When I wrote in these pages two years ago that “1977 is shaping up as a year of possibly unprecedented political confrontation between Israel and the United States,” the Ford-Kissinger “reassessment” of American Middle East interests was. still alive, though crippled by what Kissinger termed “the prevailing domestic political situation.” The Brookings Report had emerged a few months earlier, detailing what was to become during the first months of Jimmy Carter's presidency his personal outline for a “comprehensive Middle East settlement.” And the Palestinian issue was just then affecting the American consciousness as one of self-determination and legitimate nationalist fervor.

President Carter has packed away his human rights crusade, as the State Department implicitly confirmed in this year's survey of countryby- country violations and what the United States can do about them. Reduced to absurdity, the crusade now amounts to looking at 105 nations receiving American aid or buying American weapons and finally deciding it is safe to penalize Nicaragua. And who will deny that Nicaragua deserves a penalty?

No doubt we will continue to hear of human rights and occasionally see a bit of action, as we did of course before Carter appeared, but human rights as a crusade has been canceled. Carter in office quickly learned that his approach endangered too many American interests without visibly weakening tyrannies abroad.

Enhancing respect for human rights and human dignity is a fundamental objective of U.S. foreign policy. It is an objective based on our laws, our international obligations, and on the strong personal commitment of President Carter. The human rights policy, after a year, already has changed the way this country is seen by others, placing us more and more frequently, as President Carter has said, “with the tortured and the unjustifiably imprisoned, and with those that have been silenced.”

We have done that, and more. No government today doubts that this nation stands for the same ideals and values abroad that we assert at home. We freely acknowledge our own internal flaws and readily admit that there is much to do to assure full equality with economic opportunity for all our citizens.

No question of foreign affairs surpasses the arms race in terms of moral complexity and moral content. Along with the correlative issue of world poverty, the arms race forms the heart of the moral agenda of foreign policy. The Roman Catholic bishops of our country attach overriding significance to the arms race and its threat to the sacredness of life.

The massive technical complexity of the arms race in its political and strategic dimensions is something that people in our government grapple with daily. We respect that technical complexity and have tried to assimilate it in this testimony. At the same time, for the church the arms race is principally a problem defined in religious and moral categories. The specter of war, in any form, raises for Christian ethics the central question of the taking of human life.

In May, a brief communication from a source close to my family in Saigon informed me that they have just learned that my father, Tran Van Tuyen, whom they had not seen since he was sent to “reeducation” detention in June, 1975, died in confinement “in the North” on October 28, 1976.

This sad message from Vietnam coincides with news just released by Hanoi's embassy in Paris to Amnesty International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, stating that my father died of a “cerebral hemorrhage.” Curiously, when Pham Van Dong, prime minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, visited Paris in the spring of 1977, he told people making human rights inquiries about my father that he was still alive; and earlier this year Hanoi's propaganda machine released a barrage of attacks against my father.

It appears to have taken six years to kill nine million human beings in Nazi Germany and in the countries it occupied. It appears to have taken one day to inflict catastrophic disaster on more than three million Cambodians.“

With these words Freedom House three years ago filed an appeal with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights for an inquiry into events in Cambodia. The U.N. High Commission for Human Rights took three months to respond to that appeal—negatively. During these three years, a few books and articles have focused our attention on Cambodia, but governments have, for the most part, remained silent. In July, 1977, the House International Relations Subcommittee initiated a congressional inquiry into the events in Cambodia, and Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, eloquently denounced what was taking place in what is now called Democratic Kampuchea.

International agreements, of the United Nations as well as of the West European and Inter-American regional organizations, affirm commitments to such personal liberties as freedom of thought and religion, of opinion and expression, of assembly and association, and of emigration. But these liberties, until recently considered central to the concept of human rights, are under increasing threat within the U.N. system.

In 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, followed in 1966 by the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Both focused on these values. Forty-eight nations have ratified the Covenant, including nearly all the Communist and some radical leftist Third World states—but not, paradoxically, the U.S., even though this, more than any other U.N. convention, reflects the Western civil liberties tradition.

Militarism. The word has a faintly anachronistic ring. It conjures up images of Prussia in Bismarck's day, or perhaps Hitler's Third Reich. It suggests a static, rigid society in which a traditional officer caste dominates an authoritarian and hierarchical state system. But while this image is still valid for many societies today, it fails to convey the particular virulence and dynamism of modern militarism—a scourge that threatens to obliterate all the gains made in the areas of human rights, democratic government, and economic progress throughout the world since the end of World War II. If not checked soon, this scourge will almost certainly trigger a global conflagration that could destroy the human species.

Consider: World military spending in 1977 reached the record level of $400 billion—more than the combined gross national product of the world's hundred poorest nations. Most of these funds, of course, were expended by the two superpowers, which now have sufficient nuclear weapons to destroy each other several times over.