As we move further into the 1980s there are a number of alarming trends in Soviet-American relations and in the nuclear arms race: the development of so-called “counterforce” or “first-strike” weapons; NATO's new Pershing XR II missiles, which drastically reduce the warning time of an American missile attack on the USSR, just as the Soviet SS-20s threaten Western Europe; a U.S. command system that, under conditions of intense crisis, says one expert, “is subject to strains powerful enough to trigger an unintended war”: increasingly sophisticated technology, such as that which has produced the cruise missile, complicating the verification process of future arms control agreements; a new and growing arms race in space; nuclear proliferation; the discussion of “limited” nuclear war and other strategic nuclear concepts; the failure of the U.S. to ratify SALT II…and the list goes on.

Lebanon is the most recent example of an all too frequent modern tragedy, the small nation rent by internal division and external intervention: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uganda. And as with all tragedies, the agony is both unique and universal.

Understandably, Americans are deeply troubled by the latest chapter in Lebanon's ordeal, for we have a religious, moral, political, and, for millions of Lebanese-Americans, profound familial investment in the country. America's involvement is older by far than the modern state of Lebanon, having originated in the early nineteenth century and grown stronger with American relief efforts during the Christian-Druse battles of 1860 and the establishment of the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut) in 1864.

What do machine tools, motorcycles, and mushrooms have in common? All are industries that, threatened by foreign competition, have recently applied to Washington for import protection. And American manufacturers are not alone. Industries across the globe are pressing their governments to restrict purchases from abroad as a way of saving jobs at home. The story is an old one; When times are bad, cut imports; export unemployment instead.

That times are bad is obvious. Since the first oil shock a decade ago, global economic growth has slowed to a snail's pace. Not even the erstwhile “miracle” economies of Japan and Germany have been able to escape the harsh grip of recession. In the United States, one worker in ten is out of a job. In the industrial world as a whole, 30 million people are now looking for work.

In the Horn of Africa the stubborn politics of military regimes have caused as many as 750,000 people to seek sanctuary across international frontiers. They will remain in refugee camps until the various antagonists decide to compromise what they term “unnegotiable” national interests, the centerpiece of the tale is Ethiopia, which, until the revolution of 1974, worked to create a nation out of an empire by transforming its many peoples into a typical Christian peasantry, thereby alienating the Muslims and pastoralists of the south, east, and north. Under Haile Selassie it also brought great wealth to a tiny oligarchy while impoverishing the masses, a process spurred during the ’50s and ’60s as the country was being integrated in the world economy.

The scientific and technical knowledge that led in 1945 to the explosion of the first atomic weapons cannot be erased; as long as our civilization survives, so will our capacity to build nuclear weapons. Awareness of this harsh fact has sparked numerous attempts to control their spread. The hope was that nuclear weapons could be confined to a relatively few, politically stable countries and then eliminated entirely.

In the Baruch Plan of 1946, the United States offered to turn over its nuclear monopoly to an international authority on the condition that other powers do the same and that the most rigorous safeguards and inspection/verification procedures be established and enforced The Soviet Union declined to go along. Thus the 1950s and early ’60s saw the spread of nuclear weapons, first to the Soviet Union (accomplished by a combination of internal research and international espionage), then to Great Britain and France, and later to the People's Republic of China (instigated by the USSR and doubtless regretted by the Soviets today)

Seven years after the fall of Saigori and three and a half after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia/Kampuchea, Southeast Asia is an area in search of equilibrium. That search provides the key to understanding the relations between and among the various states in the region.

Vietnam's foreign policy objectives have been fairly clear and in a sense straightforward, at least since 1979. It wants de jure recognition of the status quo; that is, of a unitary Vietnamese state (now widely granted) and of both the Heng Samrin government in Cambodia and the Kaysone government in Laos (far less widely granted). Vietnam says it is seeking a normalization of relations with ASEAN and China for itself and on behalf of the other two Indochinese governments.

The Falklands conflict left in its wake a remarkable amount of psychological and conceptual disarray—even consternation— in both Latin American and U.S. policy-making circles. As a consequence, there is a good deal of stock-taking on all sides regarding the nature of hemispheric relationships and where to go from here. This has occurred not because the Falklands crisis itself created substantially new facts or circumstances but because it made explicit certain international trends and new realities that up to now have been implicit and only partially understood.

The conflict demonstrated, for example, the persistence and primacy of national interests in motivating individual Latin American countries, and also how discontinuous such interests can be with larger global issues.

Some of NATO's faults are birth defects and others are accidents of history or the usual sort of problems that beset any human institution during a third of a century. Yet despite internal strains and external challenges, NATO watched over the political and economic reconstruction of Europe and has kept the peace. Today, new and multiple tensions strain the Alliance still further. Will the NATO that survives—and few actually contemplate its demise— be as successful?

The original deal was this: We would protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union and in return the nations of Western Europe would remain friendly to us and to Western ideas of government and international relations. West Germany also would be protected and, eventually, allowed to contribute to its own defense. We would not even ask the Germans to abandon hope for reunification or concern for their brethren to the east.