Being Neutral or Passive Involvement

"Our foreign policy since the end of the two World Wars has had the overall objective to prevent a change in the territorial status quö We have been afraid to take a step beyond it, and have instead anxiously waited for the next crisis to erupt¿ The other consequence of the contradiction within our overall foreign policy is our emphasis on military arrangements throughout the world¿ In our relations with our allies we have confused the sound principle of sharing information and consultation with the questionable principle of sharing the decisions themselves and even subordinating our own interests and preferences to those of our allies¿ We have lost initiative and mobility in our alliance policies because we have looked upon military policy as a self-sufficient technical enterprise divorced from political policy¿ This failing is the more serious as the Soviet Union has chosen the economic area as the battlefield where communism will win its decisive victory..." Hans J. Morgenthau