Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism

by James Burnham

President Kennedy affirmed this “strategy of peace” (as his concluding phrase correctly named it, since the plan of action takes Peace as the supreme value or goal) in his address of June 10, 1963, at American University in Washington: “I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss . . . the most important topic on earth: peace. . . . I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. . . . We have no more urgent task.” With strict logic the President added the necessary corollary respecting weaponry: “Our primary long-range interest in negotiating [about arms control] is general and complete disarmament.” His chief aide for policy planning, the liberal ideologue Walt Whitman Rostow, had included the third and completing link of the logical chain in The United States in the World Arena: “It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty and the basis for the existence of an international arena of power, it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end of nationhood as it has been historically defined.”7