The significance of the Egyptian-Israeli interim agreement of 1975 is less in its specifications than in its implications, and these, as matters stand, are by no means clear. If the disengagement generates momentum toward further, more substantial agreements and toward a general settlement, Dr. Kissinger's diplomacy will be vindicated as successful and farsighted. If, on the other hand, the agreement becomes an excuse for Israeli intransigence, extremism on the part of one or more of the Arab parties, and a holiday from statesmanship during the forthcoming American political season, the Sinai accord will stand—depending upon events—as something between a futile exercise and an outright disaster.

In the wake of what many see as an overwhelming American defeat in Indochina, East Asia is ihe scene of dramatic changes. There is unfolding a new geopolitical configuration that looks very much like an abdication to, and accommodation with, communism. There is, moreover, a pervasive consensus that the U.S. is suffering from a paralysis of power that will cause it to abandon its Asian allies in future crises. This consensus has grown in spite of the concerted efforts of the Ford Administration to convince the international community, including Communist powers, that America still has the will to abide by its obligations.

Was U.S. policy, and the withdrawal of American forces from Southeast Asia, responsible for the sudden collapse of the pro-Western governments of Indochina and the subsequent wave of reassessments and realignments that has swept over the area?

I will attempt here to invent a future role for the transnational corporation in the development process of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. I will move away therefore from the nearby neighborhood of time and geographic space, as well as from fashionable and conventional forecasts that, precisely because they tend to reinforce each other, are least likely to materialize.

In the nonconventional prospective field of view there arises a reciprocal dependency between those who produce and those who consume strategic resources. In my "scenario" interdependency requires cooperation in the shape of concerted planning, research, and development between otherwise competitive forces, whether governments or corporations.

Two major events that bracket the past decade like a set of bookends are the Vatican Declaration on the Jews (Nostra Aetate No. 4) in 1965 and “Guidelines for the Implementation of Nostra Aetate No. 4,” issued in January, 1975.

There are two striking aspects to these events that immediately invite comment. First, they are both Catholic developments; there seem to have been no comparable developments of similar import for Christian-Jewish relations during this entire decade in Protestant and Orthodox Christianity—certainly none that come to mind as strikingly as do the two Catholic documents. Second, it took a full decade’ for the Catholic Church to issue instructions to its faithful to guide and encourage the implementation of Nostra Aetate.

The tremendous interest that Existentialism once generated has not quite simply abated. Historians of ideas will of course continue to write about it, and philosophers will continue to borrow and modify some of-its concepts; but still it does not have the immediate and even urgent impact it once had, both deserved and exaggerated, Seldom any longer will one hear a friend say, “I am grateful to Sartre. He gave me a language to describe fears and feelings I really had when I….”

Existentialism has receded to a distance where it can be viewed with more calm and detachment; but such was its nature, its considerations—“alienation,” “engagement,” “authenticity,” existence(!)—that this recession means in a sense that it has lost part of its meaning. It is now perceived as a kind of intellectual institution, energized by only flickers of urgency, a body of ideas instead of an activity, a vital intellectual engagement with the world, a philosophizing.