Volume 45, Number 13 · August 13, 1998
Counsels on Foreign Relations
By Tony Judt
A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency
by William Bundy
Hill and Wang, 647 pp., $35.00
The years 1968-1975 were the hinge on which the second half of our century turned. The cultural revolt that we somewhat misleadingly call 'the Sixties' reached its apogee in the early Seventies and entered the mainstream of public life and language. 'Revisionist' or reform communism heaved its last, optimistic breath in Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1968; its defeat signaled first the end of a chimera in Eastern Europe and then, shortly thereafter, the first stage of the dismantling of that same fond hope in the West, with the 1973 translation of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag and the unraveling illusions of Old and New Left alike. In the Middle East the unstable post-'67 truce between Israel and the Arab states was followed by the 'Yom Kippur' war, the oil embargo and price rise, and a radically altered power configuration both in the region and between the Arabs and the great powers. In South Asia a new country—Bangladesh—was born, in the course of a war between India and Pakistan.
Review, 9641 words
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