“Vietnam is the graveyard of an image we held of ourselves: America as the defender of the oppressed,” Mr. Steel wrote. “In Vietnam we were confronted
“Vietnam is the graveyard of an image we held of ourselves: America as the defender of the oppressed,” Mr. Steel wrote. “In Vietnam we were confronted with ourselves as an imperial power, fighting not for democracy but to demonstrate that Communist-led ‘wars of national liberation’ were not the wave of the future.”
Even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mr. Steel contended, in “Temptations of a Superpower” (1995), that American foreign policy remained incoherent because, he wrote, it was based on activism by presidents promoting their own political interests and causes, and because America still viewed itself as a global policeman, determined to guarantee stability around the world.
Lauding the book, Alan Tonelson, a fellow of the Economic Policy Institute at the time, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “In a political climate where the labeling of all dissenting foreign policy voices as ‘isolationist’ is praised in the news media as responsible leadership, Mr. Steel’s essay is a rare example of clarity, wisdom and intellectual integrity.”
Mr. Steel, in “New Perspectives Quarterly” in 1997, sounded yet another warning.
“The disappearance of the rival superpower, which was also the ideological challenger, has not resulted in any contraction of American global goals,” he wrote. “The ‘free world’ has now been extended to virtually the entire world as anti-communism, in American geopolitical strategy, has been replaced by the amorphous concept of global order.”
Ronald Lewis Sklut was born on March 25, 1931, in Morris, Ill., the older of two sons of Abe and Beatrice (Mink) Sklut. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, owned a clothing store. Ronald and his brother, Bruce, attended public schools in Morris, 30 miles southwest of Chicago.
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