Not the usual inquiry into how the West should respond to circumstances and policies in the Soviet Union, this is a studied endeavor to examine factors in the culture and politics of the principal Western nations, mainly domestic factors, which condition or determine what their responses will be. It is a careful study, with individual chapters done by seasoned authors-Karl Kaiser on Germany, Dominique Moïsi on France-and raises points of likely divergence that political leaders would do well to ponder. The book does not take account, unfortunately, of the events since 1989 that have brought about drastic change in the East-West balance.