One of the striking features of the first two years of the Carter administration is its failure to dispel the widespread uncertainty about candidate Carter's fundamental political outlook. Jimmy Carter's two strongest traits in domestic affairs—a populist image and a concern for economic and administrative efficiency—continue to coexist without merging. Many people find it difficult to decide whether he is a liberal or a conservative. This has advantages in a period in which labels are distrusted, but it makes it hard for him to build a strong and durable constituency to support his policies.

A similar uncertainty exists about the focus of the administration's foreign policy. Foreigners often complain about this more strongly than Americans, and allies and adversaries alike stress the difficulty of making firm decisions without knowing the likely direction of U.S. policy. The administration had been in power less than a year when it began to be charged with failing to develop an integrated policy, one that could be clearly articulated by a forceful spokesman such as Henry Kissinger. Its critics argued that this deficiency accounted for its inability to follow a consistent course on matters ranging from relations with the Soviet Union to the Arab-Israel conflict. They often forget that the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy remained far from clear after their first year in office.

The traditional dualism of law and extralegal coercion in the socialist bloc countries is well known. It is also well known that this dualism provides the framework for systematic circumvention of human rights. As it occurs in the Soviet Union, this phenomenon has been the object of scholarly studies, and a similar analysis of its existence in Cuba is long overdue. The point of this article, however, is not the violation of human rights in Cuba that violates its own or international laws but, rather, the limitations on fundamental human rights that are inherent in the Cuban legal system.

From February to July, 1978, no one would confirm to Gumercindo Britez's mother that he was a prisoner in the Department of Investigations, but she knew. She returned to Paraguay from northern Argentina as soon as she heard; every day she sat in the Investigations waiting room, hoping some policeman would finally tell her, or that some other prisoner's relatives might have seen or heard of her son.

In contrast, it took Rafaela Laino only a few hours to obtain confirmation that her husband was at Investigations. Like every other wife and mother whose family members have been arrested, she went from one police station to another with a package of clothing, hoping that somewhere a policeman would accept it and thus formally acknowledge her husband's detention. But Rafaela's quest was different: Diplomats from three countries were also inquiring after Domingo Laino, a leader of Paraguay's largest opposition party.

The law is not like life. Therein lies its utility and even its majesty. The law is not like life. Therein lies its weakness and even its danger. To be sure, the law is part of life; it is part of that communal experience we call history, including this present moment. Law itself, as we shall emphasize, has a history. And yet, when we speak of "the law," we imply that it is something distinct from ordinary experience. It has a normative status by which we order, remedy, and judge the interactions that make up what we call "life."

Ali Mohammed Jaidah, the former secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is a soft-spoken man of thirty-seven. He speaks as one comfortable with authority. His B.S. in economics and his M.S. in petroleum economics are from London University. His birthplace and home are in the capital, Doha, of Qatar, a tiny oil-rich peninsular country jutting into the Persian Gulf. He has served his country in many positions of responsibility in the Ministry of Finance and Petroleum and the Qatar General Petroleum Corporation. In January, 1977, he became OPEC secretary general. My meeting with Ali Jaidah took place at the OPEC secretariat in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 1978.

The secretary general and I chatted about Vienna, music, and the Spanish Riding School. He took a call from London—he would be heading there in a few hours—and referred the caller to a colleague in Kuwait. He told me I was sitting where President Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela had sat recently on his first visit to OPEC headquarters. We spoke of Venezuela's leading role in the founding of OPEC. He inquired about my university, the course in energy economics I teach, and my interest in OPEC. Coffee served and the amenities observed, we got down to business.

Several years ago it was almost impossible to get the media to take the issue of anti-Catholicism seriously; today, anti-Catholicism has become a relatively popular topic in both the secular and religious press. Most of these articles cite the same sources and anecdotes. Andrew Kopkind wrote in New Times that there are only ten men in America running the new cold war, and it sometimes seems there are only four running the war on anti-Catholicism—James Hitchcock and Virgil Blum, S.J., of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, plus priest-sociologist-columnist Andrew Greeley and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Why have many economists missed the fact of persistent malnutrition, hunger, and famine in the People's Republic of China? The fault is certainly not in their expertise (remarkably sophisticated in application, given the dubious nature of the data available) but in their interpretive comments and conclusions, which often seem gratuitous, deriving neither from estimates of per capita grain consumption nor from any visible basis in fact.

Brazil grows good coffee and grotesque military despots. Now increasing numbers of courageous Brazilians are trying to recultivate democracy. Under the military regime that has ruled Brazil for the last fourteen-and-a-half years, torture and executions have been widespread, although the predations of the notorious "death squads" have abated in recent years. Perhaps ten thousand people, however, remain in political exile. Nearly five thousand more are official "nonpersons," with political and civil rights annulled, passports and travel rights withdrawn, and employment or business opportunities curtailed.

George Kennan, in an interview published by the New York Times Magazine, affirmed the proposition that it is better to be “Red than dead.” Since the end of World War II the United States has been engaged in a successful effort to demonstrate that the choice thus implied is wrong. We have demonstrated, at least to date, that it is not necessary to be either “Red or dead“; it has been possible both to remain free and to avoid a nuclear war. The essential task is to continue so to do.

In the last half of the 1950's, at the time of Sputnik, serious doubts arose as to whether a time would shortly arise when that issue—“Red or dead“—could become serious. It had not been a serious choice during the period when we had a nuclear monopoly, or even when we had an overwhelming and stable nuclear deterrent. But with the Soviet development of ICBMs, the technological practicality of which was first demonstrated by Sputnik, it became possible, perhaps probable, that the “better Red than dead” issue would arise in all seriousness in a few years.

When the word "law" is juxtaposed with the word "religion," an American lawyer today is apt to think immediately of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution with its double protection against any governmental interference in "the free exercise" of religion on the one hand and against any governmental "establishment" of religion on the other. From the standpoint of contemporary American constitutional law, religion has become the personal and private affair of individual citizens or groups of citizens. Indeed, in recent decades our courts, in interpreting the "free exercise" clause, have gone far toward immunizing individual and group activities from governmental control, whether federal or state, whenever they are considered by the persons engaging in them to be of a religious character; and at the same time, under the "establishment" clause the courts have struck down most forms even of indirect governmental support of religion, whether federal or state.

Shortly after Camp David, The New York Review of Books blessed the Egyptian- Israeli deal Jimmy Carter had stumbled on. I.F. (Izzy) Stone's by-line heralding Camp David as "The Hope" neutralized legions of skeptics. "This is the beginning of peace between Israel and the Arabs and that is a prime event of history," Izzy proclaimed.

That issue of NYRB arrived just as I was leaving for London, and I took it along on the flight. I was impressed, though not fully convinced, by Izzy's enlightened prophecy. I had just written for Worldview my own rather restrained judgment that "At best the Carter-inspired formula is an uneasy, unstable beginning to what might eventually become a firmer Middle East accommodation.

What is the American system like? To our dismay we search in vain for one reliable book, or even one set of books, that describes the system within which we are now living, under whose workings we freely write and freely meet in public. (In most systems on earth scholars may not and do not work as we do.) There is no one book to place in the hands of a foreign friend and say: "Here is an accurate description of the way our nation works." There is no one book to place in the hands of a graduate student—a student disaffected, perhaps, from "the system." We have no Manifesto. We have no current Tocqueville. We lack a text that expresses our operative ideals and catches the meaning of our practices.