politics would always remain a contest among opposing interest groups. Political justice and stability would be achieved not by persuading those groups to observe the "commandment of love" but by confronting power with "countervailing power," as John Kenneth Galbraith put it in American Capitalism (1950). Neither central planning nor a return to economic competition among small producers, according to Galbraith, represented a viable strategy for industrial societies. The struggle between organized interest groups would continue, and political wisdom lay in the encouragement of counterorganization against groups that threatened to capture too much power—labor against capital, consumers against both. The same considerations applied to the international arena, as George Kennan, Walter Lippmann, and other self-proclaimed realists pointed out in the course of their attack on the kind of idealism typified by Woodrow Wilson, who wished to make the world safe for democracy by waging wars to end wars. Diplomacy had to be based on "national interest," just as domestic politics had to be based on interest groups.

By this time, Niebuhr's warning that such a politics could achieve only an "uneasy balance of power," at best, had long since been forgotten, even by Niebuhr himself. In The Irony of American History (1952), he ridiculed the "liberal hope of redeeming history" and commended the politics of countervailing power. Although Kennan's seemingly unqualified defense of "egoism" made him a little uneasy, he could no longer explain why it was no answer to the "sentimentalities and pretensions of yesterday." The "illusions of childlike innocency"—by this time a constant refrain in Niebuhr's political writing—presented a more inviting target for his invective. American national innocence, he maintained, prevented the nation from facing up to the responsibilities of world power and the need to oppose force with force. ^* He cited Hobbes on the intractability of

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These views made Niebuhr an effective apologist for American foreign policy in the age of "containment." In his biography of Niebuhr, Richard Fox claims that Niebuhr should not be seen as a cold warrior, but he provides plenty of evidence for a contrary interpretation. He shows, for example, that Niebuhr had little trouble overcoming his early reservations about John F. Kennedy and establishing cordial relations with the New Frontier. This evidence suggests that his initial reservations largely concerned matters of political style and that on substantive issues Niebuhr came to see eye to eye with those who identified political realism with American world domination.

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