Forty Years of the Green Lantern Theory of Foreign Policy

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Who wrote this?

Crucial throughout the process of _______decision-making was a conviction among many policy-makers: that ______ posed a fundamental test of America's national will. Time and again I was told by men reared in the tradition of ______ that all we needed was the will, and we would then prevail. Implicit in such a view, it seemed to me, was a curious assumption that _______s lacked will, or at least that in a contest between ______ and Anglo-Saxon wills, the non-______s must prevail. A corollary to the persistent belief in will was a fascination with power  and an awe in the face of the power America possessed as no nation or civilization ever before. Those who doubted our role in ______ were said to shrink from the burdens of power, the obligations of power, the uses of power, the responsibility of power. By implication, such men were soft-headed and effete.

That's James C. Thomson, Jr., a former JFK and LBJ advisor on East Asian affairs, writing about Vietnam for The Atlantic in 1968. Hat tip James Fallows.

I try to avoid making too many Vietnam analogies, but it does seem that large bureaucracies, when they fail, are doomed to fail in similar ways for similar reasons. The pattern of shutting out specialists, a stubborn belief that things will work if only more time and effort are given, and an unwillingness to take the time to know your enemies seem to be the common elements.

—Signed, not Ezra Klein