This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC wreath lectures.

This lecture in the series Change Without War, given by Alistair Buckin, was originally broadcast in 1973.

I make no apology for devoting one evening in this attempt at a wide panorama to the affairs and interests of a single country.

For it is common ground that the actions and reactions of the United States

can probably affect the nature of world politics,

the prospects of peace or of change without war, more than those of any other country.

All democratic states, and indeed some autocratic ones as well, are experiencing a crisis of self-confidence, as social and other domestic change accelerates.

But in few nations is the crisis, the need for decision, more acute than in the United States.

Its roots are similar to those in Britain or France, diminishing respect for political

leadership, the divorce between social and political values, the adjustment from rural to urban

loyalties, the increasing dominance of the mass media. But the process of change has been

sharpened and made more acrimonious over the past decade by a number of obvious factors.

The frustration, the casualties and the eventual failure of intervention in Southeast Asia.

The rise of the Soviet Union to a position of strategic parity.

The end of economic autarchy.

The changing balance within the government between the Congress

and the President, the disorganization of the political parties and of political values,

the intractability of many domestic problems, race relations, urban growth and decay,

drugs, law and order. And now the country is affected by the most extensive political scandal in any

democratic country since the Dreyfus case in France at the turn of the century.

Moreover, American society is afflicted by a particular feeling of frustration, a sense of living

in a thoroughly ungrateful world. America emerged into the world during the Second World War

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