Age of overkill

THIS enay, in and beyond the poneer principle as it operater in world politics, is written in the mood of the Greek myth of the Gor gon head, at a time when many fear to face the harshness of reality lest it turn them to stone. It is meant as a picture of the world today, which the American people and their leadership must confront, along with the leaders and people of the free world and Communist power clusters, and the leaders of the new and largely uncommitted nations of Asia and Africa. I have tried to depict the forces which have broken loose in that world, and what they are doing to the con tours of the familiar landscape of world politics. And I have tried to suggest how a world leadership, at once prudent and courageous, imaginative and sane, may be able to grapple with these forces.

While written by an American, mainly from the perspectives of American and European scholarship, the book was planned and largely written abroad. I wrote it-or it wrote itself in the sus tained intellectual excitement of two highly eventful years spent in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe and the United States. As writer and observer, I have had to watch world politics for more years than I care to think. In the process I have, like others, worked out a set of priorities-call them "principles" or "theories" if you wish to serve as guidelines for my thinking. None of us has the luxury of experiment in the vast laboratory of world affairs, which, alas (or perhaps happily), is not a real labora tory, because you cannot achieve a rollback of time and start over again with a new set of variables as with a new set of white mice. That is why the student of world politics can never learn from ex periment, but must be content with experience. But the trouble is that the actors who play the leading roles-the commanding elite, whether on stage or behind the scenes-are rarely reflective enough to strike through the mask of appearance, to the meaning of what they are doing; while the thinkers and writers rarely have to sweat out a decision on which power and destiny, life and death for mil lions, may turn.