Can we have some statesmanship, please?

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by Peter Jenkins | http://www.lobelog.com/can-we-have-some-statesmanship-please/

As I mentioned in a previous piece, I have been dipping into The Arrogance of Power, written by Senator William Fulbright in 1966. It has been a comforting experience in one respect. The divisions within the US foreign policy community that have been so apparent to European observers since 2001 have clearly been a characteristic of the world’s only Great Power since the senator offered his diagnosis 47 years ago. Yet the world has survived.
In another respect it has been troubling. The senator saw two tendencies that were evenly matched, and believed that the tendency he characterised as “moderate” could prevail. Yet over the last 12 years, the tendency he characterised as “full of a passionate intensity” (cf. “The Second Coming”, W.B. Yeats) has shown itself to be in rude health, whereas the moderate tendency seems to have suffered a loss of form.
Let me start to clarify what I am trying to say by a lengthy quote from the final chapter of The Arrogance or Power: