The banners can be seen across the major highways of Venezuela: “The Malvinas Are Argentine.” This impeccably democratic country that since 1958 has been an island of freedom in a sea of Latin American military dictatorships has taken the lead in supporting ihe Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Long one of the closest U.S. allies in the hemisphere, Venezuela now vigorously denounces the U.S. support of Britain and openly discusses the replacement of the Organization of American States with an all-Latin regional organization. Even the Catholic bishop of Cumana, in eastern Venezuela, called the U.S. position “traitorous and perfidious” (traicionera y desleal). Caracas has also offered petroleum and military aid to Argentina, and it has been a central coordinating point for discussions about Latin American joint diplomatic action against Great Britain.

“Foreign aid has a great future—behind it,” observed a United States congressman in the late 1960s. The words were prophetic. Since then the aid program has encountered growing opposition; it has steadily dwindled in size, especially in real terms; and worst of all, it has become more than ever an odd amalgam of contradictory objectives. Meanwhile, what had been its sole purpose—to help build the nascent economies of the poor nations on sound foundations—has receded into the background. Today that purpose is almost foreign to foreign aid.

This, at least in hindsight, is not too surprising. Foreign aid was born of mixed parents, a hybrid; and as time went by it was further hybridized as it was impregnated by ever more extraneous elements.

When, on April 30. the United States rejected the Law of the Sea Convention, it dealt a blow to its own best interest: the orderly development of rules to govern navigation and exploitation of the oceans.

During the last days of an eight-week session of the third United Nations conference on the Law of the Sea, the Third World majority had made a last-ditch effort to obtain U.S. approval of the treaty. The U.S. delegate, James Malone acknowledged that their concessions offered “modest improvements” but also that they failed to satisfy U.S. demands on the mining of highly valued manganese nodules. Whatever hope remained for a consensus on the draft treaty was shattered when the U.S. pressed for a forrnai roll call vote on the final day. Disappointment, frustration, and even shock was registered by many of the assembled delegates.

Forty years ago, when the world was plunging headlong toward total war, the Soviel Union was America's ally. Ten years later the same Soviet Union was being scorned as the home of “Godless communism” and the enemy of everything sacred to ihe “free world.” With the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. the two nations were facing each other across an abyss so large that nuclear war seemed a distinct possibility. Ten years after that, at the Moscow Summit of 1972. an American president with unimpeachable anti-Communist credentials was supping with yesterday's devil in the very capital of world communism; Nixon and his hosts managed to produce an “orgy of agreements” (the phrase is Max Frankel's), including the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 1) and the start of an era called detente. Within six years another American president was announcing that “America is now free of the inordinate fear of communism.”