Toggle open close Contemporary American debates over the character of our foreign policy can be frustrating because of the partiality or one-sidedness of the clashing views. At the extremes, we find realists, who elevate national interest and downplay the role of morality in foreign policy, arguing with idealists, who talk as if a truly moral foreign policy must be altruistic and not rooted in the country’s concern for its own well-being. In the public arena, we find the proponents of American intervention in the politics of other nations criticized by noninterventionists or isolationists. We sense that each of these perspectives has something to be said for it, that each latches on to a part of the truth but is nevertheless incomplete in itself. Surely, we think, a sensible foreign policy will be guided both by attention to the national interest and by a decent respect for the universal truths proclaimed in our Declaration of Independence and that, rather than make an absolute principle of intervention or nonintervention, the nation will instead conduct its foreign policy by prudently weighing all of the relevant considerations.