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This chapter introduces Sastri to the readers, and frames his contributions and role as a diplomat within the broader project of liberal internationalism as well as India’s diplomatic history. There is an urgent need to rescue liberal internationalism from its white, Wilsonian garb, especially as reflections on its current relevance and future have become rampant. Sastri needs to be read as a protagonist in his own right who shaped liberal internationalism of the era, and not an appendage to Woodrow Wilson’s grand-scheme of liberal internationalism. The introduction lays out how this project touches on the specific as well as general nodes of Liberal Internationalism, drawing out their connections and linkages. Further, it explains the relevance of Sastri to the past as well as the present of Indian diplomacy.

While the ideological inspiration of Woodrow Wilson on American liberal internationalism has been well investigated, less well understood are subsequent influences within the defining ideology of the years of American global ascendancy. Liberal internationalism during the Cold War is often portrayed as a kind of default that arose from idealistic high-mindedness, the novelty of American global experience during World War II, and the bipartisan consensus of sustained anticommunism. However, new scholarship on the career of J. William Fulbright, as well as fresh research on the influence of the Fulbright exchange program overseas, shows the ongoing role of American culture and American political institutions as powerful fashioners of the ideological consensus that defined US foreign policy in these years. These cultural and political influences include a key racial dimension and a prevailing faith in the wisdom of political elites as makers of US foreign policy. Other dimensions of liberal internationalism, including prevailing American gender notions, modernization impulses, and a later critique of American militarism, are evident in Fulbright’s evolving public career, which originated in idealistic support of the United Nations, came to embrace the special mission of the United States in a world of bipolarity, and ended with the senator one of the most vocal critics of a misguided American militarism in Vietnam. The Fulbright exchange program likewise shifted over time in response to many of the same impulses, though, unlike the senator, whose political influence was for long shielded by his electoral invulnerability, it has been vulnerable to shifting political forces both at home and abroad.

For decades after World War II, Senator J. William Fulbright was one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers in the United States. Especially given the importance of the eponymous academic exchange program he founded, he is often held as an avatar of the midcentury American liberal internationalist philosophy that undergirded postwar US foreign policy. From his early notoriety as a leading foreign policy spokesperson to his long-standing perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he helped carve out an active role for the United States in the world and an approach that defined American global hegemony. His views were not consistent over time, however, and he would undergo a long period of evolution. Starting out during the war as an early advocate of a “one-world” approach to global cooperationalism, he would become by the Vietnam era a critic of many of the liberal assumptions that he had famously championed. His career thus represents not only key consistencies in US postwar foreign policy but many of the fundamental internal contradictions that bipartisan consensus had disguised for many years.

This chapter examines J. W. Fulbright’s reputation as a critic of the US empire through a close analysis of his major publications on US foreign policy. It argues that he attempted to reform the tactics of American empire rather than undermine the larger strategy of US dominance. Ultimately, it concludes that his ability to diagnose the causes of US imperialism were limited by his own devotion to the ideology of liberal internationalism that undergirded US foreign policy for most of the twentieth century.

This chapter examines how crises in Cuba, Panama, and the Dominican Republic led Senator J. William Fulbright to question prevailing Cold War orthodoxy and to advocate an alternative internationalism rooted in self-determination. It argues that his support for self-determination in Latin America drew on his defense of southern autonomy within the United States and traces how he overlooked similarities between civil rights activism at home and revolutionary nationalism abroad. The chapter also describes how Fulbright antagonized President Lyndon Johnson and undermined the possibility of bettering relations with the Soviet Union during the 1960s.