Some twenty years ago, when we found out that the Chinese could fight, American military and diplomatic officialdom discovered Sun Tzu. This discovery came about through emergency reading of Mao Tse-tung on strategy, which in turn revealed that Mao had drawn many of his ideas (and even plagiarized) from an obscure ancient called Sun Tzu. More recently, when we found out that the North Vietnamese could fight, Sun Tzu again, so I am told, came into vogue with our military and diplomatic thinkers.

Liddell Hart speaks of this fourth century B.C. military theorist as having had a “clear vision” and “more profound insight” than Clausewitz. But our leaders' acquaintance with that vision and insight seems to have availed us little. “Know the enemy and know yourself,” said Sun Tzu — not Confucius nor John F. Kennedy — “and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”

The centenary this year of Gandhi's birth provides an occasionJ to reassess the significance of the Indian leader. His political ethics and supporting notions about man and the state seem to me especially important in his teachings and practices. They have their weaknesses, but they should not be overlooked in any effort to reassess the complex and at times baffling Mahatma. Because Ganhdi's ideas about government and politics have been likened to those of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy, his unique contribution has often been obscured. Gandhi borrowed Thoreau's term “civil disobedience” which the New England individualist had coined to explain his kind of opposition to the Mexican war and slavery. Yet there is a considerable gap between Gandhi's metaphysics and Thoreau's. As to Tolstoy, Gandhi's premises resemble some of the convictions of the Russian writer after he became a Christian anarchist. But the Indian leader placed more trust in the perfectability of public institutions than Tolstoy did. Without denying the utility of the frequent and inevitable comparisons, Gandhi's synthetic political philosophy is best seen by itself.

In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed doubt that this country would be able to conduct a wise foreign policy. He argued that democracies lack the qualities necessary for such a stance in world affairs. In his words, “… a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles.” Through the second world war, many students of American foreign policy felt that de Tocqueville's pessimistic expectations had been proven valid. Since 1898, this nation seemed to oscillate between extremes of adventurous activism and sullen isolationism.