For most of its young political life, beginning with the partition of British India in 1947, Pakistan has been in some sense an ally of the United States, a signatory to military agreements, and a recipient of foreign aid. The government of General Zia ul Haq, established by a military coup against the government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, has now been in power for a full seven years. Two developments have attracted U.S. attention to Pakistan during this period: first, the Soviet invasion and occupation of Pakistan's neighbor, Afghanistan, in 1979; and second, the call on the part of Zia's government for the establishment of an Islamic regime. Despite a certain unease with that ideological goal, Americans—particularly in the wake of Afghanistan—have seen their interests firmly tied to the stability of the current regime and are currently in the midst of providing it with one of their largest military and development packages, some $3.2 billion. Clearly, the policy of Islamicization has not been an obstacle to the relations of Pakistan and the United States. In what sense, however, can the policy be called Islamic?

On February 16, 1984, George Frost Kennan, the eminent historian, Russianologist, and antinuclear gadfly, reached eighty, that milestone at which former high-ranking American diplomats are customarily canonized as "elder statesman." Mr. Kennan is now a certified elder, but the nature of his statesmanship raises interesting questions—not simply because of Kennan's great notoriety but because any serious attempt to answer them cuts to the very core of the most profound issues facing the nation in the final quarter of the twentieth century.

For over thirty years now Kennan has been one of the most controversial public figures in the West. His critique of American diplomacy, especially in the areas of Soviet-American relations and strategic arms control, has had an ironic edge, emanating as it does from the architect of containment—America's historic response to the Soviet challenge.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, Yugoslavia has been so hard hit by economic crisis that the modern inflationary syndrome has overwhelmed both the triumphs and the pitfalls of its political system. The founder and preeminent leader of the country's socialist regime, Josip Broz Tito, died at the age of eighty-six in May, 1980, just as the effects of worldwide recession and the second oil crisis were reaching a climax. After thirty-five years of leadership, Tito left his multiethnic nation of nations with the superb sense of timing for which he was known. He also left 22 million Yugoslavs—including a million unemployed and a million working outside the country—with rapidly mounting debts to the International Monetary Fund and multinational private banks; dramatic shortages of imported fuel and raw materials; a fiscal crisis caused by overexpansion of state budgets on every level; and the tendency among political leaders of the six semiautonomous Yugoslav republics and two “autonomous” regions to compete among themselves for costly and capital-intensive new investment projects.