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THE LOGIC OF WORLD POWER by Franz Schurmann

THE LOGIC OF WORLD POWER

By

Pub Date: June 28th, 1974
Publisher: Pantheon

Close enough to the centers of power to have been approached by RAND in order to study means of psywar against the Chinese Communists, yet also an early critic of the Vietnam war, Schurmann elaborately broods here over the last 27 years of Sino-Soviet-U.S. maneuvers under the Pax Americana. Intermingled with Defense Department game-theory analysis, sociological chitchat about ""operational world views"" and intricate' charting of various U.S. military-industrial factions are some valuable insights. Schurmann is at his best when describing how Washington destroyed the old China hands' hopes for cultivating a ""Titoist"" Mao Tse-tung. Yet even when discussing China, his specialty, Schurmann seems mired in a moral neverland somewhere between leftist protest and Pentagon computer models. But when he says that ""American imperialism and expansionism are not dead, but the forms, both centrist and right, which they took since 1945 are,"" Schurmann follows with a warning that American military power is still very real and usable. This message, as well as the innumerable opportunities for specific historical debate, make the book an evocative, theoretically fleshed survey of postwar confrontations.