“The Administration’s defense budget politics neither serve our national interest nor promote common existence. They lead us into unwise adventures by making it harder to distinguish between real threats and unreal snares.”
Our Quote of the Week comes from Sargent Shriver’s 1975 position statement, Toward a Democratic Foreign Policy, in which he presents a thorough assessment of the issues that a country as influential as the United States should consider when protecting its national interests. The statement was written as part of Shriver’s platform as he campaigned to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States. Among the points that Shriver covers in the statement are:
- that leading by instilling fear can only cause dysfunction;
- that stressing our common existence is crucial when dealing with international issues;
- that our contemporary challenges, which he lists as “world recession and inflation, food and fuel distribution, environmental decay and population growth” are rapidly evolving and affect the international community as a whole; and
- that the United States must do better at safeguarding democracy at home as well as abroad: that the two are, in fact, intertwined.
Indeed, Shriver insists that we must uphold the same democratic principles that we aspire to live by inside our borders.
“We must have a foreign policy that represents what is best in us and in our history. We must be what we say we are. A democratic foreign policy must reflect these values—faith in the people, willingness to sponsor change, and a commitment to openness and constitutional procedure. For America, there can be no other choice.”
Shriver does not shy away from pointing out the country’s foreign policy errors, referring to the Vietnam war as “not merely a tactical error, the wrong war fought on unfavorable terrain”, and criticizing the support of “dictators and regimes indifferent to the plight of their peoples.”
Re-reading this paper in 2026, we continue to find passages that feel particularly relevant. We close with an insight that our current leaders would do well to reflect on:
“Our international strength lies not only in our arms but in our hearts. We cannot buy or force the respect of other nations. We can only earn it. We can show we understand their problems while working on our own. We can recall that nations are collections of people, not markers on an international game board, and that the measuring stick for our actions must therefore be the effect on people’s lives within the United States and abroad. And we can welcome change if it serves people’s needs, remembering the change that served our needs two hundred years before. [...] We first must recognize in our foreign policies that we are part of a world of people, not just governments.”
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