THE subject of this essay, based on personal experience, is the contrast between two views of international relations. I would say two perspectives if it were not that one of the views is distinguished by its lack of perspective. This is the view of the officials at the summit of government, for they find themselves perpetually preoccupied by urgent problems requiring immediate decision. In a great center of international decision like Washington, such officials, because they live in circumstances of constant crisis, have no choice but to follow the Biblical injunction to "take ...no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." They can never achieve the detachment to look beyond the emergency of each successive day.

Anyone who is brought into a position of high executive responsibility is likely to have in mind, at the moment of assuming it, some long-range goal that he means to achieve during his term of office. Like a sea captain who assumes command of a ship, he has the vision of a distant landfall and plots in imagination the course by which he means to make it. Once in office, however, once he has the ship under his nominal command (to pursue the simile), he finds that, in some perverse fashion, it continues to go its own way, obedient to forces over which he has no control. Or he finds that a succession of emergencies, each demanding his full attention, requires him constantly to postpone the realization of his original intention. A fire in the hold must be put out before anything else can be attended to. No sooner has it been put out than a leak is discovered; and when the leak has been stopped it transpires that the rudder is jammed. By the time the ship has at last been got under way, the approach of a hurricane requires that it be put on a course different from the one that had been projected. And so it goes. Long before the captain's term of office has expired he may have forgotten altogether the course he had originally had in mind and the landfall he had hoped to make. By that time he may be content merely to keep the ship afloat from one day to the next.