In an earlier paper Dr. R. D. McKinlay and I argued that the concept of interdependence was useless as a research tool since it was used to cover such wide and disparate ranges of phenomena that it virtually became a summary description of the current state of the international system, in which it was impossible to disentangle cause, consequence, and manifestation. We suggested that the varieties of literature subsumed under the term did none the less call attention to a number of important questions that need to be explored, among them the following:

It is disturbing for a student of foreign policy to read Tolstoy. It is even more disturbing for anyone interested specifically in the implementation of foreign policy, for in several respects he said it all in War and Peace in a way that makes twenty-five years of theorising about foreign policy look ridiculous. Tolstoy is greatly interested in the execution of policy and his conclusions are not only distinctive but they attack some of the most basic assumptions on which foreign policy is based. For in his elaboration of a view of historical causation, he is concerned to examine the elusive forces which motivate events and to ridicule the notion that policy-makers shape history by making effective decisions. He demonstrates this most vividly in describing the business of war, where he adopts a tone of devastating sarcasm in his accounts of the generals, “who of all the blind instruments of history were the most enslaved and involuntary’. Thus, he states starkly:

During the years following the Second World War, intensive research was undertaken on the subject of response to threat. Confronted with the baffling yet recurrent inability of nations to respond adequately to warnings of an impending attack, many scholars concentrated on such events as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the outbreak of the Korean War, and produced a voluminous empirical literature, as well as a considerably meagre body of theoretically oriented works. Thus alongside the plethora of works that sought explanations solely in terms of certain specific conditions operating at the time of the event analyzed, a few other inquiries attempted to integrate the case under scrutiny into a broader theoretical context in order to better elucidate the patterns by which nations cope with situations of crisis and threat.

What theme is increasingly dominating the behaviour of international politics? The answer appears to be the task of peace-building at the global level. Reality shows how far we are from completing that task, however. Our inability to complete the task is still, alas, the case in the 1970s. It is true that the international system has changed from one dominated by a bipolar-cold war to a multipolar-interdependent system since the middle of the 1960s. Global peace, however, still seems to be only a remote possibility: There is ample evidence of this, and the Middle East war of 1973 is-only one illustration.

There can be no enterprise more important to the student of International Relations than to understand the bearing on his subject of the tradition that asserts the existence of natural law. Natural law played a vital historical role in the emergence of the European states-system: in the period during which the positive law of Christendom was ceasing to command attention, but that of modern international society had not yet taken shape, the idea that princes and peoples were bound by rules in their relations with one another rested substantially, even if by no means exclusively, upon natural law doctrine. The natural law tradition is also central to the critical investigation of normative issues in world politics: for any inquiry into e.g. the justification of force, the obligation of treaties, the rights of sovereignty or the legitimacy of intervention, it provides a rich source of argument.