IRVINE, CA--The view that self-interest is morally tainted is what drives America's ineffectual foreign policy toward destruction, says Peter Schwartz in his new book: The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America. It is the cause, he maintains, of our failing war against terrorism.

In this clear, uncompromising manifesto, Mr. Schwartz calls for a radically different foreign policy--"one based entirely on self-interest." Repudiating any dichotomy between the moral and the practical, he advocates a policy under which a nation's interests are "measured by only one standard: the individual liberty of its citizens, and under which the government has but one obligation: to use force in defense of that liberty against all physical threats." The advocates of such a foreign policy would reject any duty to sacrifice the wealth and the lives of Americans to the needs of other countries. They would disclaim any obligation to seek international approval before deciding to use force to safeguard America.

"Instead, they would intransigently uphold our self-interest-not as a matter of amoral expediency, as advocated by the impractical pragmatists and their school of 'realpolitik,' but rather as a moral principle, a principle that is in keeping with America's founding values."

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Peter Schwartz, editor and contributing author of Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution by Ayn Rand, is chairman of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA.

To arrange for national-media interviews contact larryb@aynrand.org or (800) 365-6552 ext. 213.