By way of introduction, I have certain preliminary comments which may be enlightening and provide for a sharper focus on the issues here. I wish to confess that I am an expolitical criminal, and I have not been rehabilitated. I have not been rehabilitated because I have never been caught, so the system never got a chance to rehabilitate me. As a youngster I plastered prohibited posters on the walls of the ancient cities of the Middle East. In my later youth I smuggled prohibited literature into socialist countries. And later yet I saw what I was not supposed to see, and talked to people I was not supposed to talk to, in fascist countries. So consequently I do have a special interest and a feeling for this business of political crime and terror.

Having heard the presentations of Professors Dugard, Moore, and Abu-Lughod and being required to respond to them, I find myself in a somewhat strange and uncomfortable position. I assume that most of the men and women in this room are lawyers or at least have a strong orientation to the law. I, however, am a social psychologist and not a lawyer. But as a result of watching a number of Perry Mason reruns on television, I know that my ignorance of the law is no excuse.

Less than a generation ago international relations textbooks either referred to the international system as a realm of anarchy or applied to it global generalizations such as the balance of power. That the number of major states in the system, their economic and military potential, their alliance patterns, and so forth might affect the resort to force and the results of such resort was largely foreign to analysis.

I agree with the foregoing description of the central international system and the structure of power in it. In military terms it is almost as much conventionally as nuclearly bipolar. Indeed the whole logic of the Nixon Administration’s policy presupposes the stabilization of a bipolar balance as the basis for a more multipolar diplomatic pattern among the five major centers of economic and diplomatic power. It also presupposes that the stabilization of this balance is the condition for a retrenchment by the United States. Such retrenchment is to be manifested in a lower level of effort and a more indirect involvement rather than in a disengagement from our political commitments or previous involvements throughout the globe. Thus, as far as the United States is concerned, the very condition for detente is a more subtle and diversified global engagement by the United States. The center of American foreign policy remains, as it was supposed to be in some previous administrations, the orchestration of a global modus vivendi between the United States and Soviet Union. Now this modus vivendi is supposed to be manifest in a whole network of agreements and understandings linked together in such a way as to reduce room for maneuver and to moderate the behavior of both superpowers. On the basis of tacit agreements between them relating to mutual cutback of intense and often disruptive competition in the Third World, it may be expected that (1) the patterns of diplomatic conflict and alignment among the five major centers of power will become more complicated and diversified and that (2) military security concerns will recede into the background of international politics and a whole set of other issues will come to the front.