ABSTRACT
American postwar foreign policy has been characterized by a broad consensus about the dominance of its Soviet problem as well as about the nature of the Soviet threat. Moreover, the questions of whether deterrence and the stability of the alliance system are sufficiently well served by the policies of the government in power, are highly contentious issues in domestic politics. The principal problem seeming to remain resides in devising stable long-term policies to manage the decay of the Soviet system. The legitimizing and amorphous myth of what the world would be like without the Soviet challenge underlies the American political debate and its polarizations. There must be a shared belief in calculability and a political discourse within a generally shared frame of reference concerning political reality, legitimacy, and policy goals. But we do not have such a common frame of reference on common terms of discourse.
