I do not believe it is a selfish goal for us to insist that the overriding purpose of all American foreign policy should be the maintenance of the liberty and peace of our people in the United States, so that they may achieve that intellectual and material improvement which is their genius and in which they can set an example for all peoples. By that example we do an even greater service to mankind that we can do by billions of material assistance--and more than we can ever do by war.
-Robert Taft
There are a good many Americans who talk about an American century in which America will dominate the world. They rightly point out that the United States is so powerful today that we should assume a moral leadership in the world...The trouble with those who advocate this policy is that they really do not confine themselves to moral leadership...In their hearts they want to force on these foreign peoples through use of American money, and even, perhaps, American arms, the policies which moral leadership is able to advance only through the sound strength of its principles and the force of its persuasion. I do not think this moral leadership ideal justifies our engaging in any preventive war...I do not believe any policy which has behind it the threat of military force is justified as part of the basic foreign policy of the United States except to defend the liberty of our own people.
--Robert Taft
Before our system can claim success, it must not only create a people with a higher standard of living, but people with a higher standard of character––character that must include religious faith, morality, educated intelligence, self-restraint, and an ingrained demand for justice and unselfishness. In our striving for material things, we must not change those basic principles of government and of personal conduct which create and protect the character of a people.… We cannot hope to achieve salvation by worshiping the god of the standard of living. (A 1944 Program for the Republicans)
For the object of American foreign-policy, Taft argued repeatedly, is to protect and advance American national interests. Neutrality or intervention, alliances and restrictions upon armaments, international commercial agreements and assistance to other governments, peace or war, all must be determined by reference to the effects of such policies upon the security and the welfare of the United States of America. This principle abandoned, any government must be all at sea in its conduct of relations with other powers. The statesman not concerned primarily with the national interest is tossed about by every wind of doctrine; he pursues with imprudent passion vague ideological objectives, and soon finds himself mired in diplomatic and military quicksands....
Taft came to recognize limits to the postulate of the national interest; he learned that in an age of fanatic ideology, sometimes assistance to allies or to a common civilization must take precedence over the immediate national interest, narrowly interpreted. He desired, too, a comity of nations, governed by definite principles of justice, to which great states voluntarily should subordinate national appetites. But in the absence of an international order, and with allowance for the claims of the nation's allies and for military necessity, the national interest remained the only sure ground for the conduct of foreign relations....
