It is not difficult to discern the historic factors which have brought the Middle East into its present position of “crisis area” in the foreign relations of the United States. The reasons why we have gotten from there to here, from the somnolent state of Middle Eastern affairs in, say, the year 1914 and their still sleepy condition in 1939 to the split-second enmities and antagonisms of the mid-1970's have been pointed up by events of recent history. First of all there was the rise of nationalism. Evident in Egypt in the late nineteenth century, it spread slowly to the other Arabic-speaking peoples of the region. Nationalism in the Middle East has become extremely important during the last twenty-five years.

So much has been written in the past few decades about the United States involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese wars that it is difficult to move beyond the usual arguments and the rather skewed assumptions on which they rest. However, the need for fresh and serious review of these matters is essential to understand the new era of multipolar politics now dawning. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to ascertain persistent patterns of the underlying rationale of the politics of American involvement in Asia; second, to critically analyze United States foreign policy in Korea and Vietnam during the war periods of 1950–53 and 1961–73.

The relationship between politics and religion in the United States has been studied by political scientists from many perspectives. Church-state relations, religious bloc voting, political issues with strong religious overtones—these and other politico-religious phenomena have long been subjects of scholarly activity within the discipline. However, the use of religious symbols in politics has been much neglected by political scientists (though not by sociologists, psychologists and scholars). Long ago Harold D. Lasswell said “It is of the utmost importance to political science to examine in detail … the processes of symbolization.” Religious symbolization in American politics urges itself upon the political analyst, moreover, because of “the unique relationship” which has existed between religion and politics throughout the history of the nation. And there are, perhaps, no richer and more concentrated examples of politico-religious symbolism than those found in the campaign oratory to which the American public is regularly subjected. Candidates for the American presidency have long resorted to the manipulation of such symbols. Hence, a presidential campaign is a good situation for the study of the political use of religious symbols. The 1972 contest between George McGovern and Richard Nixon is an excellent case study. Frequently characterized by the public press as an election to choose “a national minister” because of the manifest use of politico-religious symbols by the candidates, the campaign provides ample evidence of the uses to which religious symbolization can be applied in American politics.

Spain entered the twentieth century as a relatively underdeveloped nation still deeply rooted in her traditional past. Spanish life had barely begun to experience the stresses of social and economic transformation that recent scholars have identified with the modernization process. Toward the end of the last century, Spanish industry grew at a rapid pace, particularly in the Basque and Catalan regions, but the nation as a whole continued to lag behind the rest of Western Europe in the years before 1914. Although the recently formed trade union movements expanded in response to the new complex of urban-industrial problems, their organizational and political strength remained ineffective until World War I. In the other regions of Spain an agrarian economy, replete with strong anarchist movements, dominated and determined a social order in which provincialism, widespread subsistence living standards, and extensive illiteracy persisted.

Does the phenomenon which occurred during the last decade and has been loosely called the “New Catholic Left” include the Catholic Worker movement? Leaders of the Catholic Peace movement, civil rights activists and proponents of social justice in many instances have actively participated in the Catholic Worker movement or have at least been in contact with its followers. Yet, upon studying the Catholic Worker, a seeming paradox arises: the ideology of the Catholic Worker is a product of neither the American Left nor of liberal Catholicism but, rather, of the European Right. The ideology of the Catholic Worker, which is presented in the “Easy Essays” of Peter Maurin, is understandable only in the context of reactionary French Social Catholicism and allied movements. It is in the consequent repudiation of most of those ideas which were developed during the Enlightenment and became the basic presuppositions of American economics, politics and society that the radicalism of the Catholic Worker lies.