3
than any of his predecessors to explain openly the general outlines of what the administration of
which he was a part was trying to do.”
2
The simultaneous instruction of the public in and
interaction with foreign leaders on issues of international relations, which Kissinger seems to
have attempted, must at least be considered a possibility.
Nor are the content of the lesson and the method of instruction uncontested. Both issues
are in fact highly controversial–never more so than when the government of the world’s pre-
eminent power has determinedly gone beyond the traditional “high politics” of foreign policy,
conducted primarily for material stakes along the primarily confidential corridors of power, to
embrace a “public diplomacy” of enlarged scope and ambition. It may therefore be as well to
define what is meant here by teaching or learning “liberty”, with the domestic public constituting
the class and national actions abroad forming the lesson.
The Complexities of Liberty
2
John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar
American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 305, 306.
It is the assumption of this paper, first, that liberty means more, indeed, much more, than
the simple desire and ability to do exactly as one pleases. The ancient distinction between liberty
and license contends that there exist certain natural ends toward which humans are directed; in
the fulfillment of these ends they become truly human, in the sense of coming closer to the
realization of the naturally ordained rational and spiritual capacities that define human beings and
distinguish them from other forms of life. If one gives oneself over to the satisfaction of every
low passion, then one may be entirely free from external restraint (and therefore free in that very
Convention