None of the perplexing problems of contemporary international affairs has given rise to more confusing discussion than the relationship of Soviet ideology to the foreign policy of the USSR. The very vagueness of the term “Soviet ideology,” or “Communist ideology” (and are they synonymous?), the uncertainty to what extent this uncertain force motivates the makers of Soviet policies, have compounded our difficulties in understanding the behavior of one of the world's two superpowers. Are Russia's rulers motivated by cynical power politics? Are they ideological fanatics? Is tlie content of their ideology the gospel of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, or something else? Questions can be compounded ad infinitum.

From the American point of view, the strategy of deterrence, and the related principle of limiting to tolerable proportions whatever conflicts become inevitable, tend to spring from the premise that the favorable results of a total war can never be sufficient to justify its cost. Such a war, according to that conception, would be too big, too allconsuming, to permit the survival even of those final values, like personal freedom, for which alone one could think of waging it. It need not be certain that it would turn out so badly; it is enough that mere is a large chance that it would.

Communist China is the most populous country in the world and the largest after Canada and the Soviet Union, but its influence in international affairs, mainly because of its economic backwardness, is still far from commensurate to its great size and strategic location. How long will this continue to be true? The question takes its immediacy from the speed with which the economy of another Communist giant, the Soviet Union, was transformed.

The emergence of the United States as a world power at the opening of the twentieth century found the nation ill-prepared to assume the burdens imposed by its new status. For American military and naval leaders, possession of an island empire stretching across 7,000 miles of ocean from San Francisco to the Philippines and almost to the mainland of Asia created new and serious problems. Slowly, during the first years of the century, the Army and Navy evolved a military strategy which would ensure the defense of these islands while supporting the foreign policy shaped by the nation's civilian leaders.

In June 1957, when he sent this book to the publisher, Max Lerner must have been very tired. The jacket blurb says the preparation took more than twelve years, and this strikes one who has been working at the book for eight months as probably an understatement. As nearly as a lone individual can do, Lerner seems to have read almost everything about the United States. The “Notes for Further Reading” alone occupy 43 pages of small type. Portions of the manuscript were checked by no less than 142 “experts”: historians, government officials, musicians, journalists, social scientists, poets, architects, foundation officers, and others.

The exhausted countries of Western Europe started reconstruction after the Second World War with productive facilities hardly sufficient to provide for current subsistence needs, and with gold and foreign-exchange reserves, foreign investments, and export capacities greatly reduced. Many—though by no means all—of the lacking goods could best be obtained from the United States, and recovery would have been long delayed without United States aid. To the superficial observer the existence of a “dollar problem” was thus proved beyond doubt. Actually, these countries did not just lack dollars, but were short of factors of production and lacked a surplus of goods and services with which to expand those factors.

The immense increase in the costs and risks of using military force to pursue political aims has once again focussed attention on the available ways of effecting changes in the international status quo by non-violent means. This is the subject of “peaceful change,” which has for some years troubled the minds of those concerned to reduce the resort to violence in international affairs.

The international status quo is embodied in several thousand treaties and understandings that mark out the current distribution of values and resources among nations. But this distribution is subject to constant pressure for revision as the needs and ambitions of nations change.

The two books under review exemplify, each in its own way, the prosperous state that Japanology has attained in this country. Maxon adds his name to the already respectably long list of American students whose grasp of sources is both broad and deep, who have worked directly with Japanese individuals and institutions as well as studied them, and who furthermore have a point to make. Maxon's book is a closely documented monograph. The revised edition of Reischauer's book contains some changes and a new section covering postwar trends.

The ideas of liberty and democracy, Ernst Troeltsch wrote during World War I, came to Germany from the West; but, he continued, there they gained a new meaning, “determined by German history and the German spirit. … Liberty consists more in duties than in rights, or, rather, in rights which are simultaneously duties.” In the same vein, Thomas Mann argued against his “Westernized” brother Heinrich: “German individualism is quite compatible with state socialism, which, of course, is something quite different from the human rights-Marxist kind. For the social principle is opposed only to the individualism of the Enlightenment, to the liberal individualism of the West. … Under our princes' absolutism the individual rarely was short-changed.”

South of China, east of India, and above the Antipodes, Southeast Asia may be more of a “geographic expression” than a “region”; perhaps, however, it deserves analysis on a regional basis. Certain similarities unite these countries, even though a consciousness on the part of the peoples of the area that they are a “region” has been slow to develop; Dien Bienphu seemed nearer to Washington than to Singapore. One of the volumes reviewed here uses the term “low-pressure area” to explain the fact that historically the national states of Southeast Asia have not been strong, and that the area has been subjected to great pressure from more densely populated countries to the north and west.

Recent advances in military technology are forcing radical revisions in Western thinking on the interconnection between war and the economic process. Concepts established by the experience of World Wars I and II have suffered a near-total eclipse. The thermo-nuclear bomb and the ICBM leave little room for the traditional notion of the “economic potential” that furnishes a nation with a “mobilization base” capable of providing the sinews of war in protracted struggles of attrition.