  What Uncle Sam Really Wants This is an amazing book that I've read a few pieces of in the past, and I was thinking about recently, and thought i'd pass along. It's by Noam Chomsky, the major linguist of the 20th century who also, as you may or may not know, is an active political commentator as well. The book was written in 1992. It's a summary of the goals and methods of post-WW2 US foreign policy in the large, based on Chomsky's research into high-level memos from the State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc. over the last 50 years. Many of the documents he cites were formerly classified; Chomsky spends a lot of time filing Freedom of Information Act petitions, finding out how US leaders actually make decisions amongst themselves, as opposed to what they say when they're in public. You can buy the book on Amazon, but for some reason, a little religious website has made the full text of the book available. Not certain how legal that is. urlLink http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/authors/chomsky/sam/sam.htm#_Toc515113637 ------------------------------- [Memo] NSC 68 is the hard-line extreme, and remember: the policies weren't just theoretical -- many of them were actually being implemented.
Now let's turn to the other extreme, to the doves. The leading dove was undoubtedly George Kennan, who headed the State Department planning staff until 1950 .
. . .
Kennan was one of the most intelligent and lucid of US planners, and a major figure in shaping the postwar world. His writings are an extremely interesting illustration of the dovish position. One document to look at if you want to understand your country is Policy Planning Study 23, written by Kennan for the State Department planning staff in 1948.
Here's some of what it says: we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity....To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives....We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.
The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better. PPS 23 was, of course, a top-secret document. To pacify the public, it was necessary to trumpet the "idealistic slogans" (as is still being done constantly), but here planners were talking to one another. 
