The United Kingdom's defence effort has undergone profound transformation in the thirty years since the end of the Second World War. Further change is foreshadowed in the programme for the forthcoming decade which emerged from the Labour Government's 1974 Defence Review. Indeed, as Britain's economic distress persisted through 1975 it became apparent that the budgetary projections yielded by this “most extensive and thorough review of our system of defence ever undertaken by a British Government in peacetime” would themselves come in for further scrutiny and revision. Even the future is not what it used to be.

The implied assumption about Ancient History, which in the present discussion will comprise mainly Graeco–Roman history, is that ‘relevance’ obtains. What this will chiefly mean is that in some sense history does teach lessons, and that specifically Ancient History has lessons to teach students of international affairs at the present day. A massive assumption, it may be thought. Some suggestions towards a defence of the proposition appear later. What might seem more readily defensible is the view that it is the present which may illuminate the past. Here the lessons of history, if we admit them, become retrospective. If Winston Churchill in certain aspects of his career in the 1930s resembled the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C. pronouncing his Anti-Philippics, even more revealingly, perhaps, in enhancing contemporary understanding of the latter period, did Demosthenes fulfil the role of Winston Churchill in his “wilderness years”.

Oil is a highly political commodity and has more than once taken the centre of the stage in international affairs. This is not surprising in view of its importance in industry and transportation as well as for military activities. Mesopotamian oil was a crucial consideration in a number of the political settlements in the Middle East after the First World War, with the French, British and Americans playing the leading roles, just before that war the British navy had converted to oil, and Britain considered the security of her oil supplies to be an important objective of foreign policy. She had no domestic production. In the 1920s the United States began to fear that her oil reserves were becoming dangerously depleted and she also felt that her security as well as her prosperity depended on obtaining control of oil abroad. The United States sought access to oil concessions in the Middle East, and the diplomatic skirmishes were sharp as the British and Dutch tried to keep her out, not merely from the Middle East, but from south-eastern Asia as well, where production was dominated by the Dutch. Thus oil was an important source of controversy in the foreign policy of a number of countries in the inter-war period.

As a research subject this title had its origins in the four years (1969–73) the author spent in Pakistan as Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Islamabad, followed by a year as Foreign and Commonwealth Office Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge. He took as his general area of study the relations from about 1800 onwards between the Tsarist and Soviet Governments and those of South Asia, as defined by the FCO, namely India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon and Nepal. More specifically, Soviet relations with South Asia were the subject of a paper read by the author at one of Professor Kinsley's seminars on international relations in the summer of 1974. A revised version of that paper forms the basis of this article.

Since the term ‘strategy’ is now generally used to describe the use of available resources to gain any objective, from winning at bridge to selling soap, it is necessary to make clear that, in this paper, I shall use it in the traditional sense only: that is, as meaning the art of the strategon, or military commander. ‘The strategic approach’ is thus one which takes account of the part which is played by force, or the threat of force, in the international system. It is descriptive in so far as it analyses the extent to which political units have the capacity to use or to threaten the use of armed force to impose their will on other units; whether to compel them to dos ome things, to deter them from doing others, or if need be to destroy them as independent communities altogether. It is prescriptive in so far as it recommends policies which will enable such units to operate in an international system which is subject to such conditions and constraints.

Dr Savigear's ‘Philosophical Idealism and International Politics: Bosanquet, Treitschke and War’ is especially welcome because this important topic has not been much discussed. However, on a subject so complex and controversial, some disagreement is to be expected. I shall suggest that Dr Savigear's argument requires qualification because it underemphasizes the cosmopolitanism which provides continuity to this aspect of Idealist moral and political philosophy.

The process of education, for all its centrality to the civilized mode of living, is but imperfectly understood. Yet if teaching is to be efficient, the preconditions for and means of learning must assuredly be appreciated; and to this end educationists have started to unravel the awesome complexities of how learning takes place – philosophers identifying the different forms of knowledge, the psychologists the different mental activities involved and the sociologists the different contexts in which learning can take place. As a consequence revolutionary changes have been effected in the syllabus-content and teaching methods of, for example, mathematics and the sciences. However, the amount of research effort that has been deployed on the various traditional school subjects varies considerably. But even the task of surveying an established school subject most patchily investigated would be more straightforward than an examination of the work carried out in the field of international studies.