Sunday, August 15, 1971. It is 8 o'clock in the evening, television prime time. Suddenly the president appears on the screen, tense and unsmiling as ever, and makes a three-point announcement: The gold window will be closed, a wage-and-price freeze will be imposed, and a blanket 10 per cent surcharge will be levied on imports — all to take effect immediately. The world is stunned. Almost instantly the shock waves cross the globe. A dazed fapan cries out against what it calls — in a memorable phrase — the “Nixon shokku.”

History has few examples of such a blitz-like turnabout and of such blatant disregard of promises and commitments publicly made and of international obligations solemnly undertaken. The twenty-six-year-old Bretton Woods agreement was cast overboard without the least qualm; the dollar, which for all those years had enjoyed the privileges of the world's foremost reserve currency, was delinked unilaterally from gold and set afloat.

It was in May, 1974, at the Sixth Special Session of the United Nations, that a majority of the nations of the world, overriding Western objections, passed a resolution that called for the establishment of a New International Economic Order. This resolution put on a new plane the issues raised in 1964 at the first session of the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development when Raul Prebisch, the UNCTAD secretary general, had called in his opening speech for a new international order.

Since 1974 a number of conferences and discussions have been held about how to implement the new order. In 1975, in the wake of a memorable speech read by then U.N. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan that reflected a more conciliatory posture by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the U.N. Seventh Special Session passed a revised declaration.

The question is asked whether Moral Majority is a threat or a challenge. The answer, I believe, is that it is both. The less intelligently we respond to the challenge, the greater is the threat.

The concern is about a cluster of organizations and movements representing an alliance between religion and the New Right in American politics. Moral Majority and its leader, Jerry Falwell, are simply the most visible part of the phenomenon. I am persuaded that the religious New Right represents a deep and long-term change in American religion, culture, and politics. Moral Majority and other organizations may not be around five years from now, but the change they represent will be with us for a long time.

World attention now rivets on a troubled Central America — from Guatemala to Costa Rica — and on surrounding island states of the larger Caribbean basin. In many international forums the question is asked: Can an international assistance effort, with financial, technical, and market components, be mounted to assist the hemispheric subregion in achieving a more stable, secure, and peaceful ground for economic growth and general development? The subject is not a new one by any means. In fact, since 1945 it has found its way again and again onto the Hemisphere's geopolitical and economic agenda.

Skeptics argue the futility of any effort to transfer resources from the wealthier to the poorer countries, maintaining that “official transfers cannot significantly promote development,” since they have too many adverse consequences on recipient nations, including encouragement of “imprudent financial policies.”