Ronald Steel, critic of US Cold War policy, dies at 92

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Vietnam is the graveyard for an image we had of ourselves: America as a defender of the oppressed, Mr. Steel wrote. In Vietnam, we confronted ourselves as an imperial power, fighting not for democracy but to demonstrate that communist-led wars of national liberation were not the wave of the future.

Mr Steels’ 1991 book on US foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union was a rare example of clarity, wisdom and intellectual integrity, one foreign policy analyst wrote.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Steel argued in Temptations of a Superpower (1995) that American foreign policy remained inconsistent because, he wrote, it was based on the activism of presidents promoting their own political interests and causes, and because America always saw itself as a policeman of the world, determined to guarantee stability in the world.

Praising the book, Alan Tonelson, a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute at the time, wrote in The New York Times Book Review: In a political climate where the labeling of all foreign policy dissenting voices as Isolationists are hailed in the media as responsible leadership, Mr. Steels’ essay is a rare example of clarity, wisdom and intellectual integrity.

Mr. Steel, in New Perspectives Quarterly in 1997, issued another warning.

The demise of the rival superpower, which was also the ideological challenger, resulted in no contraction of US global goals, he wrote. The free world has now spread to most of the world as anti-communism in American geopolitical strategy has been replaced by the amorphous concept of world order.

Ronald Lewis Sklut was born March 25, 1931 in Morris, Illinois, the older of two sons of Abe and Beatrice (Mink) Sklut. Her father, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, owned a clothing store. Ronald and his brother, Bruce, attended Morris Public Schools, 30 miles southwest of Chicago.

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