Redefining the National Interest

N at o ' s m i L i ta R y intervention in Kosovo dramatically raises a larger problem: how should the United States define its interests in today s world? After the collapse of the Soviet Union, what are the limits of Americas concerns abroad? Can one define interests conventionally in the information age? The is a slippery concept, used to describe as well as prescribe foreign Hence the considerable debate about it. Some scholars have even regretted the waning of the very idea of a interest today. Writing in these pages, Samuel P. Huntington argued recently that without a sure sense of national identity, Americans have become unable to define their national interests, and as a result subnational commercial interests and transnational and nonnational ethnic interests have come to dominate foreign policy. For almost five decades, the containment of Soviet power provided a North Star to guide American foreign From a longer historical perspective, however, the Cold War was the anomalous period, and even it involved some bitter disputes over where our interests lay?during the Vietnam War, for example. Before World War II, confusion was more often the rule. For example, ethnic differences colored appraisals of whether the United States should enter World War I. Peter