ABSTRACT
Planning activity in Washington followed basically the lines established by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in New York, readjusted to the changing needs of politics and the war. The CFR proposals also amply reflected the idea-criterion of power, and hence national security, which drew on the principle of law and order according to the rules of the US political system. The sudden collapse of the "intermediate system" in the summer of 1940, a system that had so ineptly guided the world through the twenty years between the wars, triggered new theories on security that evolved as the dynamics of the war and postwar developments gradually increased the field of application. The metaphor of the pearl and the oyster captures that sense of duality, the mixture of "diffidence and ambition" toward the outside world that has characterized US policy since World War II.
