Listening to some philosophers indict the foreign policy of the United States since the Second World War, we hear merely a litany of horrors. There are horrible enough errors in the record to give all of us pause; but anyone who can mention that record without mentioning the fact that the United States withdrew its major forces from Europe while the Red Army was astride Europe, that it not only offered the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe but extended the offer to countries in the Communist orbit, that when the United States had the monopoly of atomic weapons and could have imposed its will on any nation of the world it offered to surrender that monopoly to an international authority—a concrete proposal for international socialism!—that it encouraged an agricultural and political revolution in Japan that restored it to greater heights of prosperity and with greater freedom than it ever enjoyed, that it has not ideologically interfered with its economic aid to Yugoslavia and other socialist and semisocialist regimes in Asia and Africa—anyone who fails to weigh these things and many others like them together with the errors in the balance of judgment is simply a propagandist.

(Sidney Hook, “Philosophy and Public Policy,” chap. 3 in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975], 73-87, at 85 [essay first published in 1970])