July / August 1987
American Purpose
Issue 6, Volume 1

Publication Date: July 1, 1987
Posted: Wednesday, July 7, 1987

This issue includes 'Calhoun's Heir, or the Balkanization of American Foreign Policy'; 'The Struggle for the Catholic Human Rights Revloution'; 'On His Mind'; 'The Moral Case for Democracy'; and 'In Brief'.


In This Issue :

Calhoun's Heir, or the Balkanization of American Foreign Policy
Of the possible arguments that the bicentennial of the Constitution might have engendered, perhaps one of the least likely is the question of who, in our federal system, is responsible for U.S. foreign policy. That, at least, seemed settled two hundred years ago. Having had some experience, on tariff issues, with the chaos that came from state and local governments dealing with foreign countries, the Framers of the Constitution of 1787 gave the national government sole powers over the design and conduct of foreign relations. If there were to be constitutional debates over foreign policy during this bicentennial biennium, one would have anticipated brisk arguments over the War Powers Act, or the congressional role in the foreign policy process, or the doings, covert and otherwise, of the intelligence agencies. But governors and foreign policy? Mayors and foreign policy? City councils and county commissioners and foreign policy? That was settled long ago.  [More]

The Struggle for the Catholic Human Rights Revloution
That the Catholic Church, in the United States and indeed throughout the world, has become a major factor in shaping the debate over war and peace, security and freedom, is now widely acknowledged. The deep divisions within the church over its address to these central problems on the human agenda are, perhaps, less well known. They came into particularly sharp focus this past spring.  [More]

On His Mind
When A. M. Rosenthal retired some months back as executive editor of the New York Times, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review marked the event with the appropriate acknowledgement: that the Times was (goddamit) the best newspaper in the world. Mr. Rosenthal's performance at the helm of the paper -- the people he hired and fired; the tone he set; the news judgment he displayed -- undoubtedly had much to do with both the accolade and the parenthetical qualification.  [More]

The Moral Case for Democracy
Starting an Argument
As noted in the May/June 1987 issue of AMERICAN PURPOSE, a grant to the James Madison Foundation from the United States Institute of Peace is funding a year-long seminar of scholars and foreign policy practitioners on basic issues in the debate over ethics, war, and peace. The May seminar was built around a paper by Richard John Neuhaus, who sketched nine propositions aimed at starting a new argument in the American religious community over the moral claims of the world's democrats and the relationship of those claims to the pursuit of peace. We hope our readers will be interested in taking up the cudgels on the Neuhaus propositions, which follow:  [More]

In Brief
Dr. Anatoly Koryagin, the psychiatrist released from the gulag several months ago, is what North African Christianity in the third and fourth centuries would have called a "martyr-confessor": a man who has survived torture for the faith (in Koryagin's case, for protesting the political abuse of psychiatry in the USSR) and who thereby has a special claim on our attention. The views of dissidents who have suffered grievously for their convictions are not the only views that have to be accounted for in thinking through a peace strategy for the United States; but they ought to be engaged with great respect. Therefore, we note the following from the heroic Anatoly Koryagin:  [More]