In the premier issue of this magazine, we stated the assumptions its editors shared:
--that the primary and overriding purpose of American foreign policy must be to defend and advance the national interest of the United States (an interest that encompasses the values and aspirations of the American people, as well as their security from external threat and their material well-being);
--that, for better or worse, international politics remains essentially power politics, and that the efficacy of military power in the conduct of foreign policy remains undiminished;
--that the Soviet Union constitutes the single greatest threat to America's interests, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
When the third of these assumptions was invalidated, The National Interest inaugurated the post-Cold War debate with a series of essays (later collected as a book, America's Purpose). Since then, the evolution of that national debate has not been encouraging. All too often defenders of foreign-policy activism have misidentified its critics (for example, describing as "isolationists" people who clearly are not); attacked their motives; and relied on a tendentious misreading of American history, according to which either generations of foolish isolation suddenly gave way to heroic internationalism in 1941 or 1945, or an unbroken tradition of high-minded idealism from the time of the Founding Fathers on effectively rules out realism as an approach to American foreign policy. The essays by Alan Tonelson and Jonathan Clarke in this issue on current and historic realignments in U.S. foreign policy viewpoints will, we hope, help to combat the simplifications and distortions of the debate as it has evolved.
