More than three decades ago, in a graduate class I was teaching at Georgetown University, there occurred one of those little epiphanies that later turn out to have much greater significance than initially appears. I was expounding on the foreign policy of one or another nineteenth-century American president – probably James K. Polk – and concluded my peroration by labeling it an example of a good foreign policy. A hand shot up. “Professor, why was it good?” What had seemed self-evident to me obviously was not. I doubt the answer I gave that day was at all satisfactory from the student's point of view. But the question began an intellectual odyssey on my part, a search for standards by which to judge the quality of foreign policy, that has ultimately led me to write the following pages.

In a sense, this is a book about one of the ingredients that makes for a good foreign policy, as well as a book about how one ought to define the term “good” with regard to the nation's external affairs. It is a book, in the broadest sense, about how to think productively about foreign policy. And its thesis is that effective thinking in this realm is necessarily strategic in nature: that is, consciously concerned with means as well as ends of policy, and with the relationship between them.