Great wars, the rise and decline of empires, observed differences in the power and influence of nations, and in general the uneven levels of national achievement in international politics have inspired much speculation and hypothesis-building. Men have felt the need for satisfying explanations of past events and patterns, and even greater need for plausible hypotheses with which to approach the future. The last seventy-five years or so have witnessed a bumper crop of hypotheses designed to account for or to anticipate the ordering of political relationships in the society of nations. One characteristic of most of these activities has been a persistent search for the “master variable” that would provide a simple yet plausible and satisfying basis for explaining or predicting the ordering of political relationships among nations.

Asian studies have long since ventured beyond the traditional limits of Orientalia to embrace history and the social sciences; they have not as yet, however, applied the insights of international relations to an area framework. Similarly, international relations specialists have all but ignored the relevance of their discipline to Asia. The purpose of this article is to help bridge the serious gap between these two fields.

Defense policy and civil-military relations are now well established fields for political science. They raise problems that are important and exciting in their own right and as dramatic instances of general institutional problems of policy-making and control. Comparative and particular aspects of this field should be appreciated. What are the special characteristics of the Australian type of situation?

With the exception of Libya, Egypt, the Sudanese Republic, and Ethiopia, where no political parties exist, some variation of the single-party political system or a distinctive tendency in that direction may be found in nearly all of the independent African states. That this should have come to pass within the relatively short period of the rise of African states has been a surprise to some observers of African nationalist movements and parties during the colonial period—who were rather sanguine about the prospects of Western-type democracy and party systems in Africa—as well as to the colonial powers themselves (especially Britain and France)—who presumably assumed that their policies of decolonization in Africa were providing the institutional framework within which Western-type party systems and politics would prevail.

The long-time neglect of the military establishment by the economics profession at large is now in the process of being rectified. It hardly seems necessary to justify this awakening interest. Since resource allocation is fundamental in military problems, the economist, whose primary interest is the logic of the allocative process, is particularly well-qualified to make a contribution. To be sure, this contribution is purely formal. Economics helps to select and frame the questions that should be asked, but the data necessary for the decision-maker to make a choice must be supplied from elsewhere. Though economics may be lacking in substantive content, in that it tells how to choose rather than what to choose, nevertheless such clarification of the logic of choice is not useless to the decision-maker.

An evaluation of British foreign policy towards Nazi Germany is still overlaid in England by political controversy. The two main political parties cannot deny their descent from the parties that confronted each other in the 1930's. The question of responsibility for that tragically unsuccessful foreign policy and for the ensuing war still produces heated reproaches in the political arena and equally heated debates among historians. The belief that, had Britain taken the “right line,” the war could have been prevented is still very strong. In the words of the Oxford historian, A. L. Rowse: “There was a hope then, and it did matter what line we took; during that last decade this country exercised a leading influence in Europe and still held a position of leadership in the English-speaking world. All that has changed: the real decisions are made elsewhere” (p. 4). Had Hitler been checked and the exhaustive blood-letting avoided, would the “real decisions” still be made in England? These nagging questions arise again and again on the rostrum, in the newspapers, in Senior Common Rooms. They have produced two sets of legends, of which various versions circulate. The Right asserts in Quintin Hogg's words that “the Left was never right,” and that by demagogically exploiting the public's pacifist temper it kept Britain from rearming so that the Conservative governments had no alternative to appeasement. The Left, on the other hand, developed the legend that Tories feared Soviet Russian communism more than Nazism and saw in Hitler the man who stemmed the Red tide from spreading westward. The Communist version of this goes further; it asserts that Neville Chamberlain, in true Machiavellian fashion, encouraged Hitler to expand towards the East in order to involve him in a serious conflict with Stalin.

A new mood of criticism is abroad in modern India. The mood can be characterized as one of dismayed re-evaluation of the entire direction of development efforts since Independence. Its character was presaged by the withdrawal from politics of J. P. Narayan as long ago as 1953, but it has only been in the last two years that the mood has begun to produce tangible political effects as well as to liven markedly public debate. To be sure, the efforts of the government of India have, for many years, come under sustained attack by leftists—notably, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party of India—the force of their argument being that those efforts have fallen far short of what is necessary for the certain amelioration of the lot of the mass of Indians. The singularity of the new wave of criticism is that it is producing a genuine conservatism, in the sense that its thrust is directed against the headlong pace, as well as the novelty, of Prime Minister Nehru's “socialist” program. The Swatantra Party, founded in 1961, is the organizational manifestation of this mood in active politics. It is being led by the redoubtable C. Rajagopalachari, former Vice-President of India and veteran of the Independence struggle. The central tenet of the new conservatism is that India's ills can be traced to overrapid innovation and too sweeping a departure from Indian ways. India's economic and social predicament is not amenable to Western social engineering, based primarily upon socialistic components within a democratic political frame; it can be bettered only by a return to the methods of spiritual appeal, individualistic effort, and tutelage in the fundamentals of political democracy that are associated with the revered name of Mahatma Gandhi.

Three recent texts on international relations, chosen out of the welter of new books and revisions that have appeared in the last few years, are the subject of this review. They have been picked because in some ways each is an excellent and important work. They are also books which in their strengths and weaknesses complement each other. Each author or set of authors has a distinct emphasis in outlook and in method, but at the same time the books exhibit a core of agreement about certain fundamental aspects of world politics today that indicates a growing consensus among contemporary analysts and scholars. A comparative review of this type can thus be used not only to evaluate the suitability of these books as texts and their contributions to international relations theory, but also to assess this consensus and to indicate its main outlines.

The necessity for books dealing with Congress and foreign policy is not immediately apparent. The authors of both volumes under review remind us that Congress is not central to foreign policy-making, and that foreign policy-making is not central to the business of Congress. The fact that this is so poses indirectly a question important to both books. Given the increasing impact of foreign affairs on America's future, is it enough for Congress merely to lobby, to warn, to complain, to snip at budgets and attempt to modify policies set by a burgeoning, technically specialized executive? Must not Congress change its ways, or shrink into an unequivocally subordinate place in our Constitutional system, as foreign affairs occupy more and more of the landscape?