ABSTRACT
The historian of the future, looking back over the nineteen-fifties and probably the sixties, cannot fail to be impressed with the place given to political doctrines in the discussion of contemporary international affairs. The doctrinal split is at its sharpest between the United States, with its conservative-democratic political outlook, and the Russian and Chinese states, with their authoritarian-communist outlooks. A defensive balance of power is concerned in a broad sense with the creation and maintenance of an equilibrium among the independent states of the world. But the idea of a stationary equilibrium is useful only as an abstract reference point: in practice, it must be reinterpreted in the sense of a “moving equilibrium”. In the nineteenth century various forms of autocracy and liberalism sometimes affected the groupings and policies of the Great Powers.
