Military relations between the United States and the Soviet Union over the past decade exhibit an apparent paradox: professed mutual interests in parity yielding in practice to a competitive military buildup. The paper examines four hypothetical explanations—denoted respectively as the hypotheses of mirage, momentum, victory, and spillover—in the context of conventional military force development. While certain valid elements are identified in each hypothesis, the author concludes that it is the appeal of spillover, the non-fighting functions of conventional military advantage, which despite a mixed payoff may be regarded as the most significant determinant of Soviet behavior. The evolution of force levels and military budgets, and the political purposes and activities of the U.S.S.R. in the First and Third Worlds, provide the data for analysis.

This study examines the role of technological variables in the decisions by Egypt, the World Bank, and the United States regarding the selection and financing of the Aswan High Dam project. Three major decision-making models-rational choice, incremental, and organizational process-are assessed according to their appropriateness for and applicability to the “technological dimension.” This dimension is defined in terms of three major components-design, impact, and management issues. Despite a tendency of the literature to associate the rational-choice model with highly technical decisions, this study illustrates the dominance of “satisficing,” “muddling through,” and “bounded rationality” behavior for each of the major participants. The technological dimension is found to be important, but clearly secondary to the primacy of politics.

Linkage politics—a state's making its course of action concerning a given issue contingent upon another state's behavior in a different issue area—is of interest to policymakers as well as to those theoreticians who employ an issue—area approach to the study of international politics. However, there has been little discussion of the circumstances and conditions of linkage, or of its bargaining strategies. In this paper, 2 × 2 games are used as a model of strategic interaction to delineate the situations amenable to linkage, the forms of linkage, and relevant strategies. Coerced, threat-induced, and mutual linkage are illustrated and distinguished.

The “malaise” or inward-turning of American foreign policy is not well explained by any simple cyclical pattern, and also not by any relaxing balance-of-power in the outside world. A more important explanation may be that since 1967 we have lost our earlier confidence that the American model of political democracy would serve the happiness of peoples everywhere. Stanley Hoffmann's Primacy or World Order does not lament the fading of this confidence, but offers a fourth analysis: that international complications now require that American foreign policy be directed toward world order. Yet Hoffmann can be accused of tending to tailor “world order” to fit a preference for economic democracy over traditional liberal values. George Liska's Career of Empire presents a more resigned view of the inward turning of American foreign policy, coming perhaps closest to the first or second of the explanations noted above, but remaining therefore relatively devoid of policy recommendations.

Recent literature demonstrates that modern military regimes are actually military-civilian coalitions. The old dichotomy of civil/military is no longer a useful explanation for the politics and the dynamics of military regimes. Role expansion, new professionalism, and mission orientation have changed military missions, doctrines, and self-perception. The author proposes and develops a comparative analysis and a typology of contemporary military regimes: corporative; market-bureaucratic; socialist-oligarchic; personal tyrannies; and army-party. Case studies include Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. His conclusion, based on the literature, is that military regimes have not succeeded (at least not better than civilian regimes) in reforming, modernizing, and developing their respective societies despite organizational, structural, and personal commitments to development and reform.

Only small gains can be made in the study of political economy without building upon the traditions of Marx and rationality models. Deep are the historical observations and theoretical linkages that these schools have given us. Rationality models give us a feeling for the coalitional and strategic elements in political calculations. They inform us as to the behavioral constraints that will operate on political actors. Marxian tradition sensitizes us to the institutional constraints which markets and private property give to the political process. It is therefore unfortunate that two recent books regarding political economy-Tufte's Political Control of the Economy and Lindblom's Politics and Markets-avoid both of these traditions. Their contribution to our understanding of political economy suffers because of this omission.