This essay evaluates the Carter administration's behavior on national security questions and appraises the extent to which it meets Carter's initial professed national security goals. These goals include the intention to reduce military expenditures, to halt the nuclear arms buildup of the United States and U.S.S.R., to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons technology to additional countries, to cut U.S. arms exports, and to curtail overt and covert U.S. intervention in Third World countries. The analysis demonstrates that the Carter administration has violated its own professed goals and the security interests of the U.S. public. Carter's foreign policy, like that of preceding administrations, has been deficient because it has rigidly adhered to national interests too narrowly defined, and has not promoted structural solutions to problems that are structural in origin. To be successful, an alternative policy approach must decrease the prospects for war and inequity in the short run and advance a strategy for fundamental transformation of the international system in the long run. Such a foreign policy is proposed. Its political feasibility and value impact are examined in alternative U.S. responses to two concrete cases: the Iranian crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The essay concludes with eight guidelines for developing a new U.S. foreign policy that will serve the human interest. (Author)