1999: VICTORY WITHOUT WAR <i> by Richard Nixon (Pocket Books: $8.95) </i>

Richard Nixon, the President who opened Communist China to the West and signed a loser’s peace in Vietnam, writes in this volume a prescription for securing real peace in the remaining years of the 20th Century.

He proposes to take “a hard-headed look” at Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika , which have “generated so much hope and excitement in the West.”

“That Gorbachev seeks to take a new approach to Soviet problems (means) . . . he wants the system to be more efficient, not less communist,” Nixon writes. Gorbachev’s changes have not moved “the Soviet Union toward more freedom at home or a less aggressive policy abroad,” Nixon warns. “He sincerely does not want war. But he just as sincerely wants victory.”

“Nixon has provided . . . a highly intelligent, though sometimes overstated breviary (of) . . . ‘how great powers must behave in the real world,’ ” Josef Joffe wrote in these pages. “The book ought to be required reading for . . . every new American President.”