There is a curious unreality about the way in which Americans have been discussing foreign policy: they seem to lie speaking in terms having only tenuous relationship to reality. This partly explains why many people find discussions of Vietnam awkward and frustrating: their vocabulary is not equipped to cope with their country's behavior. This poverty of vocabulary stems from a more serious conceptual vacuum.

Part of the responsibility for this conceptual inadequacy lies in academia, where in the last two decades foreign policy has slipped sharply in appeal. In contrast to other areas of social science, foreign policy studies have adopted a non-theoretical—almost anti-theoretical-posture.

The reckless attack on United States foreign policy by the more extreme American critics during the past few years has far exceeded in shrillness and volume the irresponsible outhurst of the Joe McCarthy era. There has been an alarming deterioration in the quality of dialogue and debate on the vital issues of war and peace. This disquieting development cannot be explained, much less justified, as a plausible response to the occasional imprudent official statements that sectors of the press delight in exploiting. The virulent critics who attack the motives of the President and other high officials without substantiating evidence subvert civility and fair play and appear to reflect a profound and perhaps unconscious alienation from the mainstream of Western morality.

Ten years ago, in the space of eight months, between January 1 and August 17, 1960, sixteen independent states emerged in Africa. No previous period of history had seen such an upsurge of new sovereignty. For Americans, with their habitually peripheral and fantasy-laden view of the so-called Dark Continent, the emergence of states with such exotic names as Mali, the Ivory Coast, Chad, and Nigeria was regarded with a puzzlement and imperfect understanding which has prevailed for a decade. Vast tracks of desert, savannah, and rain-forest became states equal, in theory at least, with the, United States. France, and England.