Speaking before the U.N. General Assembly in September, 1973, Chancellor Willy Brandt said: “Where hunger prevails, there can be no peace in the long run. Where bitter poverty prevails, there can be no justice.” He called upon the Assembly members to adopt a position on the moral aspects of international coexistence. And he said something else, that there is a limit to the expansion of power—“a limit where power becomes transformed into impotence.”

His words had direct relevance to the relationship between the United States and the Third World. In the postwar period, in pursuit of its power aims, the United States concerned itself with ex-colonial countries primarily with the view of “saving” them, as political entities, from a dreaded “Communist conquest.”