In [The Last Days of America], Paul Erdman returns to the theme of an earlier book. The Crash of '79: the decline of America's will to lead the West and the opportunities this presents to its more irresponsible allies to take the world to the brink of disaster….

Mr Erdman's new book takes us into the later 1980s….

West Germany, feeling uniquely vulnerable to Russian attack, has overcome its national guilt complex and is reverting to type. Willi Brandt and Helmut Schmidt have been discarded. The new saviour is the Bavarian conservative, Franz Joseph Strauss, who, in a comeback as unexpected as Richard Nixon's resurgence in 1968, has been swept into the Chancellorship on a promise to give Germany its own independent nuclear deterrent.

Mr Erdman is a master of timing. His book appears here just as German conservatives have scored their first electoral victory in West Berlin, as...