(Following are excerpts, from a speech given by University Fellow George F. Kennan Wednesday in Sanders Theater. -- ed.)

...What I am talking about is the guiding motivation of foreign policy at any given time: what people think they are doing when they create it; what purposes they think they are serving; to what principles they believe themselves to be conforming.

Backward Glance

When one glances back at the past, one occasionally sees clear and coherent elements of concept in the thinking of the Federalist statesmen, and some fairly clear ones in the thinking of some of their successors down through the middle of the XIX century.

Obscurity--obscurantism, if you will--began to creep in, it seems to me, towards the end of the last century: as the task of rounding out our territory on this continent was completed, as the frontier disappeared, as those dangers of new European activity in the New World that had attended the Napoleonic wars and their aftermath receded into the past.

With that great transition, there crept into the ideas of Americans about foreign policy something that had not been there in the earlier days: a histrionic note, a note of self-consciousness, of pretention; a desire not just to be something but to appear as something, to appear as something greater perhaps than one actually was; the desire to play a role for the sake of playing a role, and to be seen by others as playing it; a desire to compel others to associate themselves with the ritual of self-esteem and self-glorification that was now becoming a regular feature of the rhetoric of American public life.

Imperialism

This manifested itself in various ways. It manifested itself on the one hand in the imperialism of the turn of the century: in the wave of expansionist fervor that carried us into possession of Hawaii and the Philippines, Puerto Rico and the Canala Zone: all places not contiguous to our national territory. It manifested itself also, strangely enough, in the growth among many Americans of a peculiar emotional and sentimental preoccupation with China and the Asian mainland--a preoccupation quite divorced from considerations of real national interest. And it manifested itself also in a curious enthusiasm for the establishment of legalistic criteria for the solution of international problems.

Statesmanship

To what extent this outlook came to dominate the mind of American statesmanship will become evident if we recall that just in the thirty-five years from 1898 to 1933 the United States government negotiated, signed and ratified a total of 97 international agreements, most of them bilateral ones, providing for the settlement of international disputes by arbitration and conciliation. This enormous diplomatic effort occupied much of the time of such eminent Secretaries of State as John Hay, Elihu Root, William Jennings Bryan, and Henry Stimson. The measure of realism behind it may be judged from the fact that the number of disputes actually arbitrated in subsequent years in connection with these treaties was exactly two, and for these acts of arbitration, the treaties themselves were in no way necessary.

Now all this, too, was concept, if you will--but concept founded on a rather childish view of world realities--founded also, I suspect, on a certain gratification of our self-esteem, insofar as it was so nice to see ourselves, high-mindedly devoted to the enthronement in international affairs of the principles of a law and orderly behavior, in contrast to the wicked powers of Europe, bent on intrigue, aggrandizement, and various other sorts of wickedness.

This outlook had, as an ideal for the future, its attractive, its appealing, sides; but intervening events have demonstrated, if they have demonstrated anything at all, that it is wholly inadequate as an approach to the great problems of twentieth-century international life.

Momentous

It was inconceivable that the issues of any war in which we>were involved could be less than momentous and decisive for the entire future of humanity. And out of this grew, then, the characteristic emotionalism of militancy--an emotionalism to which the democratic society, with its incorrigible tendency to self-love, is particularly prone: a state of collective hysteria in which you see your own side as the repository of all virtue, the adversary--on the other hand--as the embodiment of all that is evil and inhuman.

From this there logically flows, in turn, a conviction that victory, precisely because it will be triumph of all that is good over all that is good over all that is bad, will make all things possible--will open the gates to a new Utopia, whereas anything less than total victory would be a shameful compromise with the devil--a betrayal of all that is worth while. In his euphoria visions and concepts of the future peace become corrupted both by illusions of virtue and omnipotence addressed to oneself and equally unrealistic punitive aspirations unfortunately the conduct of the war effort, but interferes in the most serious way with any rational approach to the problems of devising a new and durable status quo to take the place of the one that is bound to be destroyed by the great upheaval of the war itself.