Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-10-2009

Abstract

Near mid-century the most influential journalist of the age, Walter Lippmann, appealed for a foreign policy rooted in American "vital interests" rather than a "fundamentalist" idealism. Even as he crafted a more realistic, less moralistic foreign policy, Lippmann was famously developing his controversial public philosophy grounded on a universal Natural Law. At this intersection between a nation oriented around self-evident Truth and an international order ruled by naked power and interests, Walter Lippmann produced a hard-headed via media lamentably rare in an ideological age. We have much to learn from this great American stoic whose life's work was to educate dispassionately a passionate public.

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