ABSTRACT
Among the more engaging features of the American political system is the custom of extending wide indulgence to every incoming administration, both in foreign policy and domestic affairs. For President Carter upon assuming office to announce a "new American foreign policy for a new world" and for the new Secretary of State to proclaim a radical reversal of his predecessor's foreign policy as an end to what Mr. Brzezinski called "ideological warfare". If the Carter administration's Middle East policy has suffered from a surfeit of misguided activism, its policy in the Far East seems to have suffered from the opposite. The charge of having neglected Japan, made by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other members of the Trilateral Commission against the former administration, can be made with equal validity against the Carter administration in its first year in office. US policy toward China has similarly suffered from an absence of clear guidelines.
