ABSTRACT
In the first volume of his insightful Democracy in America, written in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that “it seems as if all the minds of Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they follow the same route.”1 Over the following century there were a great many occasions on which American minds did not pursue the same route; but during World War II and the first twenty years of the Cold War a remarkable consensus once again emerged: general agreement about American foreign policy. President Franklin D.Roosevelt was able to lead the United States through its most popular war because the overwhelming majority of the American people profoundly believed that the nation was fighting for vital interests-territorial, economic, political-as well as for ideals of universal validity. Among these ideals were not only the “truths” and rights incorporated in the Declaration of Independence and the first ten amendments of the American constitution, but basic human values as well. The onset of the Cold War brought a continuation of the consensus. Just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese military leadership had posed palpable threats to American ideals and interests so too, people thought, did Josef Stalin-a brutal tyrant who had killed millions of his compatriots in the Soviet Union: the kulaks who stood in the way of collectivized agriculture; military officers who might threaten his internal hegemony; loyal party members and former close associates who knew of his crimes; the executioners; the executioners of the executioners; etc., etc. He imprisoned millions of others out of paranoid fear or irrational whim. He also presided over a hostile, messianic ideology that promoted revolution in other nations and rejected many of the norms of international behavior.
