TBR @ 40 Looking Back

International developments have been unfolding with such rapidity in the second half of the present century that any attempt to survey them is in danger of being outdated between the time of its writing and its presentation to the reader.

This is particularly true of the Third World in which phenomenal changes have been taking place before our very eyes. The volume under review suffers from a further handicap in so far as the Chinese influence in the world outside can hardly be examined in isolation from the happenings at home which during the last five years have been subjected in a very large measure to the overpowering personalized politics around the father figure of Mao Tse-tung. …

Rubinstein in opening the discussion has warned that ‘there is clearly no Rosetta stone for deciphering influence’ and has brought out the difficulties in measuring any country’s influence over another. However, adherence to certain broad criteria has helped the contributors to the volume to reach certain significant as well as interesting conclusions: for instance, the appraisal of Soviet influence in India by William Barnds makes it clear that while it is difficult to describe Soviet goals ‘and especially their priorities’, Moscow’s success in this direction is due to the fact that Soviet and Indian interests were similar rather than because Moscow influenced New Delhi. Barnd … comes to the significant conclusion that ‘the major impact of Soviet efforts in India has been to enable New Delhi to pursue more effectively policies it wanted to follow in any case’—a rather surprising rebuff to those in India and abroad who have denounced the Indo-Soviet Treaty as having mortgaged Indian interests to Moscow, a rebuff administered by one who has served the CIA for fourteen years, as Barnds’s record shows.