To the Editor:

I would like to communicate my admiration for the solidly informative and cogently reasoned essay, “Africa, Soviet Imperialism, and the Retreat of American Power,” by Bayard Rustin and Carl Gershman [October 1977].

The authors clearly appreciate that their essay is only initially concerned with Africa. They conclude: “Sooner or later, the United States will have to decide whether it intends to remain [the leader of the West] and a world power fulfilling its obligations as the only country capable of deterring Soviet expansion.”

I ask them to consider the alternative that the authoritative American answer to this question of deterring Soviet expansion has already been given, for these next years, and this answer is a selective negative. That this negative is always well-reasoned—or even reasoned at all—I do not assert.

The brackets which I have inserted around the phrase “the leader of the West” are not in the authors’ original. But surely such language is today obsolete, perhaps to the point of impoliteness.

Oscar Gass
Washington, D.C.