If we no longer have Richard Nixon to kick around, we nonetheless have the former president's advice. On U.S. policy toward China, he states: “China, with its population and resources, is eventually going to be a superpower. It is vital that we help them become a superpower associated with the West rather than one that is against us.”

Sounds reasonable enough, until we consider the options. To announce such a goal might, in the short term, play hob with our diplomatic bargaining positions vis-à-vis Beijing itself or come at the expense of our traditional allies in Asia. And if this is to be the polar star of U.S. foreign policy over the long term, as Nixon suggests, what about other legitimate U.S. interests; what about the notion of the proper play of the international balance of power and America's concern for human rights and democratic values?

In 406 B.C., eight generals of the Athenian navy were brought to trial for abandoning survivors of a shipwreck after the great battle of Arginusae. The public clamored for blood; and the state, spreading a wave of terror, intimidated the assembly that was then trying the generals. They were condemned to death. Only Socrates dared to speak out against the abuse of law, identifying the generals as victims of an insecure government. “The true teacher,” he had said, “must offer himself as a model of what he preaches.”

The fundamental problems of politics, in the modern world as in the ancient one, have been and inevitably will be moral. To the ancients the maxim that no state could long flourish without virtue was clear. Equally clear was the conclusion that no state had ever conducted itself virtuously over a long span of years. We are all familiar with the philosophical and the practical debate over this problem, one that has perplexed statesmen and philosophers from the beginnings of history. We need only think of the New Testament account of Herod's massacre of the Innocents—an issue that conjured up, or seemed to conjure up, Reasons of State.

The Cowley Road does not rate a mention in the Oxford guidebooks. It links the university with the suburb of Cowley, where British Ley land has a large and sprawling factory.

Cowley Road is fascinating, a microcosm of the changes that have come over Britain in the last twenty-five years. It has Greek, Italian, Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese restaurants and a Caribbean pub. Native English cuisine is represented only by "fish 'n' chips" shops, one of them run by Hong Kong Chinese. Finger-lickin Col. Sanders is the outpost of American gastronomic imperialism. None of these places existed twenty years ago. Levi-Strauss in Le cru et le cuit (the Raw arid the Cooked) saw in eating the basis of cultural differences. Tell me what you had for breakfast and I'll tell you who you are.

If debtors prisons were still in fashion, many countries around the world would now be in jail. Poland, Rumania, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico—all recently have found themselves teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to pay even the interest on the money they owe to Western governments and banks. And the list keeps growing longer. Over the last year nearly three dozen Third World and East European nations have fallen into arrears' on their foreign loans. Never before have so many countries come so close to default on so much debt.

As we move further into the 1980s there are a number of alarming trends in Soviet-American relations and in the nuclear arms race: the development of so-called “counterforce” or “first-strike” weapons; NATO's new Pershing XR II missiles, which drastically reduce the warning time of an American missile attack on the USSR, just as the Soviet SS-20s threaten Western Europe; a U.S. command system that, under conditions of intense crisis, says one expert, “is subject to strains powerful enough to trigger an unintended war”: increasingly sophisticated technology, such as that which has produced the cruise missile, complicating the verification process of future arms control agreements; a new and growing arms race in space; nuclear proliferation; the discussion of “limited” nuclear war and other strategic nuclear concepts; the failure of the U.S. to ratify SALT II…and the list goes on.

In the time of the Roman historian Tacitus (circa 55-117 A.D.), the area now watched over by NATO and Warsaw Pact armies was covered by a vast forest penetrated only by a network of narrow trails. A traveler could walk from Poland to the Rhine without even glimpsing the sun. As populations grew, forests gradually gave way to pastures and arable land. By the beginning of the twentieth century German geography—and military strategy—had undergone such radical transformation that Field Marshal von Schlieffen could see the North German Plain as a corridor for maneuvering thirty-four of the kaiser's divisions to outflank the French “if the last man on the right brushed the [English] Channel with his sleeve.”