Diplomacy & Crisis News

Soviet citizens were probably relieved at the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, for he stands in sharp contrast to his aging and ailing predecessors. At 54, he is young enough to be their son. More important, the mortality odds are that he will be around for a decade or more to implement those programs he wants. The likelihood of such continuity is in itself an important change. Also impressive are the speed and the purposefulness with which he has assumed control and addressed himself to the country's problems. This is clearly a man in a hurry who realizes he has to deal with some significant dilemmas, particularly in the economic sphere.

When Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, the Central Committee waited four days to name his successor. It is not clear whether this resulted from a real struggle for power or was simply because of an intervening weekend. In either case, the delay symbolized the stagnation and even the retrogression during Konstantin Chernenko's year in office.

What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass," exclaimed Lord Melbourne during one of the British politician's fits of exasperation over the situation in Ireland. Well, viewing the post-World War II course of Soviet-American relations, one is tempted to echo the nineteenth-century statesman's sentiments.

Forty years ago, U.S. nuclear power was indispensable in ending World War II. In the postwar era, American nuclear superiority was indispensable in deterring Soviet probes that might have led to World War III. But that era is over, and we live in the age of nuclear parity, when each superpower has the means to destroy the other and the rest of the world.

The linkup of American and Soviet forces at Torgau on the Elbe in April 1945 may be taken as the event symbolizing a new era in international relations--one largely dominated by the central relationship between two great powers, later known as the superpowers. The meeting at Torgau meant the splitting of Germany, the preeminent European power for three-quarters of a century. Germany's division was to be both a fixture of the postwar era and, additionally, a continuing source of unease. Also, the event dramatically initiated what was to become die Wacht an der Elbe, an American protection against the power of the East of what was to become a democratic Germany--and behind Germany an abiding American commitment to the security of Western Europe. Despite the misjudgments in the immediate aftermath of the war, the lessons of two world wars had been insinuated into American foreign policy. Finally, in the way of symbolism, perhaps the brief exchange of fire between Soviet and American forces on the Elbe provided an early harbinger of the tensions that were ultimately to emerge.

Albert Einstein once observed that the advent of nuclear weapons had changed everything except our modes of thinking. If even so dramatic a development as the nuclear revolution has taken a long time to be fully understood, how much longer has it usually taken to understand the implications of the more subtle, intangible historical changes taking place around us.

AN OPEN LETTER TO DR. SIDNEY DRELL Dear Friend: I have read your two splendid lectures--the speech on nuclear weapons at Grace Cathedral, October 23, 1982, and the opening statement to Hearings on the Consequences of Nuclear War before the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. What you say and write about the appalling dangers of nuclear war is very close to my heart and has disturbed me profoundly for many years now. I decided to address an open letter to you, feeling it necessary to take part in the discussion of this problem, one of the most important facing mankind.

The role of Congress in U.S. foreign policy is unique among the legislative bodies of the world. Our Constitution provides that the Congress, and especially the Senate, will be a source of independent judgment and a potential check upon the actions of the executive branch on such fundamental matters as the use of military force, the conclusion of international commitments, the appointment of principal policymakers, and the financing of military and diplomatic programs. The phrase _advice and consent_ with respect to treaties and nominations aptly summarizes that role in general.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Great Britain was obsessed by the fear that one of the other European powers would take advantage of the political decay of Islamic Asia.

The boundaries of Arab states have been around now for nearly six decades. It is not their existence which is novel, but their power and legitimacy

"Everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it." The old saw about the weather might well be applied to America's China policy. After the dramatic events of 1971-73 which initiated the long overdue process of "normalization" of relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China, the past three years have witnessed a lull in the relationship. At the start of President Richard Nixon's second term, the establishment of formal diplomatic relations was expected before the 1976 presidential election. The Sino-American joint communiqué of February 22, 1973, authorizing the parties to open liaison offices in each other's capital, and the termination of American military operations in Vietnam in early 1973 seemed to clear the path for a serious effort at normalization.

A history of terrorism from the Middle Ages onward, with analysis of terrorist strategies--and how governments can defeat them.

Twenty-five years after the League of Nations was born a successor organization was being formed at San Francisco. This fate, at least, has been spared the United Nations. The United Nations is not dead. But it certainly is ill. It is suffering, even supporters admit, from "a crisis of confidence," a "decline in credibility," and "creeping irrelevance." However we define it, the fact is that the world organization is being increasingly bypassed by its members as they confront the central problems of the time.

The Vietnam war has for so long dominated the U.S. field of vision that it has missed profound developments in the rest of Asia.

Twenty years of effort by the United Nations to give vitality and concrete form to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will be celebrated in 1968, designated by the General Assembly as International Human Rights Year. From 1945 to 1948 the United States delegation led the movement for the enactment of the Declaration as the embodiment of basic democratic political ideas. But since then, while the United Nations has been struggling to establish global norms of conduct, the United States has been the chief laggard in translating them into international law. At the present time the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify a single human rights treaty.

There is nothing new in the contemporary doctrine opposing intervention or in the pragmatic use of intervention on behalf of individual nations' interests.

The United Nations and South Africa are in dispute over which country governs a piece of formerly German-occupied territory known as South West Africa.

What is the destiny of the Europe of the Six? What should be its aim? Should it be content with economic integration and remain what the Gaullists contemptuously call a mere Europe des Marchands, sheltered under the American umbrella? Or should it aspire to become a power in its own right, a self-reliant Europe enjoying the status of "equal partner" with the United States, as the late President Kennedy, with unprecedented generosity, exhorted it to do? The debate on these questions now in progress throughout the Europe of the Six has been forced on its members by the American invitation to switch over to a somewhat doubtful form of Atlantic integration-the Multilateral Nuclear Force.

In the Security Council on August 7 the United States voted for a ban on the shipment of arms to the South African Government, and in the course of the debate the American representative announced that the United States would suspend all arms shipments at the end of the year. Since South Africa has in the past found it difficult to obtain licenses for the purchase of American arms, this decision represented only a small shift in policy. But as the vote was taken under African pressure, and as it separated the United States from Britain and France (which abstained), the shift was significant; for it showed that when faced with a choice, the United States is more prepared than before to take a stand against apartheid.

The Arab refugee problem is no longer the principal obstacle to peace between Israel and the Arab states. This was indicated in the recent United Nations Palestine debate. Concern of most Arab speakers about the refugees was secondary to their fear of the Zionist enclave in the Arab "heartland."