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"Since World War I, the United States has pursued the defense of Western civilization as a critical element of its own national interest. In his provocative reconsideration of that goal, Robert Strausz-Hupe asks whether the American people can still agree upon and adopt foreign policies consistently devoted to that end. He specifically examines popular and paradoxical attitudes that often undermine Washington's ability to defend American and Western interests, attitudes towards society and the state, politics and government, instruments of foreign policy and the people who wield them.As the backdrop for his analysis, Strausz-Hupe employs the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, reiterating Tocqueville's finding that the driving force of American life is its passion for equality and democracy. To this insight, Strausz-Hupe adds another: When one realizes that domestic politics is the driving force behind foreign policy, one understands why "the foreign policy of the United States cannot be other than the defense of democracy everywhere." Unlike some analysts, however, Strausz-Hupe believes that this proposition states only the problem for American statesmen not the answer. The answer, Strausz-Hupe concludes, lies in a universal federation of democratic states.In an appreciative foreword that examines the evolution of Strausz-Hupe thought, Walter A. McDougall demonstrates that this idealistic vision of a democratic world-state has been the unifying thread in Strausz-Hupe's intellectual career, not the calculating Realpolitik so often attributed to him. Democracy and American Foreign Policy will be of central importance to international relations specialists, policymakers, political scientists, and students of political philosophy. Its chapters include "Tocqueville and Nationalism"; "Tocqueville and Marx"; "The Hypocrisies of Egalitarianism"; "Foreign Policy and Interest Groups"; and "Isolationism and the New World Order.""--Provided by publisher.

The recent workers' revolution in Poland is discussed with reference to the repressive system of Soviet communism. It is suggested that whatever can be learned from recent events in Poland will not be sufficient to aid in solving the enigma of why the repressive tactics of the Soviet regime (to both those at home & those in conquered territory) have been inadequate in alienating "every sane & sensitive observer." A call is made for Western attention & analysis concerning the Polish situation: there is no cause to suspect the imminent collapse of communism in Poland. Western pursuit of economic policies with communist nations that stregthen them in their quest for world domination is strongly discouraged, with particular emphasis on the Polish crisis. D. Abrahams.

The workings of many factors have wrought political change the world over. Among these, the impact of scientific-technological development upon society has been the most powerful agent of political transformation. Obvious as this has been for
a long time, the progress of science and technology continues to outpace political creativity by a broad margin. Increasingly, political institutions are being left to accommodate themselves to the accomplished fact of scientific-technological progress— or to lose their functional significance. The logic of the political which alone can devise and master the social order, has become subservient to the logic of the apolitical. It is as if our society insists upon giving to Karl Marx's crude hypothesis what our economic experience withheld; we are about to validate Marxist determinism by the failure of our political imagination rather than the failure of our economic system. It seems as if the contrivances of science and technology now tell us not only what we should do with them but also how to order our lives. If this appearance is not deceptive — and it is proposed here to show that it is not — political change will befall our society like a natural event beyond man's control. To foreclose a disastrous deterioration of the political order and hence the human condition, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate philosophy of political change and, in the light of such a philosophy, policies which govern the integration of scientific and technological progress — the making of our "tools" — into political development. Part of what follow will be devoted to showing why the political needs to remain primary in order to insure that political change will be beneficial change. At the threshold of political change must stand political will.

Millions of men stand under arms to defend democracy Their weapons are fashioned by scientific technology which, now as always before, has placed its highest ingenuity at the service of its most important client: the military establishment. The state, the schools and the mass media do not shirk the task of indoctrination: they have employed every available technical device in order to spread awareness of the dangers which threaten democracy as well as national survival. Yet the flame of the martial spirit flickers but feebly in the heart of Western man, more feebly indeed than in any epoch of the West's dangerous history. Citizens respond dutifully to the call to arms. They cannot do otherwise in the face of the comprehensive controls and sanctions available to the state. Individual men among them are still capable of high feats of heroism at war, as high as those performed by warriors in ages past. Yet no one can deny that the democracies are loath to fight and that abiding popular aversion to war has forced democratic statesmen into a long series of diplomatic retreats. Science that has done so much to defend the democracies against aggression has also taught them that there is no defense against aggression and that its latest tools might prove as deleterious to the victor as to the defeated. More important still, science has taught men to value life as their highest possession and to abhor death, to abhor death not so much as the ineluctable fate of all living things but as the break in a process of expanding knowledge and possession of the physical environment. There is little in the history of our times to show that modern man is more averse to violence than were his forebears. There is some evidence showing that he views and handles violence with an impersonal detachment that would have shocked his ancestors inured to the precariousness and brutality of a prescientific civilization. Modern man, like all men before him, eschews violence that begets retribution, seeks to avoid pain and cherishes the good things upon earth. What sets him apart from preceding generations is his belief in his perfectibility upon earth and the dreadful and absurd finality of death.

International politics, like nature, is a system of processes. There are no simple causes and effects of historical developments. The record of the past tends to determine the present — until circumstance intervenes. Peoples, like individuals, are at the mercy of what is called chance, and an apparently meaningless combination of circumstances may frustrate the culmination of long-developed tendencies. Tendency is conservative of past forms, and circumstance may appear formless, but their balanced interplay is the source of novel forms. It is only within the frame of reference of these three terms — tendency, circumstance and novelty — that forecasting future developments can derive its warrant from an exact science of prediction. The basic conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union is the central issue of world politics. Sir Halford Mackinder's celebrated theorem — the juxtaposition of the continental empire of Eurasia and the Oceanic Powers, and the contest over the vast rimland interposed be-between the "heartland" and the littoral of Eurasia — is today as brilliant a summation of the world strategic problem as it was forty years ago when it was first propounded.