Ten years ago the United Nations sponsored the first conference of governments on global population. Held in Bucharest, the conference was spearheaded by the United States and planned as a rally in support of the notion that population was growing too rapidly around the world and that the right prescription was family planning. But Bucharest did not turn out as planned. Such developing giants as India and China questioned the cure, and the rallying cry became, rather, that development is the best contraceptive. The conferees produced a grandly-named World Population Plan of Action which, though it acknowledged the role of family planning and contraception, had more than one plan in its platform.

In The Hero in History Sidney Hook argues that, with one possible exception, no great leader has managed singlehandedly to change the course of history. The one exception: Lenin. The Russian Revolution "was triumphant," writes Hook, "because of the directing leadership of Lenin …without him it would have been lost." Stalin, Lenin's sanguinary successor and founder of the "cult of personality," did manage, however, to place his own terrible stamp upon the Soviet system. Perhaps this double legacy is what accounts for the lingering perception in the West that Soviet behavior (and with it the destiny of the world) is dictated by the man at the top.

It may well be a tendency rooted in human nature that both individuals and larger collectivities, when faced with an intractable problem, like to think that someone, somewhere, must have the definitive solution. This tendency has certainly been visible in the area of Third World development. When this area was first brought into public consciousness in the years following World War II, there was the widespread assumption (by no means limited to North Americans and Europeans) that the advanced industrial societies of the West had discovered the secret of development. They constituted the model; the problem for other societies was how to follow this model as rapidly and painlessly as possible. This was the time when Talcott Parsons, for example, could refer to the United States as the "lead society," sincerely believing that this designation reflected sober social-scientific analysis rather than messianic nationalism. Then came the great ideological upheaval of the late 1960s and early '70s. The success of the Western model was either challenged in toto—as was done by Marxists of various denominations—or at least deemed to be negative in its effects on non-Western societies— as in the perspective of the more moderate versions of "dependency theory." The American "lead society" model was replaced by miscellaneous "vanguard societies," ranging from China to Tanzania, that had little in common except a commitment to a socialist development strategy.

Hailed at its birth in 1960 as democracy's best hope in Africa, Nigeria succumbed to yet another military takeover on December 31, 1983. Of particular anguish is the fact that the coup reverses the celebrated constitution of 1979, when Nigeria redeemed democracy from the ashes of violent political breakdown, military intervention, assassination, and civil war. Now events are bound to confirm the all too general impression that in Africa authoritarian rule is inevitable.

Events of recent years have focused considerable attention on northeast India, particularly on tribal uprisings, insurgency, the problem of aliens, the involvement of foreign agencies, political horse trading, and natural disasters. At the same tune, ethnic and religious factors have been almost wholly ignored—this despite the fact that they have a decisive influence on the institutions of democracy and, since India's independence, have acquired quite new and different nuances.

In 1950 northeast India consisted of the State of Assam and the Union Territories of Manipur and Tripura. With the passage of the North-Eastern Areas (Reorganization) Act of 1971, the northeast emerged as a significant administrative concept. The more familiar unit of Assam was replaced by a North-Eastem Council (NEC) to deal with planning and security.

As is perhaps fitting for a "capitalist" society, Americans tend to address national security issues in monetary terms. In the early 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles counseled that "the Soviet Communists are planning what they call 'an entire historical era,' and we should do the same. They seek, through many types of maneuvers, gradually to divide and weaken the free nations by overextending them in efforts which, as Lenin put it, are 'beyond their Strength, so that they come to practical bankruptcy.'"

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.

When, during the invasion of Grenada, Secretary of State George Schultz announced that newsmen were no longer “on our side,” he was correct. It's a far, far different world with wars far different from World War II, when our civilization was threatened and it would have been treason for a newsman to report from the “other side.” As a youth in the Pacific theatre of that war I saw my first foreign correspondent: He was uniformed and could have been a general.

It all began to change during Korea; not all newsmen were accredited in that United Nations war. When, in April, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the U.S. Marines and 82nd Airborne ashore in the Dominican Republic, some of us went ashore with the first wave of Marines. Daily we crossed the Marines’ lines to cover the rebel side of the war.

Until July, 1979, when Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution sent shock waves through Central America, Honduras was unknown territory. Today all that has changed. Honduras has become the nerve center of U.S. military operations in the convulsive Central American region. The appeal of its strategic location is clear. Honduras occupies the heart of the Central American isthmus, with a long Caribbean shoreline. To the south it commands the Gulf of Fonseca, which U.S. officials have long charged is a primary route of arms transfers from Nicaragua to the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador.

Overseas bases go against the American grain. Associated in popular imagination with the emanations of nineteenth-century imperialism, their retention today seems anachronistic, their expansion sinister. Yet this nation has held a global grid of bases since the 1940s; and though shrunk from 150 major naval and air bases in its cold war heyday to a mere 30 today, it remains the underpinning of U.S. global strategy. However reluctantly, the United States has assumed a global commitment, and it has fashioned a strategy of containment to sustain it. American bases abroad are the physical manifestations as well as the emotive symbols of that historic strategy. As such, they help not only to identify America's place in a changing world but also to determine whether such change warrants a reorientation of strategy.

Soviet newspapers are filled with the most interesting stories—particularly on the first and second pages, which are devoted to the Soviet economy. Four subjects dominate these pages: food problems, discipline problems, and management and transportation problems.

A public philosophy is the ectoplasm of a political party. Candidates represent die party, but, in a larger sense, they are epiphenomenal; if die parry's principles and organizing concepts are shopworn, even die most presentable candidate will have difficulty transcending diem. In such cases victory is not impossible, just unwarranted.

Mexico's two thousand-mile border with the United States is unarmed, but it remains the locus of sharp conflicts. Last October, House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill, bowing to pressure from the Hispanic Caucus, withdrew the Simpson- Mazzoli bill on immigration reform over White House objections that "it is in the best interests of all Americans to have the nation regain control of its borders." Jorge Bustamante, director of Mexico's Center for Border Studies, argues, however, that such a bill would "leave all migrant workers, whether documented or not, in a state of virtual slavery, since they will have no access to the courts to plead for justice."

In 1942, shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and removed any lingering doubts about America's total involvement in world affairs, the Voice of America opened its inaugural foreign broadcast with the announcement: "Daily at this time we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth."

As our train passed through the flat, grayish city of Nanking last December, a retired Chinese high school principal spoke about the uncertain future of his home, Hong Kong. What would happen to one of the world's great colonial anachronisms when Great Britain's ninety-nine-year lease ran out in 1997? After months of secretive negotiations between China and Great Britain, the former schoolmaster was optimistic: The Chinese Communists were too smart to risk undermining Hong Kong's stability by, say, moving in troops. They understood that to act precipitously toward always-anxious Hong Kong could mean chaos, and they appreciated the economic benefits of preserving Hong Kong as a window on the West for trade, technology, and capital.