This paper reviews briefly the close relationship that foreign language research has sustained with social and political power since the emergence of applied linguistics as a field of scientific inquiry and, more recently, with the demands of economic competitiveness and national security. It examines two debates that capture well the conflicting demands currently placed on foreign language researchers and educators: the demand by a global economy for both communicative and intercultural competence, and the demand by the U.S. government for speakers with "advanced levels" of language proficiency to serve the needs of national security. It argues that applied linguistic research, in its efforts to build a theory of practice, should reflect on its own conditions of possibility and openly discuss with practitioners not only the categorization, but also the framing, of real-world problems.