A Policy of Misunderstanding

Philip G Altbach Containment and Revolution, edited by David Horowitz; Boston: Beacon
THIS volume, the first in a series of "Studies in Imperialism and the Cold War" issued by the Bertrand Russell Centre for Social Research in London is a multi-faceted analysis of America's role in the world in the twentieth century. It is essentially a clear and generally well-documented indictment of American foreign policy in such diverse areas as post-revolutionary Russia, the Greek civil war, China in the 1940s, and Vietnam. The theme is clear: the United States has played a negative and reactionary role throughout the present century. While the essays in this volume arc basically interested in analysing the negative aspects of United States policy, they often fail to deal with the roles of other powers which had an impact on the shaping of American policies and the authors are not very much concerned with internal American politics. Nevertheless, the volume does present a number of themes in American foreign relations, and is rather convincing for the most part.