It is not simply because an inter-disciplinary journal is such a rarity that a retiring editor of the Review looks back on an unusual experience. In the variety of responses to the challenge of studying international relations two opposing general tendencies constantly assert themselves. One is the tendency to see international problems wholly in terms familiar to long established disciplines; the other is to define international relations so particularly as to exclude contributions from traditional modes of understanding. The existence of the Review suggests that its own correct and humane function is to moderate both these tendencies, without thereby depleting the ambition to create new styles of discourse or the determination to maintain the vigour of the old. Among its more demanding readership the Review may even stimulate efforts to transcend them. Selecting, commissioning and preparing material for publication with such aims in mind certainly tests the categories of the editor's own thinking to an unusual degree. For this experience he ought to be, and in the present case certainly is, duly grateful.

The West is now less dependent on Persian Gulf oil than at any time in the last decade. However, the area remains economically and strategically vital. The fact that the recent escalation of hostilities in the desultory Iran-Iraq war has attracted world-wide attention bears disturbing witness to the West's continuing vulnerability in this region. This vulnerability stems, in part, from three crucial decisions—two made in London and one in Washington—during the years 1968 to 1973, Until then, the Persian Gulf was viewed, when it was considered at all, as something of an international anachronism—a sleepy outpost of the fast-dwindling British Empire where Britannia still ruled the waves and the ‘Pax Britannica’ applied as it had since the 1820s. In that six-year period the Labour government of Harold Wilson announced that Britain would end its historic role in the Gulf; the Conservative government of Edward Heath chose not to alter the Labour policy, despite indications that it would do so; and the Nixon administration decided not to ‘fill the vacuum’. This paper assesses these three cases in terms of decision making theory, testing the utility of various theoretical decision making paradigms. Developments in the Gulf itself are treated only in so far as they had an effect on the making of policy in London and Washington.

How to conceptualize the relationship between domestic political conflict and foreign policy has been a perennial problem of international relations. Quantitative studies of the internal and external conflict behaviors of nations have proposed and rejected correlations between these two phenomena on a regular basis. But the theoretical linkages that are presented in these studies between the domestic and external political arenas are generally made in such a rudimentary fashion that they appear fuzzy if not actually contradictory when subjected to close analysis. At the same time, most historical treatments of domestic conflict and foreign policy are too impressionistic to provide clear concepts for comparative research. As Michael Fry and Arthur Gilbert have demonstrated with regard to the writings of one especially prolific and influential contemporary historian—Arno Mayer—a substantial amount of pruning and interpolation is required to put such notions as ‘the Forces of Order and the Forces of Movement’ or ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ societal crises into usable form.

A decade after publication of a major work on world politics suggests an appropriate period for reassessment. Looking back, two obvious questions emerge. How original is Franz Schurmann's analysis? And how has it stood the test of time? The last question, depending on the first, will be discussed in my conclusion. The answer to the first question, however, is still clouded in controversy, as it was from the start. (I am considering only Schumann's interpretation-of American ‘welfare imperialism’ and how it is derived; not his informative but conventional depiction of American-Soviet-Chinese policies in relation to the Vietnam war.)

In spite of an ever increasing interest in Caribbean affairs the signing, by representatives of seven Commonwealth governments, of the treaty establishing the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) in June 1981 aroused little academic or media comment outside the region. Indeed, in the years which followed, this experiment in collective self reliance continued to be largely ignored by the academic community notwithstanding the incorporation of a number of relatively bold innovations in the structure and scope of the institution which had been created.

The United States and the Soviet Union have been the subjects of a vast out-pouring of literature during the post-war period. While that literature has generated a number of memorable images, from the two scorpions trapped in a bottle to President Carter as the cowboy who got on his horse and rode off in all directions at once, it has not been so successful in other regards. Most notably, and perhaps inevitably, it has failed to produce any objective, or even consensus, overall view which might provide statesmen and scholars with a reliable guide to the motives and actions of the two super-states. What it has done has been to furnish us with a rich variety of competing perspectives and frameworks from which to choose when trying to understand the workings of the two puzzling giants.