Books in Brief: A World Elsewhere: The New American Foreign Policy

A World Elsewhere: The New American Foreign Policy, by James Chace (Scribners, 108 pp., $5.95). James Chace is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious quarterly of the New York Council of Foreign Relations. In this capacity he has had an opportunity to assimilate a substantial fraction of the what-do-we-do-now-that-the-cold-war-isdead theories that have surfaced in the past few years. Virtually all of the presumptions about what is troublesome in that world that have dominated the perceptions of upper-middle-class intellectuals for a decade are here. Chace neatly characterized them as “transnational influences”; overpopulation and resource exhaustion (essentially the discredited Forrester/Meadows “we will drown in garbage” critique), multinational corporations, etc. Name the candidate for a villainous social trend, and you are likely to find it in this slender volume. He argues for a U.S. foreign policy that “navigates” the nation state through tricky shoals of a host of transnational influences to permit international stability in a multipolar world. Like so many products of this genre, the author tends to denigrate the importance of such obviously potent national influences as military force, revanchism, greed, hatred, and dumb luck. As recently as December 1972 we saw how military force, an obsolescent element in Chace’s A World Elsewhere, namely the B-52 strikes in Hanoi and Haiphong to encourage the North Vietnamese to come to terms in Paris, indeed had the desired effect. The world still waits for an adequate characterization of the nature of the interaction between national and transnational influences.

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A World Elsewhere: The New American Foreign Policy, by James Chace (Scribners, 108 pp., $5.95). James Chace is the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious quarterly of the New York Council of Foreign Relations. In this capacity he has had an opportunity to assimilate a substantial fraction of the what-do-we-do-now-that-the-cold-war-isdead theories that have surfaced in the past few years. Virtually all of the presumptions about what is troublesome in that world that have dominated the perceptions of upper-middle-class intellectuals for a decade are here. Chace neatly characterized them as “transnational influences”; overpopulation and resource exhaustion (essentially the discredited Forrester/Meadows “we will drown in garbage” critique), multinational corporations, etc. Name the candidate for a villainous social trend, and you are likely to find it in this slender volume. He argues for a U.S. foreign policy that “navigates” the nation state through tricky shoals of a host of transnational influences to permit international stability in a multipolar world. Like so many products of this genre, the author tends to denigrate the importance of such obviously potent national influences as military force, revanchism, greed, hatred, and dumb luck. As recently as December 1972 we saw how military force, an obsolescent element in Chace’s A World Elsewhere, namely the B-52 strikes in Hanoi and Haiphong to encourage the North Vietnamese to come to terms in Paris, indeed had the desired effect. The world still waits for an adequate characterization of the nature of the interaction between national and transnational influences.