i cant think: William Fulbright's "The Arrogance of Power"

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November 21, 2004

William Fulbright's "The Arrogance of Power"

While surfing the internets in my pajamas, as we bloggers often do, I ran across an interesting piece by Jim Lobe highlighting quotations from J. William Fulbright's 1966 book "The Arrogance of Power". In 1964 Fulbright was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a member of the Congress which passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution committing the U.S. to war in Vietnam.

Even as early as 1966 Senator Fulbright had some eerily prescient insights on the course of American foreign policy, insights which ring especially true in light of the Bush administration's foreign policy course during the last four years.

On the arrogance of power:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly 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. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.

On Unilateralism and support from traditional allies:

The United States is willing to defy allied opinion because of... an excess of pride born of power. Power has a way of undermining judgment, of planting delusions of grandeur in the minds of otherwise sensible people and otherwise sensible nations. As I have said earlier, the idea of being responsible for the whole world seems to have dazzled us, giving rise to what I call the arrogance of power, or what the French, perhaps more aptly, call le vertige de puissance, by which they mean a kind of dizziness or giddiness inspired by the possession of great power. If then, as I suspect, there is a relationship between the self-absorption of some of our allies and the American military involvement in Vietnam, it may have more to do with American vanity than with our friends' complacency.

On international law:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

Posted by bcoffee at November 21, 2004 01:24 AM