The New International Pattern
MCGEEHAN, ROBERT
The New International Pattern The End of the Postwar Era: A New Balance of World Power By Alastair Buchan Saturday Review Press. 347 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Robert McGeehan Assistant...
...Eschewing moral and ethical judgments, he calls for sound policy choices in the chancelleries of "the democracies of the Atlantic and the Pacific" (though he believes that ours is not an age that will be remembered for its towering leadership...
...that economic rivalries can be settled without serious disruption of trade and monetary relationships...
...But alongside this relatively simple military dimension, intricate economic and political relationships have evolved...
...No other state or group of states has or will soon possess nuclear arms or delivery vehicles comparable to those in the arsenals of the two superpowers...
...Because power has now become diffused, Buchan warns, we should avoid drawing analogies between today's world and the 18th- and 19th-century equilibrium of forces that actually kept the peace during long stretches of European history...
...Buchan treats a succession of subjects with assurance and stylistic skill-sociopolitical developments within modern societies, global trade and monetary problems, the promise and limitations of Japan and the European Community, prospects for China and the Soviet Union...
...Alastair Buchan would not have put it quite so bluntly, but The End of the Postwar Era will hardly reassure those eager for a respite from the uncertainties of international affairs...
...It seems he was then as good a prophet as he is an analyst, and it will be quite interesting to return to The End of the Postwar Era 10 years from today...
...What is the international reality...
...The result is a remarkably comprehensive tour d'horizon, a thoughtful analysis of the close of the period we have known since World War II and the emergence of the new pattern of power balances...
...On the level of strategic weaponry, bipolarity between the U.S...
...Commentators who denounced Henry Kissinger's remarks along these lines should note that Buchan suggests force might even be used in a situation less serious than the "strangulation" of the industrial world which concerned the Secretary of State...
...Buchan relates that he shocked a university audience in the early 1960s when he suggested that a decade hence "we might look back with nostalgia to the simple character of international politics in the years of the Cold War...
...Still, Buchan observes, preoccupation with raw materials could become the late-20th-century equivalent of the 19th-century scramble for colonies and concessions, and during a prolonged oil embargo, say, the temptation to resort to gunboat diplomacy could be strong...
...Reviewed by Robert McGeehan Assistant Professor, City College, City University of New York When Pope Paul delivered his annual address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican last year, he announced that the world had entered a new prewar situation...
...Military power continues to be a factor, of course, but it is less translatable into influence...
...Buchan writes that we have "entered a period of such complexity that it makes the clear distinctions of the previous quarter century-distortions and myths though they may have been-seem like the boyhood of Rousseau's noble savage...
...Currently a professor of international relations at Oxford, Buchan draws on his extensive experience as a journalist for the Economist and the Observer (1948-58), Director of the Institute for Strategic Studies (1958-69) and Commandant of the Royal College of Defense Studies, London (197071...
...and that the richer countries are more generous toward the Third World...
...And despite a rather gloomy assessment, he expresses some hope provided that there is mutual restraint in the further development of strategic weapons...
...indeed, conditions have deteriorated markedly since these recommendations were made...
...and USSR remains...
...Unfortunately, on none of these counts is there solid ground for optimism...
...The new period is marked by a political balance between the United States, the Soviet Union and China, and an economic balance between Japan, the member countries of the European Community and the United States...
...The postwar era, he says, ended with the passing of the two-bloc system, the deepening of the Sino-Soviet dispute, the achievement of Russian-American strategic parity, the withdrawal of United States military forces from Vietnam, and the various influences that ushered in the present "era of negotiations...
...Buchan's analytical realism, however, lacks a theoretical framework or special thesis about the world we are entering, and only in a brief concluding chapter does he offer scenarios for the future...
Vol. 58 • June 1975 • No. 12
