Recalling the abrupt changes in American national security policy in 1953 and 1961, we may well ask: What New Look should we expect now? What should we want? Changes will probably emerge more temperately and slowly than they did in those years. To our friends abroad, over-sensitized as they have become to policy modifications, this prospect should be reassuring. Much as they tend to sympathize with dissent within the United States over Vietnam, they realize that our domestic furor over this tragic war threatens to induce a generalized neo-isolationism. Arguments for neo-isolationism have a powerful appeal, but tend to cloud debate about the real issues for long-term security policy choice: what doctrine, military force structure, budgets, and plans?

The role of interest groups in the policy process has long engaged the attention of students of democratic politics. Only recently, however, have Soviet interest groups been studied systematically. This lag can be explained by two facts: the employment of the totalitarian model, emphasizing hierarchical controls and ignoring or denying significant political conflict; and the considerable difficulties of applying group theory to nondemocratic societies.

The distribution of ethnic groups throughout South Asia constitutes the region's single most significant strategic factor. Other factors, varying in importance according to specific location and time, do, of course, interact with the ethnic factor. Thus, the topographic, political, economic, and transportation maps all contribute essential elements to our knowledge of the region. Nevertheless, the settlement pattern of distinct culture-groups, as defined by the language and dialect maps, is clearly the most critical of all tangible phenomena.

We have entered a new phase in the apparently endless debate method. Argument once centered on the possibility of quantifying important political variables, and of establishing empirically based generalizations about international behavior. With accumulating evidence that measurement and generalization are possible, the grounds have shifted. Sometimes only specific applications are attacked. Though it is curious how few of the extant applications of scientific method come up to the high standards of some of their critics, the critics’ targets cannot complain too much. After all, the methods and applications are new, most studies do suffer from significant flaws of one sort or another, and constructive criticism is essential to their improvement.

“Whereas in post-war Britain youth has often channelled its energies into violent self-expression, destructive or creative, in France the dominant impression left by all the varying tendencies is of a kind of docile listiessness.” A competent British commentator on French politics and society had the misfortune of appearing in print with this assertion about French youth in June of 1968—that is, at precisely the time when many members of France's younger generation were participating in that violent form of self-expression that has come to be called “the Events.”

Increasingly, the present society is coming to be viewed not as a condition but as an alternative, as one possible arrangement of a much larger set. The social sciences help provide an understanding of the factors and mechanisms that allow us to review such a society, propose alternative plans, and transform it in line with these new designs.