lonas Jurasas, director of The Suicide now on Broadway, formerly headed the State Theatre of Kaunas in his native Lithuania. After his Moscow production of Macbeth was banned, he wrote an open letter to the Ministry of Culture in protest. He was immediately stripped of his position and, two years later, was permitted to emigrate together with his wife and son.

For several decades the West has tended to view Mideast dynamics mainly through the prism of the Arab- Israeli conflict. While the conflict has definitely played a role, it would be dangerous to minimize the importance of other destabilizing factors that are preponderant— especially as far as Western access to Middle East oil is concerned. As demonstrated recently in Iran, these factors do endanger Western interests and are likely to affect them increasingly in the future.

The United States has maintained consistently since the Arablsraeli war of 1967 that Jewish settlements on lands inhabited by Palestinian Arabs are illegal, and in June, 1980, legislation was proposed that would deduct a portion of American aid that goes to pay for such illegal settlements.

For many years the German people liked to consider themselves America's closest allies on the European continent. Since the late 1940s, when former foes joined ranks against further Russian expansion, the Germans could be counted as one of the more solid rocks in the Western defense system. Within decades of a devasting war they not only surprised the world with a strong economy, but they took pride in developing a model democratic society. Even most East Germans (unofficially, of course) used to look to the young Federal Republic as an example and testing ground for the future of the entire country, although the East German state tried desperately to promote a model of its own. The general feeling was—and to some extent still is— that the Eastern model did not work, while the Western one did.

Throughout 1980 the moral buffer zone between domestic and world politics has been widening dangerously. Because our communications media have been preoccupied with presidential and senatorial election campaigns—and because those campaigns have been almost totally innocent of any rational deliberation over foreign policy— the American people have learned little about the realities of, for example, the nuclear arms race.