This article deals with the way that America handles it’s foreign policies, either dealing with ideology or looking at the way things have historically occurred. This article mainly addresses the problems that occurred with the Soviet Union through the mid-20^th century.

At first, Ideology and Historic action are compared to get the idea of what each one stands for, but through out the rest of the article you look at the effect of Ideology and how a simple historic view point would be much more beneficial. Ideology creates problems in politics and in the way that the government deals with it’s occurring problems. In the end it is said that decisions based on history are a much safer way to run a country.

Do you rely on history or ideology when trying to protect a countries national interest? Americans, in the past have preferred hard evidence to what is considered theory, but at this time they were dealing with the idea of creating desired truths through conjured evidence and theory. America was turning from a private enterprise to a government-assisted economy. In dealing with the Soviet Union and the balance of power, America had to prove itself to be worthy before sticking its nose into other countries business. They did this with a historical approach, using experiments to show relations between actions and consequences. After the historical approach had already been used ideology began to play a lager part of the situation. The U.S. entered WW1 with the idea that the old balance of power was going to give way to a newer and much more dangerous balance, now seeing us as saviors "marrying national interest to idealistic hope."

The Soviet Union was seen by the Reagan administration as the root of all the problems, and they took an ideological way of approaching this. America was right, the Soviet Union was wrong and must be dealt with. The ideological approach was a large problem substituting economic models for reality. Ideology saw the Soviet situation as one that the historical solutions couldn’t fix; it saw the Soviets out for world domination alone. The Soviets themselves had an ideological point of view; "it too sees the enemy as unchanging and unchangeable." The idea that the two were looking at each other in ways other than historically elevated the seriousness of the situation vastly.

The United States facing the problem, insurgency of Central America by the Soviets, that demanded a large response. The American problem was " if you shape rhetoric and policy to what you regard as a predestined result, chances are that you will get the result predestined." They believed if the problem were left alone then Marxism would spread in the U.S., so America increased military support. America believed if they left this problem alone all credibility of our country would be lost. Americas use of ideology was a recipe for disaster.

The nuclear arms race was one of the most ridiculous effects that came from substituting theories and models for reality. The preoccupation with first-strike capabilities, and having more power than the Soviet Union created a budget eating competition for the upper hand. Ideologists made it worse, counting warheads, and forgetting that the U.S. already had the upper hand. The U.S. and the Soviet Union feed off of each-other, it had to be realized that reliance on bomb to save a country doesn’t matter in the time of nuclear weapons.

The end of the arms race came after a long time of worrying, and actually realizing the detrimental effects of such a situation. This race was dealing with the fate of humanity itself, just to outdo another country. The idea of peace, and patients was the only way to remedy this problem. "Mankind has no choice but to find ways to crawl back from the edge of the Faustian abyss and to move toward the extinction of the nuclear race: better this with its difficulties, than the extinction of the human race."

Ideology goes against what America was founded on, the constitution and the beliefs of our founding fathers. It was seen that ideology runs directly against American democracy. Leaders must attend to the popular needs rather than trying to achieve ideological gratification. "Ideology is the curse of public affairs because it converts politics into a branch of theology and sacrifices human beings on the thoughts of abstractions."