Historians are bound by the historically conditioned values that shape their judgments of what are important facts and their interpretations of those facts. This is especially true for ‘official’ historians who must serve both their craft and their government. David Carlton points to this process in the course of evaluating the official history of the development of Britain's nuclear arsenal.1 Unfortunately, Dr Carlton diminishes the effectiveness of his position by the manner in which he chooses to illustrate it.

A Head-on collision between two national movements; a clash between Western and Oriental cultures; disputes over territories, borders, maritime rights, property and refugees; intense mutual suspicion engendered by a long and tortuous history of strife; highly distorted images of the adversary; a chronically unstable pattern of regional politics; the intrusion of Great Power rivalry and a spiralling arms race: these are only some of the ingredients which account for the complexity and uniqueness of the Arab-Israeli conflict and make the Middle East the most volatile and explosive sub-system of the international political system. Here, in Michael Howard's phrase, is a “hell-brew to end all hell-brews”. The problem is a political scientist's paradise; a statesman's nightmare; and, for the military specialist, a matter for grisly, but absorbing concern.

The work presented in this paper arises from a study of foreign policy formation in the British Labour Party and its behaviour towards the issue of British membership of the European Economic Community.1

At the time of his death in February 1976, Alastair Buchan was preparing what he intended as his major work – a three volume history of American foreign policy since 1945. He had completed only two draft chapters, both of which focused on the impact of the war and its immediate aftermath on American perceptions of her future role in international politics. Because the draft chapters were so few in number it was not considered possible to have the study continued along the lines envisaged by the author. In order that some indication of the tentative judgement of so eminent a student of United States diplomacy be available, the article below has been extracted from what would have been the second chapter of the first volume.

This article does not purport to be a critique of a stimulating review of four recent textbooks on British foreign policy. A review article, however, does present an opportunity to speculate beyond the confines of the immediate text(s) to make some assessment of the ‘state of the discipline’. The writer believes that such an assessment is long overdue and that an important opportunity in this journal was inadequately grasped. What follows, then, are some initial comments on the status of British foreign policy studies in the context of contemporary foreign policy analysis.