The diplomatic business is a competitive one. Most countries set lofty standards for their representatives. In various capitals colleagues of the corps respect or sneer at each other's professionalskills, are attracted or repelled by each other's graces and accomplishments, and sometimes selfishly cheer a rival's ineptitude. Good diplomats serve national interests cheaply and effectively. Bad ones do a great deal of harm.

Now that Chad is partitioned and a fragile truce holds along an artificial line, it is worth taking stock of Chad and other Chad-like situations to see what lessons they may teach. For Chad's problems are not solved. Worse, there is nothing unique about its situation; it merely offers a particularly sharp example of what is taking place in a number of Third World nations.

Chad offers, first, a case of political collapse—an unusually complete case—not just of the overthrow of a government but of the total destruction of the state and its legitimate authority. Part of this has been the work of nature, part the work of the Chadians themselves. The basic fact of Chad is poverty.

Much of the recent commentary on Lebanon has focused on its internal conflicts, giving the impression that these are primarily responsible for the current state of affairs and that only by dealing with them can the Lebanon crisis be resolved. One detects particularly in the media, but also in the statements of many analysts, the notion that Lebanon and the Lebanese are metaphysically or psychologically destined to chaos and disintegration. The implication, in other words, is that Lebanon is by its very nature a problem state.

If Westerners harbored any doubts about the role of the Catholic Church in sustaining the Polish national spirit, the recent visit of Pope John Paul II to his native land surely laid them to rest. And yet the Church's historic partner in the enterprise of keeping Polish nationalism alive is still generally overlooked. That partner is Poland's national literature.

Polish literature helped sustain the nation through centuries of oppression, and its role in the post-World War II epoch has been no less critical. From the Romantic classics of the nineteenth century to a (for Eastern Europe) remarkably free modern literature, Poland's authors and poets are its unsung heroes in the struggle to preserve an independent national culture.

Not long ago we were quite confident about how to go about thinking. If we wanted to think about some fundamental value—say, justice—we charted the course of our exploration over the broad and silent ocean of historical and philosophical knowledge accumulated in libraries. Within the last few decades, however, we have discovered, to our dismay, that knowledge has burst the boundaries of print to attack not only eyes, but ears, touch—the whole sensorium. Ease of travel and the wonders of electronics have launched us into an informational universe of too many dimensions. We can be almost anywhere. We can watch space lift-offs and half-an-hour later watch magnified human sperm travel into the womb and beyond. We can "see" the color-coded temperature of Jupiter and look back from beyond the Earth. We can see and hear war happen.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the Marxist-dominated government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup. This summer, exactly a decade later, onlookers had a sense of deja vu. Once again Chile was on the front pages of the world press, and once again Santiago's hotels were filled with foreign correspondents waiting for the government to topple.

Lebanon is the most recent example of an all too frequent modern tragedy, the small nation rent by internal division and external intervention: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uganda. And as with all tragedies, the agony is both unique and universal.

Understandably, Americans are deeply troubled by the latest chapter in Lebanon's ordeal, for we have a religious, moral, political, and, for millions of Lebanese-Americans, profound familial investment in the country. America's involvement is older by far than the modern state of Lebanon, having originated in the early nineteenth century and grown stronger with American relief efforts during the Christian-Druse battles of 1860 and the establishment of the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut) in 1864.

Most of us are well aware that the world is being changed by new information technologies, especially in the area of computers and telecommunications. Fewer are aware that these same technologies have stimulated major policy debates in international councils and within the economic and foreign policy-making chambers of an ever-increasing number of nations. Generally, these debates focus on the economic and political impact of technologies that enable computer data to be sent across national borders, a process known as transborder data flow (TDF). But transborder data flow has given rise to complex social and moral questions as well. At issue are such matters as national sovereignty and security, and the right of citizens to privacy and freedom of speech.

The visitor flying into Lesotho—the tiny nation-state wholly surrounded by South Africa—gets to see a bit of the country before landing. It's enough to give him second thoughts. The parched, brown land stretches in all directions; and nowhere is there a hint of the lush mountain kingdom promised in the tourist board's brochures.

The Air Lesotho forty-seater touches down at Chief Leabua Jonathan International Airport, a single building in a vast field. The scrutiny of passport control, then the visitor is whisked down Chief Leabua Jonathan Highway toward Maseru, the capital. The highway is flanked by conical huts with thatched roofs and rows of public housing— cinder-block boxes topped with corrugated iron. The huts and boxes continue into the very heart of the capital, where the visitor's car turns onto Maseru's main road, the Kingsway. The sign readsr “Welcome to Lesotho, Africa's friendly mountain kingdom.” Perhaps it should read: Welcome to the poorest place on earth.

It is not unlikely that within the next two years nearly every country in Latin America will be governed by an elected civilian regime. This might surprise most Americans, accustomed as we are to thinking about the region in terms of coup-prone military governments and repressive oligarchies. We are surprised too at the recent embrace of democracy in Latin America by the Reagan administration. Some of its leading representatives went about touting the virtues of authoritarian government; but the administration has found that it is good politics to promote democracy and free elections in Central America and the Caribbean— and politically impossible to resume aid to regimes with bad human rights records. In fact, “Project Democracy” is the latest buzzword of Reagan's Latin American policy.

Jorge Luis Borges, in his disquieting story “The Library of Babel,” describes a mythical institution in which all books, all verbal structures, all symbols, all human knowledge is labeled and catalogued. This library, whose stacks contain everything expressed in language—from chronicles of the ancient past to imaginary histories of the future:— inspires, at first glimpse, an “extravagant joy”; each man feels himself to be “lord of a secret, intact treasure.” But the library, like the human experience it records, is constantly expanding; its periodic inventory extends so far beyond the range of man's individual or cultural comprehension that the library becomes identical, not with the finite world of a single volume, but with the limitless, protean universe itself.

The American “strategic trusteeship” of Micronesia, awarded by the United Nations after the Japanese defeat in World War II, is today giving way to a new political status for the islands. Tucked under the wing of the Federal Government since 1947—first as a ward of the Navy and* then of the Interior Department—the two thousand islands and atolls extending over three million-square miles of the Western Pacific are familiar only to those Americans old enough to have followed news of the war in the Pacific and of early A-bomb tests.

The Micronesian chain begins with the Marshalls, 2,200 miles southwest of Hawaii—Bikini, Enewetak, and Kwajalein are here—and ends with the U.S. Territory of Guam, 1,600 mile east of Manila. To the west of the Marshalls are the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM)—Truk and Yap among them. Above Guam stretch the islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), and below, the Republic of Palau.

The Democratic party is like an estranged married couple that tries to make a go of it again. However great its resolve to play up the things held in common and to minimize those causing strife, it soon finds that the matters that tear at the relationship are of equal or greater importance than those that cement it. One might say that on many issues the Democratic party is divided between those who squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle and those who roll it up from the end.

For openers, there are elements in the party who are distinctly uncomfortable with many of the constituencies that traditionally have lent it support. For another thing, the party itself is divided between vintage free-traders and born-again protectionists. Although Democrats want government to have more than the limited role Ronald Reagan would consign to it, many in the party fear that the voters are unsympathetic to its statist proclivities.

After more than a year of relative calm, Northern Ireland is once again a powder keg, its three-century-old sectarian debate threatening to explode in yet more death and violence. The British Government had hoped to return local self-rule to Northern Ireland this past fall, and a province-wide election for a seventy-eight-seat local assembly was to introduce a new era of peace and stability. This has not happened. Both Protestant and Catholic political parties declared they would not cooperate in any new government, and terrorist activity on both sides threatens to escalate the violence still further.

The recent growth of concern over the danger of nuclear war has been dramatic and impressive. It is also eminently realistic. Any sane and rational person who considers the scale and character of contemporary military power, the current vast expansion of the military arsenals of the superpowers, and the proliferation of armaments throughout the world would surely have to conclude that the likelihood of a global catastrophe is not small.

One might argue, in fact, that it is a miracle that the catastrophe has not yet occurred. According to a Brookings Institutions study by Barry M. Blechman and Stephen S. Kaplan, from November, 1946, to October, 1973, there were nineteen incidents in which U.S. strategic nuclear forces were involved (we do hot have the record since, nor the record for the USSR and other powers). That means, to put it plainly, that every U.S. president regarded the use of nuclear weapons as a live policy option. The examples are instructive.

“The real world.” How our students love the phrase! An ex-linguist of my acquaintance, bitter from years of mistreatment in English departments, has come to rest at last behind a very large oak desk in a generously appointed office at a large university. She is coordinator of business-writing programs, and a sense of authority informs her words now as she talks of “those of us who work in the real world.” Meanwhile the benighted rest of us, left behind on university faculties, complacently accept the givenness of that extrauniversity “real world.” At graduation rituals we sit smiling under our tassels and hear each speaker, from the head of student government to the chancellor, from professor to famous guest, tell our students that they are about to enter the “real world.”

If all goes according to the latest plan, “free and honest” municipal elections will have been held in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince on August 14, capping a three-phase process that began in the provinces six months ago. Can a quarter-century-old dictatorship hold “free” elections? What are the advantages of staggered balloting in a country the size of Maryland and with a mere five million inhabitants?

Plans for any type of election in a poverty-stricken, politically repressed island nation ruled by a “president for- life” are subject to skepticism. Yet an analysis of the “elections” may indicate something of the mood of Haiti's citizens and also reveal the nature of a regime that claims to be a “bulwark against communism” in the Caribbean and Central America.

On April 22, 1982, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc“) Duvalier was commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Duvalierist rule and wishing his subjects many more years of the same, when he dropped a bombshell.