While reading Herbert Butterfield's Christianity, Diplomacy and War recently, I was struck as much by some marginal notations a previous reader had left behind as by the masterful text itself (published in 1953). One notation was the word “Vietnam” scribbled in the margin next to Butterfield's treatment of the Korean War. I remembered suddenly an experience I'd had during the Korean War period. I was helping then to care for an elderly gentleman, and we used to listen regularly to radio broadcasts from the battlefield. The old man, whose capacity to differentiate between past and present had failed him, would ask for further news on the war: “And how are the Central Powers doing?” World War I and Korea had for him collapsed into a single struggle.

Since the second world war, tension has existed in this country between two schools of “internationalists.” One camp has concentrated on the necessity of building and maintaining “positions of strength” in order to deter and tu negotiate with the Soviet Union and Communist China. The second school has stressed the need for “constructive” policies such as foreign aid and liberalized trade in order to foster economic and social progress in the industrialized nations and to promote development in the Third World. Generally speaking, presidents from Truman through Nixon have combined the two approaches, although at various times more attention has been given to one or the other. Most students of American foreign policy would probably agree that power generally has been given priority over development politics since the Korean War.

In 1942, shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and removed any lingering doubts about America's total involvement in world affairs, the Voice of America opened its inaugural foreign broadcast with the announcement: "Daily at this time we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth."

In Addis Ababa's vast Revolution Square there are large pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Engels, and of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the head of the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia and leader of the newly organized Workers Party of Ethiopia. In the decade since a military committee, the dirgue, dethroned Haile Selassie and abolished the monarchy, these four have been proclaimed the saviors of Ethiopia. Today, however, many Ethiopians believe the dirgue's policies are responsible for inciting the nationalities to insurrection, reducing agricultural yields in the south, helping to cause the famine in the northeast, tying Ethiopia to the capital-poor Soviet Union and its allies, and unnecessarily alienating the capital-rich West. In their opinion, the government has failed the. revolution by being repressive and rigid. Mengistu and the ideology he represent should give way to new and more flexible leaders and politics.

Aid is more than an organized effort to transfer resources from the affluent to the poor. It is also a message to the world and a medium of communication. Who we are as a people and what we stand for as a nation are implicit in the choices we make in our aid programs and are revealed by the manner in which we pursue them.

Through constant repetition over the past siderable credence has been given to a very pessimistic outlook for world agriculture. The pessimists argue that recurrent and ever more serious food shortages will occur as a result of increasing population growth, rising affluence, and decreasing availability of cultivatable land. Based largely on world consumption of food and feed grains ranging between 1.1 and 1.2 billion tons per year, with a yearly growth in volume of some 25 million tons needed to meet increased demand, it has been asserted that the world has twenty-seven days worth of food reserves left and is living on a razor's edge with respect to famine. This assertion does not bear up under close examination.

The subject of nuclear energy, arousing hope and anxiety in almost equal degree, is of interest to all mankind. Of late, however, attention has focused on the implications of the spread of nuclear power and technology to Third World countries, and in that context the views of Pakistan—a developing country with similar economic compulsions—may be of some general interest.

Thirty years after Hiroshima-Nagasaki one sees nuclear energy being used beneficently all over the world in research institutions and hospitals, in farms and factories. But a number of recent developments have reawakened the fear and moral doubt concerning man's capacity to make wise use of the terrible power his intelligence has unleashed: the explosion by India of a nuclear device in 1974; disclosures about the real risks of accidents in power reactors; and the fear that terrorists, political or’ criminal, may obtain recourse to nuclear bombs to further their ends.

The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.

We face a series of issues in the Middle East, some of them new and quite unprecedented. The first is how to bring to a conclusion the negotiating process that has been started. With respect to the negotiations between Egypt and Israel I do not think much needs to be said. They will be concluded within the very near future. They will create their own reality. They will mark both a political and a spiritual change, in the sense that two peoples who have thought of each other only in terms of hostility will now at least have an opportunity to address together some tasks of construction.

I would, however, say two things. It is perhaps not totally unfair to state that many Israelis, and Jews, operate on the principle that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. But I see no overwhelming political necessity that, for example, every Israeli busline establish a terminal in Cairo. I think, of course, it is important that contact starts with Egypt and Israel. I think it is important also that these contacts be developed in a manner that is compatible with Egypt's perception of itself, still a Moslem country and still related to other Arab countries. And I would strongly urge that within Israel aitd within the Jewish communities around the world some mechanism be established that vets the many brilliant approaches that are being generated by every original Jewish thinker, a number that exceeds the total Jewish population.