The Foreign-Policy Soup

From our Philippine military bases to ballistic-missile defenses, from NATO to manpower to the defense budget process, recent issues of prominent quarterlies have flooded the newsstands with commentaries on our military readiness. The Spring 1984 issue of the Washington Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, devotes four articles to America’s changing relations with its European allies. Meanwhile, with its Spring issue, The Public Interest begins a two-issue, eight-article series titled “America’s Defense Dilemmas.” A recent issue of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Orbis (Winter 1984) included a symposium on military and political “gaming,” while the Winter issue of the Journal of Contemporary Studies offered articles on ballistic missiles, intelligence betrayals, and the “dubious promise” of big-power summitry.

If the need for such reminders and reassessments is unfortunate, the climate in which they occur is downright scary. Never in recent history have so many chefs sought to stir the foreign-policy soup. And it is that issue—Congress’s now-considerable involvement in the making of foreign policy—which draws the fire, albeit from different angles, of Representative Richard Cheney and Senator Charles Mathias in the current issue of SAIS Review, the journal of Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies (Winter/ Spring 1984).

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Michael A. Scully

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From our Philippine military bases to ballistic-missile defenses, from NATO to manpower to the defense budget process, recent issues of prominent quarterlies have flooded the newsstands with commentaries on our military readiness. The Spring 1984 issue of the Washington Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown, devotes four articles to America’s changing relations with its European allies. Meanwhile, with its Spring issue, The Public Interest begins a two-issue, eight-article series titled “America’s Defense Dilemmas.” A recent issue of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Orbis (Winter 1984) included a symposium on military and political “gaming,” while the Winter issue of the Journal of Contemporary Studies offered articles on ballistic missiles, intelligence betrayals, and the “dubious promise” of big-power summitry.

If the need for such reminders and reassessments is unfortunate, the climate in which they occur is downright scary. Never in recent history have so many chefs sought to stir the foreign-policy soup. And it is that issue—Congress’s now-considerable involvement in the making of foreign policy—which draws the fire, albeit from different angles, of Representative Richard Cheney and Senator Charles Mathias in the current issue of SAIS Review, the journal of Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies (Winter/ Spring 1984).