The financial difficulties of the United Nations have become one of the pressing issues of contemporary international affairs. They have roots that extend to the heart of the politics of the Organization and its procedure. Beyond this they raise serious questions about the ability of the institution to function effectively in the future. To grasp the complex problems associated with the UN financial situation it is necessary to view the matter in some perspective.

The term “political modernization” is of late encountered with increasing frequency in the literature of political science. Its antecedents are somewhat diffuse. In the most general sense, it seems to represent a specialized adaptation of scholars' long-standing concern with the question of whether the process of social change is determinate or variable, random or patterned, continuous or episodic, cyclic or evolutionary. Within this tradition “political modernization” is a concept opposed in tendency to the relativistic character of much modern scholarship in the field of politics. It would seem to be oriented more in the direction of a patterned and evolutionary—although not necessarily determinate or value-laden—interpretation of social change.

The two industrial nuclear-power blocs in Western Europe, EURATOM (European Atomic Community—the Common Market) and ENEA (European Nuclear Energy Agency, organized under the auspices of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation), represent a significant political cleavage in Europe. Both supranational groups are consortiums for the generation of industrial nuclear power, including fuel production, reprocessing, and isotope separation. EURATOM represents the Continental Six under French-West German leadership; ENEA, a more loosely organized bloc under British sponsorship.

If one thinks seriously about any of the major international trouble spots in the world today, one soon confronts the problem of what really is the “value” of, for example, Cuba, Berlin, or Laos to the United States. The view put forward in this article is that, while the question is unanswerable in a rigorous and precise sense, some useful things can be said in approaching it, and in trying to distinguish between more and less unsatisfactory answers to it. In principle, of course, the value of other countries to the United States includes that of the advanced countries, and, most significantly, of Western Europe. The present article, however, will be primarily concerned with the value of less-developed countries to the United States, and with their value in certain extreme contingencies over a time period that is relatively short from the standpoint of history, though somewhat longer from the standpoint of economics.

The importance and political implications of the subject of unconventional warfare are well known and need not be elaborated upon here. At the present time, the three branches of the American military services are expanding their “special” forces, preparing for the eventuality of conflicts of smaller scope than conventional warfare. On the Soviet side, the theory of peaceful coexistence—i.e., the thesis that capitalism should be eliminated by popular movements rather than by foreign armies—was reasserted at the January conference of the S.E.D. in Berlin, by no lesser authority than Nikita Khrushchev himself.