Here he was a guy from Nebraska and yet his worldview mirrored what I think of as the Council on Foreign Relations worldview of the 1970s — disdain for a foreign policy built explicitly around values, and esteem for a foreign policy built around a narrow conception of interests.
Think of DARPA and the National Institutes of Health, which bestow grants of capital out of conceptions of public interest rather than return on investment.
Many argue that more traditional liberal conceptions of the interests or rights that individuals have, and so of what activities can cause harm to them, is too narrow.
They were introduced to different concepts of public interest and were introduced to the idea that one conception of public interest would insist that any trade-off between common interests in confidentiality and health improvement was for reasons that the public would find accessible and acceptable.
I'm tempted to a cynical rebuttal to my own suggestion: This administration spouts democracy and freedom but I suspect there is some conception of national interest that will work to ensure that WE remain the authoritative force rather than some multi-lateral entity.
These include Hayek's conception of the interest rate as an intertemporal price and his idea that changes in the money supply can be an important cause of discoordination, particularly as those changes affect the ability of prices to accurately reflect relative scarcities.
Nevertheless, as Kant's terminology suggests, his conception of this interest may have remained more intellectual and moralistic than Herder himself would prefer.
The effects of this narrower conception of corporate interest have been mixed.
This is not even realpolitik, but a simplistic, board-game conception of national interest and patriotism, in which America "wins" by deploying as many natural resources as possible (never mind that harnessing "untapped shale, oil, and natural gas" is entirely inconsistent with "reviving America's coal industry").
