This study systematically identifies the Soviet lessons of Vietnam as presented in eleven Soviet newspapers (specialized and regional as well as the central papers) and eight journals. Altogether, 1,585 citations were coded, representing more than 70 different lessons. A predominant finding is that the most common lessons the Soviet Union learned from Vietnam differed from their American counterparts: the Soviet lessons would not have warned the leadership about the dangers of military intervention in Afghanistan. A left/right scale was constructed, based on such issue clusters as why the communists won in Vietnam, the nature of imperialism, and the implications of Soviet policy in the Third World. Substantial variation was found among the media examined, many of which are linked to specific Soviet institutions. The implication is that Soviet foreign policy is contingent upon individual choices, institutional interplay, and changing contexts. This, in turn, suggests that Western policy makers should not lose sight of their capacity to influence the Soviet policy dialogue, and hence Soviet policy choices.

America's current nuclear strategy seeks to improve deterrence with a counterforce targeting plan that exceeds the requirements of mutual assured destruction. This “countervailing” nuclear strategy codifies an enlarged spectrum of retaliatory options. The author argues, however, that the countervailing strategy is based upon a number of implausible and contradictory assumptions, and that it actually degrades the overriding objective of genuine security. For many reasons, the Soviet Union is not apt to assign a higher probability of fulfillment to American counterforce threats; under certain conditions, current policy confronts our adversary with a heightened incentive to pre-empt. The conclusion identifies an alternative strategy for the avoidance of nuclear war, a network of doctrines and obligations that calls for a return to minimum deterrence, a comprehensive test ban, and a joint renunciation of the right to the first use of nuclear weapons.

Empirical research on the United Nations has been characterized as fragmented, noncumulative, and lacking in the coherence necessary for conceptual integration—a condition at least partly due to the variegated nature of the institution itself. Yet in some important respects the research literature projects a rather homogeneous image. This image is shaped by a prevailing research perspective that treats the U.N. as (1) an arena for the political maneuvering of member states rather than an actor in its own right, and (2) as a resultant of exogenous forces governing world politics rather than as a source of influence affecting the larger world community. One or both of these traits may be found in 36 of 41 research articles published between 1970 and 1977. This perspective probably derives from numerous factors, including the state-centric orientation dominating our discipline and the tendency to view the U.N. as a convenient source of data for the study of world politics.

Recent economic theory places growing emphasis on the importance of psychological expectations in economic behavior and policy implementation. This article reviews four recent books on political economy which analyze failures in Keynesian macroeconomic management in light of social and political pressures in advanced democratic nations (especially Britain and the United States). Public choice theories focusing on the myopic behavior of voters and structuralist interpretations stressing class or corporatist conflict are discussed; but the author concludes that political as well as economic response to uncertain conditions is best understood in terms of how future expectations shape current preferences. James Alt's pioneering research on British public opinion suggests that expectational adaptation may hold the key to democratic stability as well as economic adjustment.

Recent literature, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands, has provided insights into some of the most perplexing imponderables of the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. These are, first, the development of consensus among the various German elites for the purposes of the Final Solution; second, an incremental kind of German decision making which led to the efficiently implemented mass annihilation of the Jews; and third, the passive mood toward the disasters befalling the Jews on the part of the entire universe of bystanders. (In the case of the Netherlands, this resulted, in spite of an unusually low degree of anti-Semitism, in an unusually high degree of Jewish victimization—in contrast to the so-called Danish reversal.) Fourth, because of the unimaginable predicament experienced by the victims and their “governments,” the Jewish Councils (such as the Amsterdam Joodsche Raad), they never had a chance to develop workable responses to such a catastrophe.

Theories of democratic development have to account for breakdowns, fascist and other, and to consider phases of incomplete democratization as well as mass democracy. To this end, they may need to relate structural changes to social and political mobilization, explain different kinds of revolution—not only the “true revolution” of leftist ideology—and different types of military coups. “Developmental dictatorships,” fascist or not, are unlikely midwives of liberal democracy. Democratic development can also be related to broad cultural and religious patterns of political civilization that may shape the course of revolutionary or non-revolutionary change.