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Senator J. William Fulbright Is Remembered Today Primarily for the Scholarship Program That Bears His Name

But a broader look at Fulbright’s legacy reveals him as one of the most prescient critics of militarism and the “imperial presidency”—lessons that apply more than ever today.

On August 1, 1946, President Truman signed the Fulbright Act into law, creating what would become one of the world’s most prestigious educational exchange programs. Eight decades later, “Fulbright” has become shorthand for international scholarship, as hundreds of thousands of students, researchers, and educators have crossed borders under its banner. But somewhere along the way, we forgot the philosophy that animated the program—a radically different vision of how the United States should engage the world.

Its architect, Senator J. William Fulbright, was one of the 20th century’s most incisive critics of American militarism. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Cold War and the Vietnam era, Fulbright watched US global leadership grow through overwhelming military power and concentrated executive authority. Long before phrases like “forever wars” or the “national security state” entered the political lexicon, he warned that the greatest danger facing American democracy was not adversaries abroad but the gradual acceptance of militarism as the central orientation of foreign policy. That warning deserves another hearing.

In the aftermath of World War II, Senator Fulbright introduced Senate Bill 1440 in order to establish an international educational exchange program as a form of peace-building and grassroots diplomacy. The legislation declared its purpose to “exchange students, create a better understanding of our mutual problems, and promote friendly relations, while avoiding possible ill feelings between Nations resulting from inability to meet obligations set up in accordance with traditional methods.”

It is these “traditional methods” of foreign policy—zero-sum competition, military intervention, and covert operations—that Fulbright spent nearly his whole career challenging.

Writing in his 1989 book The Price of Empire, Fulbright called attention to the failures of US foreign policy by outlining the central pathologies he believed had come to define US engagement abroad. Fulbright argued that a “Cold War psychology” had conditioned Americans to mistake confrontation for security. Nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of international politics, he wrote, yet policymakers continued to rely on orthodox assumptions about balance-of-power competition and military superiority. Rather than recognizing humanity’s shared interest in avoiding catastrophe, the United States locked itself into an arms race whose logic was, in Fulbright’s words, “suicidally irrational.”

Fulbright was equally troubled........

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