FOR those who believe that the foreign policy of the United States became unnecessarily expensive and demanding after mid-century, President Richard Nixon's foreign policy precepts, as embodied in his second inaugural, seemed promising enough. "The time has passed," he said, "when America will make every other nation's conflict our own, or make every other nation's future our responsibility, or presume to tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs." But even as the President insisted that every nation carried the responsibility for its own future, he added: "Let us build a structure of peace in which the weak are as safe as the strong, in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system, in which those who would influence others will do so by the strength of their ideas, not by the force of their arms."

Such rhetoric placed no visible limit on this country's external ambitions, for at what price can the weak be made as safe as the strong? The President, no less than his predecessors, sought to bridge two attractive, yet antithetical, formulations of the country's proper role, one anchored to a shared responsibility for reducing dangers of confrontation in a world of conflict, the other, to the self-assigned task of leading all nations toward a peaceful world order that, he said, would endure for generations.