I hope that I have not given offence by my title. No one is a legitimate target of terrorism. I mean that thinking about terrorism involves thinking about who is and who is not a legitimate target for political force.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 has prompted a large number of scholars and journalists to embark on the analysis of Afghan affairs. Even before the invasion, much valuable material was available in Western languages to the interested reader. The internal politics of Afghanistan had been studied by Louis Dupree, Vartan Gregorian, Hasan Kakar, Leon B. Poullada, and Richard S. Newell; Maxwell J. Fry and Gilbert Etienne had analysed the Afghan economy; and Afghanistan's international relations had been examined in detail by Ludwig W. Adamec. Indeed, a recent bibliography of works on Afghanistan has listed no fewer than 1,611 items dealing with Afghan history and politics. None the less, had it not been for the Soviet invasion, the study of Afghanistan would surely have remained the province of a few cognoscenti. In the wake of the invasion, however, a large body of literature on Afghanistan has been published, containing works varying in quality from the outstanding to the atrocious. An appraisal of the relative merits of some of the more widely cited studies therefore seems to be in order.

Why study international relations? Is it simply because, like Everest, they are there? Or is it in order more effectively to empathize with international statesmen? Or is it to seek such a measure of understanding of structures and processes that interventions to change them in desirable ways may have increasing probabilities of success? Garnett most neatly attaches himself to the first of these positions. The contributors to the scholarly Bull and Watson volume (or more exactly, most of the contributors) seem to hold the second view. Kubalkova and Cruickshank, Strange, and Banks have the third objective in mind, although in very different ways, and with varying degrees of explicitness. The choice of objective made by a scholar is determined not merely by his interests and the intellectual and analytical skills of which he has made himself master, but also by his epistemological assumptions. Thus Garnett and Bull would assert that, in contrast with the ‘exact’ sciences, it is erroneous to suppose that scientific methods can be employed in the study of social questions, and that any attempt so to do and thereby to arrive at advice about action must be mistaken—and dangerous to the extent that it creates expectations about results that are as likely to be falsified as to be confirmed.

Hedley Bull's contribution to the theory of international relations is considerable; and nowhere more acute than in the distinction which he made between the concept of a system of states and that of an international society. His definitive formulation is set out in Chapter I of The Anarchical Society. ‘Where states are in regular contact with one another, and where in addition there is interaction between them sufficient to make the behaviour of each a necessary element in the calculations of the other, then we may speak of their forming a system.’ ‘A society of states (or international society) exists when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.’

Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union have engaged in an intense and often deeply hostile contest for predominance in the international system. The dedication by each superpower of its most valued technological, engineering and economic resources first to acquiring and thereafter to ceaselessly enhancing a comprehensive inventory of nuclear arms, is an especially prominent and important manifestation of USA-USSR rivalry.

The ideological divide which informs the current superpower competition, and the nuclear context in which that competition takes place, reinforce the tendency of the superpowers to view other actors in the system with covetous eyes. These two factors also have a great bearing on how the United States and the Soviet Union are perceived by the Third World states.

Over recent years the birth of the post-war world—of the East—West divide in Germany and Europe; the Soviet preponderance in the East; and the Atlantic alliance—has come to exert an enormous attraction over academics and students, and as the archives have been opened in Britain, America and elsewhere, the year 1945 has ceased to be a 'barrier' for historical studies.

The relationship between the United States and Great Britain is a subject of apparently endless fascination. It has given rise to innumerable books, theses, articles, essays and speculations. It is, however, riven with misunderstandings, inconsistencies and stereotypes. For all that the relationship has been written about, investigated, discussed and analysed, the topic is ripe, even yet, for further discussion.