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.

If you spend enough time in Israel and talk with enough people from enough different communities, you becdme aware that each "new immigrant" group feels it is being discriminated against in favor of another. Oriental Jews complain about bias in favor of Western Jews, and both groups complain that much more is being done for the universally disliked Georgians. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the smallest and most controversial group of new immigrants— the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews who now number about 28,000, of whom 300 are in Israel—is their lack of complaint, indeed their joy of having finally arrived in Zion.

Pope John Paul II explored the African continent this May with all the stamina, exuberance, and gusto of the nineteenth-century missionary-explorers Stanley and Livingston. He had to call on his talents as linguist, diplomat, humanist, and intellectual to deal with the complex problems he faced —and continues to face. For examples: How should Rome react to the continuing Africanization of the evangelization of the Church? What is the position of Christianity vis-à-vis the proliferation of Marxist/socialist experiments in Africa? Can Christianity coexist peacefully with Islam in a continent where the latter is growing at a rate of 3 1/2 million adherents per year?

The world of espionage, we have been given to understand, is drab, sordid, and lumpenbourgeois. Base motives dominate, vile acts are common, and agents bespeak cynicism and weariness. This is the tradition of spy fiction, developed long ago by masters like Conrad. It is also, however, no more than a milieu, and in spying it is important not to be misled by appearances.

Spies deceive, and the fictions a spy novelist writes are deceptions about deceivers. Subterfuge is the business of the art, and John le Carre's political teaching is a good deal subtler than many critics imagine. It is not true, for example, that le Carre's heroes are—as Michael Wood described them—all “glum, deceived…[and] tired of spying.” In fact, George Smiley's people yearn for the harness. “Thank you,” Otto Leipzig tells the widow Ostrakova, who sets the plot in motion, “for calling me to arms.” General Vladimir, the old emigre, almost races to his doom.

Internal colonialism has beeome a popular term in academic parlance. Although suggested in the writings of Lenin, it was probably first developed by the Mexican intellectual Pablo Gonzales Casanova, who employed the term in his Democracy in Mexico to describe the relationship between the Mexican Government and the Indian population. In the United States it has since been used to characterize the status of virtually every minority. The charge is made that blacks, Mexican- Americans, Indians, and even women have been colonized. Virtually all culturally pluralistic societies— outside the socialist bloc—are now stigmatized as instances of internal colonialism.

The keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Cincinnati World Affairs Council in March, 1972, was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. The dinner was held in a cavernous banquet hall, with forty or fifty of Cincinnati's leading citizens seated in two tiers on a raised dais at one end. Midway through Laird's address a figure arose from the darkened audience and began working her way forward. Everyone, including Laird, pretended to ignore her steady progress toward the speaker's lectern. Arriving directly in front of the secretary, the woman unfurled a small white sign— "War Is Murder"—and pinned it to the front of the lectern. Someone then got up and quietly escorted her to the sidelines. It was one person's way of protesting the ongoing agony of the Vietnam war.

St. Lucia, one of the British West Indies and the most recent to achieve independence (February 22, 1979), provides a case study of a tiny island-state's prospects for development. It is also the prototype of a Caribbean nation in the throes of choosing whether to remain in the Western camp or to follow the way of Fidel Castro and his Grenadian ally, Maurice Bishop.

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.

Government-sanctioned mass killings in Kampuchea and Uganda in recent years argue forcefully for military intervention on humanitarian grounds. While international law does permit such intervention in special circumstances, there remains the need to devise satisfactory procedures for carrying out this intervention as well as effective international mechanisms to ensure that it is not used to promote a nation's own self-interest.