Around the Edge of War

With Around the Edge of War: A New Approach to the Problems of American Foreign Policy, John Forth Amory wrote a thought-provoking book examining several approaches to United States foreign policy. A Washington expert at the time of first publication in 1961, Amory was critical of the tendency in Washington to “over-think” a problem, and advocated a return to Jeffersonian principles as a beginning in the search of reasonable alternatives to present policy.

“Our primary purpose is to help Americans think about our foreign policy as a whole, about how it is made, whence derived, and whether it has been right or wrong in terms of the whole national interest and pragmatically in terms of results. We want especially to lead Americans to think of people, of men, women and children; for we believe that in this period of military stalemate the only remaining weapons that can be used, for or against us, are the people of the earth, whom Jefferson defined as the only legitimate source of power—the great majorities who, after millennia, are coming into their own. We think that the safety of the United States, the moral health of the American people and the survival of our national freedoms depend on whether we go with this swelling tide of people or against it.”—John Forth Amory, Foreword