on September 11, 2001. It was its naïveté. Americans have tended to believe that in the eyes of others the United States has lived up to the boastful clichés propagated during the Cold War (especially under Ronald Reagan) and during the Clinton administration. We were seen, […]

Of course America needs a foreign policy! The title of Henry Kissinger’s newbook suggests that it hasn’t had one recently–a thesis supported by his manycriticisms of President Bill Clinton’s diplomacy as well as by the statement,early in the book, that “in the face of perhaps the most profound and widespreadupheavals the world has ever seen,” […]