There is a curious unreality about the way in which Americans have been discussing foreign policy: they seem to lie speaking in terms having only tenuous relationship to reality. This partly explains why many people find discussions of Vietnam awkward and frustrating: their vocabulary is not equipped to cope with their country's behavior. This poverty of vocabulary stems from a more serious conceptual vacuum.

Part of the responsibility for this conceptual inadequacy lies in academia, where in the last two decades foreign policy has slipped sharply in appeal. In contrast to other areas of social science, foreign policy studies have adopted a non-theoretical—almost anti-theoretical-posture.