Monarchies would appear to be a dying breed of political system, and those in which royal heads of state rule as well as reign are rarer still. As to the Middle East, the fall of the shah of Iran in 1979 was widely regarded as betokening the imminent demise of other dynastic regimes in that part of the world. Yet a closer look at Jordan and Saudi Arabia—both critically important to U.S. interests in the area—indicates that their governments seem to enjoy a considerable degree of legitimacy and, despite major problems, are likely to survive for some time to come. They do, however, face significant challenges in a period of rapid and unrelenting change. and

The Chinese have sayings to fit many situations, and there is even one that describes the state of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China today: Anything pushed to an extreme must bounce back. After the euphoria that followed the normalization of relations in 1978, which deepened into mutual infatuation and the belief mat all previous animosities had been obliterated, there came an increasing awareness that all was not quite so rosy, followed by backing away by both sides.

In June, 1976, U.S. Ambassador Francis Meloy and his economic counselor were assassinated in Beirut by Palestinian sympathizers. In August, 1980, as U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean was driving to his residence in a suburb of Lebanon's capital, his bullet-proof car was riddled with machine-gun fire—this attempt on his life later claimed by the "Front for the Liberation of Lebanon From Foreigners," a right-wing and pro-Christian group that accused the U.S. of aiding the Palestinians. Between 1978 and 1982 factions tied to Palestinian guerrillas fired rockets at the U.S. embassy on four separate occasions. In April, 1983, the bombing of the embassy, took a toll of sixty-three lives; the first group to claim "credit" was a littleknown pro-Iranian faction

By now the origins of the debt crisis—too much borrowing by Third World countries and too much lending by banks and industrialized nations—are reasonably well understood. What has only just begun is a flood of scholarly articles and muckraking journalism about the collusion between various parties pursuing narrow profits rather than the wider public interest.

It is perhaps both natural and understandable that most of these analyses and commentaries are focusing on the complexity of the problem and offering complicated cures. After all, the number and variety of countries in debt is large and growing. Similarly, the number of public, private, bilateral, and multilateral institutions involved in the crisis constitutes a mind-boggling alphabet soup. The jargon too is forbidding. There is financing and refinancing, scheduling and rescheduling, Special Drawing Rights and Structural Adjustment, to mention only what every newspaper reader has to struggle through. And there is the umbrella term conditionality, which, of course, is difficult to understand in the intricate detail of its application, implementation, and implication.

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.