Tehran has been thought of as simply a mistake. Fifty years ago Western “advisors” would incredulously demand of their Iranian hosts, “You call this a city? This is nothing but an overgrown garden.” Obligingly the Iranians eradicated the garden and built Tehran. Maddeningly now the foreigners are more incredulous than ever. “You call this a city? This is simply a concrete wasteland!” Most of the foreigners who come here are simply peddling better mousetraps, however. Aside from the carpetbaggers there are a few visitors, who feel as if they were being forced to look at a distorted reflection of themselves in some grotesque carnival mirror. Here they find the doctrines of progress and the dogmas of development parodied by overearnest disciples; nowadays some of the most vehement proponents of the “Western” concepts of materialism are Easterners.

With the end of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Indochina attention has turned to the Korean Peninsula. For the past two decades an uneasy peace has been maintained between two Korean governments—the one Communist, totalitarian, and revolutionary; the other non-Communist, yet authoritarian, undemocratic, and indeed almost as totalitarian in its lack of regard for opposition political voices and the rights of the individual. Probably nowhere else is American power and influence so greatly exposed as on the Korean Peninsula—with all the attendant risks for involving the U.S. in a land war on the Asian mainland.

Any sensible discussion of alternatives to U.S. policy in Korea should begin with consideration of the commitment of the U.S. to the defense of Korea, as embodied in the treaty between the U.S. and Korea that entered into force in November, 1954.

Korean intelligence agents operating in the United States have violated our laws with impunity. Such reprehensible actions merit serious scrutiny at any time. But in view of recent developments in Korea, it is even more urgent that our government be concerned about the intelligence activities of the South Korean Government in the United States.

The hearings held earlier this year before the appropriate subcommittee of the House are important for at least two reasons. First, they sought, at long last, to inquire publicly into serious allegations of illegal activity carried on in our country by agents or persons representing a foreign power. The fact that Korea has been a close ally of the United States is not in dispute; what is of concern is whether representatives of that government have violated American law and have attempted to deny the human rights of Koreans resident in this country.

Three propositions govern this essay. First, China feels more secure than at any point since 1949. Until the mid-1960's China felt a grave threat from the United States. For a period of several years, highlighted by the Cultural Revolution and crystallized at die Ninth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1969, the Peking leadership felt danger alike from the U.S. and the USSR (and decided to defy bom simultaneously). From 1969 to 1972 the American threat was felt to be much diminished, but the Russian threat was felt to be fairly acute. Now, for the past three years or so China has felt a reduced danger from the North and, of course, a negligible danger from across the Pacific. (Hence its formal military budget shrinks.)

At a White House dinner in his honor last April the President of Zambia tossed traditional protocol to the winds and discomfited his hosts with a toast calling on the United States to cease giving “psychological comfort to the forces of evil.”

Speaking in sorrow rather than anger, Kenneth Kaunda expressed “dismay at the fact that America has not fulfilled our expectations” and cautioned that black freedom fighters and the white minority governments of Rhodesia and South Africa are “poised for a dangerous armed conflict.'’ Could America stand and be counted in implementing the Dar-es-Salaam Declaration strategy adopted by the Organization of African Unity? he asked. In that resolution Africa had affirmed its commitment to a peaceful solution.

In one of James Thurber's tales, “The Birds and the Foxes,” the shrewd foxes (for the highest of ethical motives, of course) finally succeed in having torn down the cages that protected the Baltimore orioles. The fox leader gives a memorable speech about how those poor but juicy birds, though eaten, are now “liberated” from their unjust confinement. Thurber's moral parodies Lincoln: “Government of the orioles, by the foxes, and for the foxes, must perish from the earth,“ His reinterpretations of Lincoln—another being “You can fool too many people too much of the time”—are perhaps too severe. But they come closer to what politics deals with than we usually care to admit.

I begin thus because the general prognosis for the Western world is decidedly not cheery. I should like to think that the spate of unrestrained self-criticism Americans are now undergoing is a sign of strength.

Signs in the trains and in the stations quote Gandhi on the merits of traveling light. No one pays attention to this sensible advice. On the platform at Siliguri, waiting for the night train to Benares, I noted there was as much space taken up by bulky bedrolls and piles of household gear as by the crowds of people jockeying for position. Finally, to the accompaniment of much shoving and some angry shouting, the train puffed and clanked to a halt alongside the platform.

The third-class cars we were all waiting for were even more jampacked than the platform. Friends had come to the station to see me off and had engaged one of the red-turbaned porters to help. Now they hurried up and down the platform looking for an opening chink through which to get me aboard.

Something remarkable and of historic importance took place in New York during the first two weeks of September, 1975. At a Special Session of the United Nations the poor countries of the world, who have 70 per cent of its people and 30 per cent of its income, demanded that the rich, countries make some major changes in the international system. And the rich countries, including the United States, responded in new ways. Most reporters failed to notice how remarkable the events were, but the evidence is there.

Among the many curious questions raised by the Portuguese revolution is: Why did so many career officers, proudly wearing the decorations of a colonialist fascist state, emerge as such passionate militants of the left? Three explanations are commonly offered. First, it is said, the social origins of the younger officers are closer to the working class than to the aristocracy; second, contact with African freedom fighters convinced them that they too should be Third World revolutionaries; and third, social intercourse with educated draftees drew them into the contemporary climate of opinion.

A happy result of the Bicentennial can be increased self-knowledge. The danger, however, is that one may focus too exclusively on the United States, thus magnifying out of proportion both our virtues and our faults.

Such distortion is evident in the current discussion of American civil religion. The turmoil of the late sixties and the self-examination of the seventies have encouraged consideration of the civil beliefs and practices widely shared by Americans. Robert Bellah, Will Herberg, Martin Marty, and Sidney Mead are among those who have recently written on the subject. Too often learned commentators have failed to note that American civil religion is an expression of general social patterns. It is therefore useful to take a look at non-American civil religions in several traditional and revolutionary societies.

Among the many curious questions raised by the Portuguese revolution is: Why did so many career officers, proudly wearing the decorations of a colonialist fascist state, emerge as such passionate militants of the left? Three explanations are commonly offered. First, it is said, the social origins of the younger officers are closer to the working class than to the aristocracy; second, contact with African freedom fighters convinced them that they too should be Third World revolutionaries; and third, social intercourse with educated draftees drew them into the contemporary climate of opinion.

On November 10 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution defining Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The vote was 72-35 with 32 abstentions. A week earlier Abba Eban had written in the New York Times that “there is…no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination.” Mr. Eban's words, coming as they did, not in the midst of a pro-Israel rally, but in a reflective column from a widely respected figure in the international community, a man who has not hesitated to criticize publicly aspects of his own government's policies toward the Arabs, must be accorded a special seriousness.

We live in a curious time. We are agreed that our educational and university system has been increasingly dominated for the past half century by a pseudoscientific philosophy that doubted on principle the validity of moral values. Our constitutional system is implemented through courts managed largely by a legal profession educated in such an amoral environment that any explicit value or religious criterion is practically precluded from being taught as true.

Two countries in East Asia prompt students and visitors to think of them as likely to occupy, in the twenty-first century, a commanding world position. I have in mind, of course, that writers like Norman Macrae of the Economist and Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute look at the Japanese system and project performance that will place Japan in the very forefront of world economies within the next twenty-five years—and this despite the relatively small size of the country and its almost total lack of natural resources. On the other hand, visitors like former Supreme Court Justice Douglas, Kenneth Scott Galbraith of Harvard, and many others have visited China and left it saying, in effect: “I have seen the future, and it works!”

Plitics is our national sport,'' a Puerto Rican lawyer warns, "but it sometimes gets too lively. That's why many bars post signs prohibiting discussions of politics or religion."

This sport is mirrored in another Island passion: music. In the Miami Beach-type hotels along San Juan's Condado strip, for example, a faceless continental music regales not only North American tourists but dolce vita from the present economic and social system. Behind the Folies Bergeres night club acts flashes the subliminal message: Things are fine as they are.

A few miles inland, past a boulevard with high-rise, air-conditioned buildings in the commercial section of Hato Rey, past a Sears and several shopping malls, the rooftops get lower and the housing denser and a wild and exciting beat rises from a street corner opposite the headquarters of the Puerto Rican Independence Party.

I wish to explore, first of all, the nature of the crisis of liberal democracy and will argue that it is essentially a crisis of meaning. If, as I believe, we are entering a new period of ideological candor and contest, we must examine some inhibiting factors in making the case for liberal democracy. These factors are in large part internal to Western thought, but they are also increasingly vulnerable to our perspective on the future ofthe “third” and “fourth” worlds, that is, to the poor. Finally, I wish to suggest some directions that could sustain and enliven our hope for the democratic prospect.

The first twinges of anxiety have turned into a torrent of rumors building toward a new consensus that democracy is now on the defensive and probably in decline. What some view with fear and others with hope is not all that sudden or all that new.

When the multiple crises of an entire civilization have severely shaken men's confidence in its survival, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn questions the basic goals of that civilization and the direction in which it has been heading for some centuries. To do so is to challenge a much cherished cluster of beliefs about humans and their destiny that together make up, as he wrote inLetter to the Soviet Leaders (1974), "the entire culture and world outlook which were conceived at the time of the Renaissance and attained the peak of their expression with the eighteenth century Enlightenment."

Solzhenitsyn speaks not from the depths of a chair of political science or sociology, but out of the depths of the Gulag Archipelago: "I belong as much to the camps as I do to Russian literature…. There is where I was formed, and for all time," he wrote in a letter to Tvardovsky.

Dictatorship starts with the gagging of the opposition press,” Indira once declared. Between the time she uttered those remarkable words and now, several memorable events have taken place. Two spectacular events in particular have focused world attention upon her: First, she won in the war against Pakistan and made Bangladesh possible; second, she declared a state of emergency, which includes, among other measures, press censorship.

Some people contend that whatever she is doing now is at great personal cost and that she is courageously undertaking the defense of her democratic country and her people against anarchy. Others bewail the passing of democracy and compose eloquent obituaries. Still others contend that “a democracy” may have died, but a promise of another, more indigenous in nature and more suitable for the service of its people, may be in the working.

With the transformation of Cuba into an obedient Soviet satellite, the Cuban Revolution no longerexcites the imagination of romantic rebels and Utopian dreamers. For the student of politics, however, the early years of the Cuban Revolution remains an intriguing phenomenon, and especially the figure of Fidel Castro, its creator and guiding genius. Castro remains Cuba's Commander-in-Chief, Prime Minister, and First Secretary of the Communist Party. His leadership still plays a role in molding Cuban institutions into the Soviet pattern and promoting Soviet foreign policy, but his charisma is now circumscribed by Soviet-style bureaucratic rationality and the Kremlin's surveillance. Fidel Castro before his domestication was something else.