The title piece for The Present Danger had appeared in the February 1980 issue of Commentary. If the United States is to survive as a free society, Podhoretz argued, it must reaffirm the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which pledged, in that president's words, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure” and thereby to “contain” the spread of left-wing totalitarianism. The Truman Doctrine had been most eloquently articulated by George F. Kennan in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs, July 1947). Soviet expansionism was something that, Kennan said, “can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”

Counterforce had a military as well as political dimension, as was demonstrated by what Podhoretz called our “unremarkable” decisions to intervene in Korea and Vietnam. Our goal, in either instance, wasn't to roll back communism, as the doctrine's more hawkish right-wing critics wanted to do, but, by reestablishing recognized borders between north and south, at least halt it. And why was this America's job? Kennan's peroration was squarely within the tradition of the country's exceptionalism: