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his policy to the experience of his people will doom himself to sterility; witness French policy since World War I.

One of the crucial challenges confronting a society is therefore the capacity to produce a leadership group capable of transcending the experience of that society. And here our sudden emergence as the major Power in the free world presents particular difficulties. The qualities of our leadership groups were formed during the period when our primary concerns were domestic. Politics was considered a necessary evil and the primary function of the state was the exercise of police powers. Neither education nor incentives existed for our leadership groups to think in political or strategic terms. This was compounded by our empiricism with its cult of the expert and its premium on specialization. The two groups which are most dominant in the higher levels of government, industry and the law, can serve as an illustration. The rewards in industry, particularly large-scale industry, are for administrative competence; they therefore produce a tendency to deal with conceptual problems by administrative means, by turning them over to committees of experts. And the legal profession, trained to think in terms of discrete individual cases, produces a penchant for *ad hoc* decisions and a resistance to the "hypothetical cases" inherent in long-range planning. Our leadership groups are therefore better prepared to deal with technical than with conceptual problems, with economic than with political issues. Projected on the Washington scene, they often lack the background to cope with a developing political and strategic situation: each problem is dealt with "on its merits," a procedure which emphasizes the particular at the expense of the general and bogs down planning in a mass of detail. The absence of a conceptual framework makes it difficult for them even to identify our problems or to choose effectively among the proposals and interpretations with which our governmental machinery is overloaded.

This explains many postwar Soviet successes. Whatever the qualities of Soviet leadership, its training is eminently political and conceptual. Reading Lenin or Mao or Stalin, one is struck by the emphasis on the relationship between political, military, psychological and economic factors, the insistence on finding a conceptual basis for political action and on the need for dominating a situation by flexible tactics and inflexible purpose. And the internal struggles in the Kremlin ensure that only the most iron-

REFLECTIONS ON AMERICAN DIPLOMACY 55

nerved reach the top. Against the Politbureau, trained to think
in general terms and freed of problems of day-to-day administra-
tion, we have pitted leaders overwhelmed with departmental
duties and trained to think that it was a cardinal sin to transgress
on another's field of specialization. To our leaders, policy is as a
series of discrete problems; to the Soviet leaders it is an aspect
of a continuing political process. As a result, the contest between
us and the Soviets has had many of the attributes of any contest
between a professional and an amateur: even a mediocre profes-
sional will usually defeat an excellent amateur, not because the
amateur does not know what to do, but because he cannot react
sufficiently quickly or consistently. Our leaders have not lacked
ability, but they have had to learn while doing and this has im-
posed too great a handicap.

To be sure, many of the shortcomings of our leadership groups
reflect the very qualities which have made for the ease of rela-
tionships in American society. The condition for our limited gov-
ernment has been the absence of basic social schisms, the regula-
tion of many concerns not by government fiat but by "what is
taken for granted." A society can operate in this fashion only if
disputes are not pushed to their logical conclusions, and if dis-
agreements are blunted by the absence of dogmatism. And in fact
the fear of seeming dogmatic permeates our social scene. Most
opinions are introduced with a disclaimer which indicates that
the proponent is aware of their contingency and also that he
claims no superior validity for his own conclusions. This produces
a preference for decisions by committee, because the process of
conversation permits disagreements to be discovered most easily
and adjustments made before positions have hardened. Our de-
cision-making process is therefore geared to the pace of conversa-
tion; even departmental memoranda on which policy decisions
are ultimately based are written with an eye to eventual com-
promise and not with the expectation that any one of them will
be accepted in its entirety.

It would be wrong to be too pessimistic. No one would have
believed when World War II ended that the United States would
assume commitments on such a world-wide scale. Our shortcom-
ings are imposing only because of the magnitude of the threat
confronting us. Moreover, the performance of the United States,
for all its failings, compares favorably with that of the other
nations of the non-Soviet world. Our difficulties in foreign policy

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

are therefore only a symptom—and by no means the most obvious
—of an inward uncertainty in the free world. To be sure, democ-
racies by the nature of their institutions cannot conduct policy
as deviously, change course as rapidly or prepare their moves as
secretly as dictatorships. But the crisis of the non-Soviet world
is deeper. The tragic element in foreign policy is the impossibil-
ity of escaping conjecture; after the "objective" analysis of fact
there remains a residue of uncertainty about the meaning of
events or the opportunities they offer. A statesman can often
escape his dilemmas by lowering his sights; he always has the
option to ignore the other side's capabilities by assuming it has
peaceful intentions. Many of the difficulties of the non-Soviet
world have been the result of an attempt to use the element of
uncertainty as an excuse for inaction. But certainty in foreign
policy is conferred at least as much by philosophy as by fact;
it derives from the imposition of purpose on events.

This is not to say that we should imitate Soviet dogmatism. A
society can survive only by the genius that made it great. But we
should be able to leaven our empiricism with a sense of urgency.
And while our history may leave us not well enough prepared to
deal with tragedy, it can teach us that great achievement does
not result from a quest for safety. Even so, our task will remain
psychologically more complex than that of the Soviets. As the
strongest and perhaps the most vital Power of the free world we
face the challenge of demonstrating that democracy is able to
find the moral certainty to act without the support of fanaticism
and to run risks without a guarantee of success.