- New Issue
- Books & Reviews
- About Us
- Browse by Issue:
Neither Lon Nol nor President Nixon has left Cambodians any alternative to armed struggle and revolution-a struggle and revolution whose object is to enable our people to regain their freedom, our nation to recover its dignity and our country to become independent again.
Twenty-FIVE years have passed since the collapse of Europe. Vienna- Versailles-Potsdam: these historic milestones mark the calamitous decline of the European world order during the last hundred and fifty years.
Science and the increase of population are the major dynamics of our time. Science promises civilization its highest fulfillment but simultaneously threatens its survival. A billion more people will populate the earth in 10 years, three to four billion more in 30. No one can escape the combined impact of mass population and technology. We are, finally, truly interdependent.
The rationale of West German foreign policy is very simple: the postwar era has ended. Its hallmarks were high hopes for Western political structures on the one hand, and high tension between East and West on the other. Now a new epoch is in the offing. In the West it is going to be characterized by less ambitious objectives and more pragmatic approaches. The achievements of the fifties and sixties will not be dismantled, but the aims for the immediate future will be lowered. Dreams of "Atlantic Union Now" or "Instant Europe" must give way to expectations more closely geared to realities: wider and deeper coöperation, without necessarily institutional perfection. Between East and West the new era could be one of diminished tension and growing détente, of more coöperation and less confrontation. Not unlike President Nixon, the Bonn government is also trying to "build agreement upon agreement" without in any way deluding itself that this could be a process easily or speedily accomplished.
The purpose of recent American diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East is simply stated. It is to stop the fighting and bring the peace effort back to the point, now nearly three years ago, when Ambassador Gunnar Jarring was setting out on his mission to help bring about an agreed Arab-Israeli settlement on the basis of a unanimous U.N. resolution. It is a measure of the deterioration since that time that these modest proposals, the results of which are uncertain as these lines are written, have generated optimism by their initial success in breaking the fixed pattern of reliance on force alone. For they came at a time of gloom over the prospects for settlement and of alarm over military events which could bring major Soviet gains or grave risk of war. Participation of Soviet pilots and missile crews in military operations had already limited Israel's mastery of the skies over Egypt and might in time shift the balance of power which now favors Israel. Once that balance is upset, President Nixon has said, the United States "will do what is necessary" to restore it.
Whatever objectives the Soviet Union may have in the eastern Mediterranean, they must be presumed to be part of wider policies, and inevitably the effects of activities there extend far beyond the states immediately concerned.
American foreign policy is changing, but the machinery of government is not changing with it. As we try to enter what President Nixon has called an era of negotiation, it is time to ask whether the nation is well served by the immense foreign affairs bureaucracies that have grown up in Washington over the past quarter-century. Could institutional reform give new coherence to our foreign policy? How these questions are answered may well determine the success or failure of American diplomacy in the seventies.
In the long run it may yet transpire that the differences between stages of economic development as between various nations and regions of the world are a more important determinant of history than differences in ideology or systems of government. Religious wars are contested with fervor at the time; so are wars to make the world safe for democracy. But sooner or later, the economic historian presents an alternative analysis which seems to put the hysteria of yesteryear in a more realistic frame.
Before the murder of Tom Mboya in July 1969, Kenya politicians could mute and obscure their country's tribal tensions. The tensions, of course, were always there, straining the fragile unity of the new country, but they did not pervade every side of political life. Personal rivalry counted; so did ideology. The assassination changed all that.
Ten years ago this fall John Kennedy first spoke about sending Americans overseas in voluntary service. By the following summer the idea had a name- the Peace Corps-several hundred Volunteers were in training, and even as Congress debated the program it became clear that the idea was catching on. The Silent Generation was ready to be heard from and young Americans were flooding the Corps' makeshift headquarters with thousands of applications. The public saw in it an opportunity to "show what Americans are really like" and redeem the image portrayed in Eugene Burdick's best-seller, "The Ugly American." Surveys revealed thousands of jobs to be done abroad. It seemed obvious that the most modern nation in the world could provide the needed manpower. Despite misgivings, Congress baptized the experiment by overwhelming votes.
The decade of the sixties has produced a new school of isolationism. The reaction to the war in Vietnam, the demands of domestic problems and the seeming hollowness of traditional assumptions of international involvement- all give rise to this outlook. The isolationism is sometimes incoherent, occasionally inconsistent, and very attractive to a large portion of the younger generation.
Ten years ago, in August 1960, the Socialist Party abstained in the vote of confidence for the third Fanfani cabinet, thus giving the first and irreversible indication that a new period was beginning in the brief history of the Italian Republic. The era of "quadripartito" coalitions, running from the Christian Democrats to the Liberals, and including the Republicans and Social Democrats, was over. The "opening to the Left" was on. Although the first Center-Left government, led by Aldo Moro and including the Nenni Socialists, the Republicans and Social Democrats, would not come into being until December 1963, it can be fairly said that the sixties, in Italy, belonged to that political constellation. At the end of the decade, during the critical summer of 1970, people wondered whether a new turning point had arrived. Had the Center-Left already exhausted its historical task? If so, what would come afterwards-the "opening to the Communists," or, on the contrary, a turn to the Right? Or would, after all, the Center-Left coalition be able to survive and even gather new strength?