At Moscow on June 29 President Nixon joined with Soviet leader Brezhnev in signing a ten-year pact. Building upon the three-year commercial agreement of October, 1972, between the two countries, the pact proposed the further promotion of Soviet-American comrfierce by providing a framework for the discovery of new economic opportunities and the fostering of trade activities, including cooperation by American and Soviet organizations in joint enterprises.

In assessing the prospects of Soviet-American trade relations, it is essential to consider carefully the world economic situation, the Soviet Union's role as a world trader, and also the stance of the United States vis-à-vis the contemplated commerce.

When I arrived at Earlham (a Quaker liberal arts college) from graduate study at Berkeley, a sincere young man from the student newspaper came knocking on my office door asking for a confessional account of my past political sins. That was a first for me. I tried to accommodate the young man as best I could, all the while feeling slightly uneasy. The story in the first edition of the year ran under the blazing headline, “Former Marxist Joins Political Science Department.”

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.

There was a time when the Caribbean area loomed large on the American foreign policy scene. The Monroe Doctrine, the Cuban war, canal concerns, dollar-diplomacy—these issues occupied not only the time of diplomats but the attention of press and public as well. Yet now, ten years after the Cuban missile confrontation, seven after the Dominican Republic fiasco, Americans treat the Caribbean with monumental indifference. Rather than an area of great political concern, it has become merely a resort for winter holidays.

But profound changes are under way in the Caribbean precisely in those islands known only for their tourist appeal. New forces in the British West Indies, traditionally the safe and stable members of the regional community, are transforming once sleepy tropical isles into fully conscious members of the Third World. One such force is the movement toward West Indian integration.

Depending on the definition of terms, the Arab-Israeli war is either not a religious war or it is a religious war a dozen times over in a dozen elusive senses. In the remarks that follow we shall review Jewish and Muslim claims not to spiritual privilege or national destiny but, more narrowly, to territory. These territorial claims would become causa belli only in the unlikely event that the National Religious Party of Israel and, say, King Feisal of Saudi Arabia were to become the sole voices for, respectively, Israel and “the Arab nation.” Short of that, they are a rhetorical and psychological factor in a broader and usually more pragmatic conflict, but as such they are easily overlooked by Christian and secular observers.

Dominating the lobby of Common Cause's very modern and very busy offices on M Street in Washington is a cork bulletin board nine feet high and six feet wide. Bold red letters proclaim news! Littering the board are newspaper clippings from all over the country, each bearing a red pencil stripe beneath the phrase “Common Cause.” Every working day over a thousand checks pour into this office, none of them tax-deductible. Membership in the organization has grown to 230,000 since its founding in 1970, and its membership renewal rate increased from a healthy 65 per cent in 1970 to a phenomenal 85 per cent in 1973. What sort of organization is this, and what can it tell us about our society and the individual's role in it?

I is a prideful word. It's full of boldness over against the internal slumbering of the rest of our planet's creatures. That's because they carry their world with them, like a snail and its shell, while man emerges out of an information gap. Other animals are directed by an instinctual encoding, while we must tell ourselves what we need to know in order to survive. Indeed, we must persuade ourselves to listen. We lack an internal conviction of reality, automatic animal persuasion. As anthropologist Ernest Becker says, “man became man in a total celebration of himself.”

It was a warm, humid Bengal evening when a small party of resident foreigners gathered in the Dacca home of an American diplomat. Two journalists, two American diplomats, a French diplomat and the director of a private relief organization in Bangladesh spent five hours talking about the country's bleak economic and political future. The discussion was heated, and the conclusions drawn in the early morning hours ought to evoke nightmares worthy of the cheapest horror film. The evening's host, a diplomat seasoned in the conflicts of Southeast Asia, reluctantly admitted that Bangladesh's rapid decline into absolute economic chaos might be averted only by a dedicated and ruthless party of Maoists. In any case, after more than two years of independence and $2 billion of international aid, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Bangladesh has nothing to expect from the West.

One of the most rapid and thorough intellectual revolutions in recent times took place in Latin America during the last decade. In the early 1960's the notion of “development” (desarrollo) still had an almost religious connotation to it, among intellectuals as well as politicians in Latin America. Today it is overwhelmingly decried as “developmentalism” (desarrollismo), an ideology-serving the interests of U.S. imperialism and serving to obfuscate the realities of exploitation. This dramatic change has far-reaching political implications. The present article, which Dr. Kahl, Professor of Sociology at Cornell, has adapted from his book Modernization, Exploitation and Dependency (soon to be published by Transaction Books), traces the change in sociology, a strategically important field for Latin Americans' self-interpretation. Its focus is on the work of two men who today are the most important Latin American sociologists, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova of Mexico and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil.

The response on the part of Christians to the ongoing struggle in the Middle East between Israel and the Arab states is limited, restrained and varied. This should not have surprised anyone, for in general Christians do not differ from the great mass of those who make up our nation. We are a people quite generally uninformed about international affairs and not very quickly stirred up by happenings abroad. Some of us are moved by such things, but it takes a Pearl Harbor or a halfdozen years of rapidly accelerating U.S. aggression in Indochina to get a response from us. The average Jew has every reason to be concerned about the breaking of the peace in the Middle East.

What! Yet another article on the Vietnam war! Don't we know enough about it by now to avoid repeating it? The answer is no. We ought to, but we don't. In time there will be probing studies based on the Pentagon Papers and as yet unpublished documents and memoirs. But presently available evidence strongly indicates that the reigning explanations are one-sided and incomplete. So overwhelming has been the compulsion to blame the war on the mistakes of the civilian decision-makers that the military responsibility for beginning and prolonging the war has been virtually ignored.

The fact that Christians and Jews are together able to take up a topic such as “speaking of God after Auschwitz” indicates that a certain stage of maturity has been reached in our conversations. Especially on theological and biblical topics there was so definite a body of conviction on both sides, worked out through centuries and even millennia of discussion, that the spokesmen for the two faith communities could do little more than serve as reporters of the received doctrine on the matter. But with a topic such as the present one we confront a question to which there are no readymade answers.

The appearance of John Yoder's exegetical defense of pacifism, The Politics of Jesus, has reopened the question of the relationship between violence and religious values (cf. Stanley Hauerwas's “Messianic Pacifism,” Worldview, June, 1973). Even those who have carefully and decisively rejected the pacifist option will be disturbed once more by this magistral summation of the New Testament tradition. The source of this unease will be Yoder's informed and dispassionate examination of the question: What is the significance of Jesus' death for the contemporary Christian? His reminder that the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus constitute the form of Christian existence is persuasive in its very simplicity. He argues, principally on the basis of St. Luke's Gospel, but with corroboration from virtually all the New Testament writings, that a life unscarred by defeat cannot be called Christian. There can be no following of Jesus that does not go by way of the cross, nor any hope that resurrection will occur outside a tomb. Starkly, Yoder calls us back to the basics, asking: What is the cross in your political life?

It is generally accepted today that Japan —simultaneously the most economically powerful and militarily weak nation in Asia—is looking for a role in the world community that is independent rather than subservient, cooperative rather than disruptive, influential and contributive rather than domineering and exploitative. Thus Japan is an anomaly in a system of world politics where the prime determinant of role and influence throughout the modern age has been military power and the will to use it. However, having once demonstrated its ability and will to challenge the United States and Great Britain in East Asia, Japan could again become a major military power if that seemed necessary to achieve and maintain the influence it seeks in the international community.

In 1965, shortly after the United States Government had ordered regular bombing raids over Vietnam, Bertrand Russell and his Peace Foundation organized a nongovernmental “International War Crimes Tribunal.” Its aim was to determine whether the U.S. Government was committing crimes in violation of international law in its conduct of the Indochina war. Hearings began in November, 1966, in Sweden. A year later, Secretary McNamara was ordering preparation of what is now known as the Pentagon Papers, and four months after that was the massacre at Mylai. The final question put before the Tribunal was: “Do the combination of crimes imputed to the Government of the United States in its war in Vietnam constitute the crime of genocide?” The Tribunal voted unanimously that “the United States Government [is] guilty of genocide against the people in Vietnam.”

In July, 1974, Spain finally stood at the threshold of the momentous political transition that many had hoped for and just as many had feared for at least thirty years. An attack of phlebitis placed the life of the eighty-one-year-old Generalissimo Francisco Franco in grave danger and forced him, for the first time, to relinquish the powers of chief of state, which were temporarily transferred to his chosen successor, Prince Juan Carlos de Borbon, who will presumably soon become king of Spain, in any event.