Dynamics of international relations power , security , and order
- New York "Holt, Rinehart and Winston" 1964
- 733 p.
The intensity of an author's interest in his book should be self-evident, but his individual relationship to the special world of his subject matter needs some clarification. Ever since I became aware of the world of nation states, I found the topic both frightening and fascinating. Certainly the history of my own times has been breathtaking in the sweeping importance of events generated by, through, these peculiar sovereign states. Born in 1923, at the time of the last French defensive lunge against Germany, I grew up within earshot of my elders' romantic yet terrified recollections of the Great European War. That has always been the war in my mind. one that remained strange, filtered by the vague mind of childhood. Of the span of years that began with Mussolini's assault on Ethiopia, a barsh and incomprehensible period of blunder and tragedy, memories are all too clear, though my understanding was gravely compromised by the feeling that meaningful events started only when I became aware of them. It is still difficult to realize that but two years elapsed from the time that newspapers pictured old-fashioned French artillery pointing quietly across the Rhine in 1936 (as the Germans reoccupied their western frontier) to the ago nizing Munich crisis of 1938, and then but an even shorter period to the headlines of 1940 screaming the fall of Paris.
Old enough to realize the dimensions of this true nightmare, I felt that the entire adult world had gone mad, and to this day I cannot read explana tions usually rationalizations of the events-without a numbing sensation of disbelief. After that came the serious, grown-up business of military service in which I found myself in the strangest part of the world, New Guinea, grappling with that most difficult language of the eastern enemy who had, surprisingly, made our second German war politically acceptable. For all my personal involvement there, the Far East remained to me the second of the only two foreign areas that seemed to matter to the United States.