If the superpowers are, as is commonly suggested, passing through a time of crisis, so inevitably are the “middle powers,” for the states that for twenty-five years have been collectively but erratically referred to as middle powers are groping for their place in a system determined by the giants. At San Francisco in 1945 the middle powers seemed to have found a mission in frustrating the great power determination to brook as little interference as possible in their ordering of world politics. When the great powers fell apart, the middle-power front was also broken. Its members found their niches in alliance with the great powers or in a status they called nonalignment. Alignment and nonalignment make sense, however, only in relation to the great powers' division.

Since the world is again in dramatic search of a new equilibrium, it is not surprising that the future of Europe is a major subject of debate among those concerned about international affairs. Many of the present terms of the discussion were set at the end of World War II—in February, 1945, to be more precise, at Yalta. A careful reading of the Yalta Papers leaves doubt that the three men who sat around the conference table understood clearly the ramifications of the new order they were establishing. Convinced as they were that their solutions were of a temporary nature, they devoted most of their time to jockeying for short-range advantages. In the background, however, were greater historic forces of which these men were the puppets.

Now that Chiang Kai-shek and the American strategy of “containment” of Asian communism have grown old together, and the dream of the Nationalist reconquest of the Mainland has faded into nothingness with President Nixon's February meeting with Chinese Communist chieftain Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai, there stirs a question that has lain largely dormant over the past two decades: What of the future, of Taiwan (Formosa)? More specifically, should not the United States, sworn protector of Taiwan, (make provision for the Taiwanese to have a voice in determining their own future destiny?

The U.S. professes to believe that people may properly be governed only with their consent. It supports the doctrine of self-determination of nations.

In 1966 I spent fifty-five days in Vietnam observing the air war firsthand and wrote a book, Air War—Vietnam. It went to six editions. It was reprinted almost in its entirety in the official Pentagon publication to show how well our troops were doing and how just our case was; it was quoted extensively in liberal publications and by campus protestors to show how badly our troops were doing and how unjust our cause was. American fighter pilots in one F-100 squadron elected me to their inner circle of gungho operators which they called “Sierra Hotel” (decorum forbids a translation of the code words). I. F. Stone reprinted my napalm sequence; Dr. Spock's lawyers phoned to ask me to appear at his trial in his behalf; my local American Legion Post invited me to speak at their annual Memorial Day ceremony.

Just so there is no misunderstanding: I do not believe economic policies can make much of a contribution to peacekeeping. During the nineteenth century and up to the present there has been a tendency to stress too much the economic factors in international relations. Liberal economic theory, from the classical writers on, is in this respect strikingly similar to what we now identify as the “Marxist” tradition. It is glibly assumed in both camps that trade is an important contributor to peaceful relations on the political level. That trade and economic relations generally worked for peace was an important corollary to the free-trade doctrine, and as a general proposition it now receives almost universal acclaim.

A Reuters dispatch datelined Hong Kong, May 24, 1972, relayed the following communique from the Pathet Lao News Agency:

The bomb tonnage released on the liberated zone in Laos in the first three years under the Nixon Administration is equal in energy to 150 Hiroshima type atomic bombs. On a per capita basis the bomb tonnage dumped on the liberated zone in Nixon's time is the highest in history and Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world.

That Bernard Malamud passes as a Jewish author is a commentary on the cultural and theological illiteracy of our times. Jewish by descent, his literary themes and values are Christian, echt Christian, sometimes nauseatingly so. "Malamud's themes," Stanley Edgar Hyman informed us long ago in The New Leader, "are the typical themes of the New Testament: charity, compassion, sacrifice, redemption…." He added: "these Christian themes are thoroughly secularized." Malamud's central theme, with variations, is not merely redemption, but redemption through love, through sacrificial, universal, altruistic, agapic, Christian love. His heroes are Christ figures. But the d£cor of his novels and their characters are largely Jewish. And that's where the confusion begins.

The Return. I once wondered how it would feel to arrive back in Anomabu (home of Aggrey and Robert Gardiner) and be referred to simply asvKodwo's wife rather than as the American, wife of … ! For I am black, twelve years married, dress in fhe traditional Ghanaian “cloth,” speak a bit of the Fante language, have features generally indistinguishable from my in-laws, and I have lived and worked for eight years in West and East Africa. Politically I am firmly aligned with those working toward a genuine economic and political liberation of black Africa. Nevertheless, for the likes of me in Africa, “black” does not yet fully mean “belonging”

Uruguay, with a tradition of democratic stability similar to that of Chile and, to a certain extent, Costa Rica, has characteristics which distinguish it within the Latin American continent. Some of these were highlighted during the last few months of 1971 when Uruguay became a center of world attention: The traditional two-party regime was confronted with a conglomeration of political parties of the Left which appeared capable of coming to power through the elections, thus repeating the phenomenon of Chile.

On November 24,1971, the largest political demonstration in the history of Uruguay took place. An enormous crowd, wild with enthusiasm, marched through all parts of Montevideo and gathered in front of the parliament building to express its support for the Frente Amplio (Broad Front).

The anomaly in present U.S.-Japanese relations is that, while both countries warmly approve each other's professed foreign policies, neither country has mastered the new styles of doing business with each other necessitated by domestic trends, imperfectly perceived, which affect how each country looks upon itself and expects the other to understand it.

The United States recognizes, at last, limits on its resources, power and capabilities. At home, the U.S. Government must devote a larger part of its budget to urgent social and economic needs of its own people. Looking outward, the Government rations sparingly the wealth it shares with others and insists that others, able to do so, take a larger part of real responsibility for preservation of world order. The American people are weary of ideological overtones in power confrontations abroad and are beginning to accept, with all of the risks and confusion of new perspectives, the reality of a pluralistic world.

Not long ago if you mentioned to academic acquaintances that you were studying China missionaries seriously, the response was one of surprise and a quick change of subject. In the world of China analysts, missionaries were dismissed as a horde of fanatics or as a club of wellintentioned but impotent meddlers.

Today, as more attention is paid the transnational influence of service organizations, China missionaries are, if not precisely in vogue, becoming a respectable field of academic inquiry. In January, 1972, the Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the American Historical Association sponsored a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on China missionaries. Assorted historians gave papers on theology and American foreign policy, the corporate structure of the missionary movement and its influence in China, theories of missionary imperialism or lack thereof, among other topics. (The papers are to be published by Harvard in a book edited by John K. Fairbank, organizer of the proceedings.)

There was more than one crime involved in the tragedy of Mylai. Behind the immediate facts of the massacre lie a host of charges which ultimately amount to an indictment of America as a political society. Since we are prosecutors as well as defendants, we have been tempted to drop the charges and to lower the voice of outrage to a timorous whisper. But that murmur will be insistent and eventually maddening; nations, as well as individuals, can be pursued by the Furies. The accusations must be taken up and examined, for they reflect an inescapable crisis in our political life which taints the present and threatens the future.

Remembering the role writers and intellectuals played in the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and in the Czechoslovak liberalization from 1966 to 1968, the Soviet authorities are determined to see that Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's works, as well as those of a number of other Soviet writers, bring neither increased turbulence at home nor decreased prestige and power for the Soviet Union and its leadership abroad.

These are hard days for men and women who believe in the moral judgments of history and cling, for all our doubts, to the Christmas ideal of world unity and brotherhood.

For there is no unity in the world at the end of 1971, and far from supporting the religious mission of peace and goodwill on earth, the saddest and bitterest quarrels of contemporary history are between Moslem and Hindu on the subcontinent of South Asia, between Jew and Arab in the Middle East and between Protestant and Roman Catholic in Ireland.

The literature of contemporary Africa is more than a response to the politics of Africa. It is an aspect of the political debate, of course, but it is also an intrinsically important element in the total African renaissance of our times. True, the earliest beginnings of literature in contemporary Africa are rooted in politics and political protest. (I exclude the African writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the simple reason that most of them did not see fiction, poetry or drama as possible vehicles for their anti-colonial and antislavery protests.)

Négritude, the literary movement of the French African and Antillean deracine, was created as a literary response to European cultural imperialism (defined by Gallicism) Its prophets, Césaire of Martinique, Damas of Guyana, and L. S. Senghor of Sengal, expressed the anguish of their delirious alienation, frustration, protest against European culture, and against that romantic glorification of Africa, the Sartrean imaginary continent.

There is much lively speculation about the direction that United States foreign policy is taking under President Nixon's Administration. Many observers believe that Nixon's foreign policy is being directed toward disengagement. The arguments to support this thesis tend, however, to differ. Some say that the Vietnam war has led to internal frustration and has tended to demonstrate that the U.S. cannot indefinitely play the role of policeman to the world. Consequently, unless Washington drops its policy of intervention—so goes the argument— the national morale will be so eroded that the country will face serious internal political problems.

It is not necessary to carry a torch for the colonels who seized power in Greece in 1967 to suggest that they evoked from the start in much of the Western world a sense of shock and hostility beyond their obvious deserts. Their coup was bloodless, after all, and scarcely unexpected. Their authoritarian style was more typical than the preceding parliamentary system had been of the prevailing trend in other countries with similar historical, economic and social weaknesses; and in purely Greek ferms it could be seen as a comprehensible and characteristic, albeit depressing, response to a genuine national crisis. The changes in the Greek economy which had ensued from the postwar period of reconstruction, the accelerating drift from the land, the startling growth of Athens, the soaring emigration figures, and the termination of American aid had all imposed great new strains upon the country.

It's our last chance to get the whole business of killing back onto a healthy basis. Imagine in the spanking dawn of our century a youth with dark fiery eyes, a lopsided tangle of curly hair awkward in its profusion, body and limbs … still those of a mere stripling. But what experience was available to temper that growing strength! The Boer War, three long years of fighting at the cost of ten thousand lives: scene of the first concentration camps (the British), the first guerrilla warfare (the Boers). Can you doubt that our youth fought on the side of those doughty Boers in their struggle for freedom?

Since the beginning of the cold war the keystone of American strategic planning has been the principle that the ultimate deterrent to a Russian attack had to be the certainty of American retaliation against Russian cities. The Russians seemingly have adopted the same position vis-à-vis the United States, usually to the point of denying vigorously any possibility of limiting central war to counterforce strikes alone. A typical formulation was expressed by former Defense Secretary McNamara in his 1968 “posture statement” to Congress:

[It is] the clear and present ability to destroy the attacker as a viable 20th Century nation and an unwavering will to use those [Assured Destruction] forces in retaliation to a nuclear attack upon ourselves or our allies that provides the deterrent, and not the ability partially to limit damage to ourselves.

The world community does not seem to care." This judgment appears in almost every analysis of the situation in Bangla Desh, formerly East Pakistan. North Americans know little about the politics of Pakistan, the geography of suffering, the moral issues involved. What is more, "compassion fatigue" has set in and our capacity for moral outrage is dormant, at least where the agonies of remote millions are concerned. Still we can, as Hugh McCullum, for example, does in the September, 1971, Canadian Churchman, make an effort to personalize the plea to help save the life of a Bengali refugee.