ABSTRACT
The true of one of the most striking features of American foreign policy after 1945: the vigorous debates, usually with strong ethical and moral features, about the most important international issues confronting the United States. If the public debate about American foreign policy has typically had a moral dimension, the actual subjects of that debate have varied over time. The Soviet Union refused to take part in the Marshall Plan, the program for European economic recovery that the United States sponsored, and prevented its eastern satellites from accepting American aid. The government paid attention to civil defense. Domestic programs with little discernible connection to military strength were linked to the Cold War. One concerned the kind of international order that would succeed the political and military arrangements of the Cold War.
