At a special gathering of the General Assembly, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations celebrated its thirty-ninth birthday. At the same time, the Assembly observed the annual World Food Day, which was inaugurated by an FAO conference four years ago. This year's keynote speaker was Professor John Kenneth Galbraith. The subject he chose was characteristically titled: “The Agricultural System and the Enduring Error.”

This February Hafez al-Assad was elected to a third seven-year term as president of Syria. In the country that popularized the Middle Eastern coup d'état, Assad's rule is remarkable if only for its longevity. Successful dictators must both lead and follow the countries they rule, and Assad's career embodies well the strengths and failures of his countrymen. Coming to power in the wake of debacle and despair, Assad has tenaciously defended Syrian national interests. At home, the “Butcher of Hama” has not created political community or viable institutions, but he has stayed in power. Relying on increasingly brutal and minoritarian methods, Assad has brought a tenuous stability to Syria, but nothing more.

Back in 1979 talk began about stationing Pershing missiles in Europe as a way of renewing Washington's time-worn pledge to its NATO allies and of preventing the U.S. from “decoupling” in Europe. This had the effect of opening a lively debate in foreign policy circles about the missiles per se as well as about the three-decade-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Congress took a serious interest, as did the peace movement in Europe. Yet not long ago, when the USSR shot down a Korean civilian airliner, the debate stopped. Such underlying issues as whether NATO should continue in its present form or indeed should exist at all never reached public consciousness.

The 1980s have become and are likely to remain a new “time of troubles” for the Soviet Union. Principal among these troubles is a faltering economy. The average rate of annual growth for the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981-86) is likely to be just over 2 per cent, half the rate achieved a decade ago; and die productivity of both labor and capital in industry during the first three years of the present Plan actually declined. Although investment in machinery production has increased by more than 20 per cent—a key element of a strategy designed to accelerate the modernization of an aged industrial plant—the growth in production of new machinery remains at a postwar low. Increased investment in agriculture has also produced disappointing results, and food shortages in cities are likely to recur in '85. The Soviet leadership must be equally troubled by the fact that, despite rising consumer expectations, growth in per capita consumption during the first three years of the present Plan has averaged a mere 1 per cent—a sharp contrast to the 4-5 per cent realized during the 1970s.

The events surrounding the tragic illness and death of President-elect Tancredo Neves have led some observers to ascribe a new political maturity to Brazil. Nevis, the grandfatherly figure who was to become the first civilian president most Brazilians had ever known, never took the oath of office. Instead, it fell to an unlikely and unpredictable politician named José Sarney to break the string of generals who have ruled the country since a bloodless military coup in 1964. During the five weeks of Neves's lingering intestinal ailment, Sarney ruled as acting president with the collaboration of the country's entire political and civilian leadership. Now, without a figure of national unity to rely upon, Sarney—a former head of the military governments's party, who only last summer became a convert to the democratic opposition—holds in his hands the fate of the government that Brazilians have labeled hopefully the New Republic.

It is a truth, if not universally acknowledged at least widely accepted, that the United States Government would like its Third World allies and client states to be stable, progressive, democratic, and domestically popular. While the U.S. feels it must protect these allies and clients from direct Soviet aggression, ideally they would manage their internal problems themselves.

Unfortunately, the ideal is the exception in the Third World. Many of America's allies and clients face a disloyal opposition at home, and often one that seeks or attracts assistance from the Soviet Union or its surrogates. With few exceptions, these governments are neither democratic nor want to be: For every Costa Rica there is an El Salvador or a Guatemala; for every Singapore there is a South Korea or a Philippines.

Since 1970 Cambodia has experienced a coup d'état, civil war, saturation bombing, revolution, genocide, invasion, occupation, and famine. This spring is the tenth anniversary of the Communist revolutions that swept Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos in 1975. For Cambodians, and anyone concerned with that much-punished country, it is an opportunity to reflect—and mourn.

No name is more closely tied with Cambodia's postwar history than that of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Placed on the throne by French colonial authorities in 1941 at the age of nineteen, Sihanouk gained international fame during his Croisade Royale pour l' Independence, which reached fruition with the Geneva Accords of 1954. Abdicating shortly thereafter, Sihanouk formed a political party that swept the first National Assembly elections. He ruled without interruption until 1970.

If you want to understand West Berlin's history and present political reality, take the train from Hanover or Hamburg. The border crossing from West to East Germany gives the first clue. Barbed wire and high fences line the track; police line the station platform. The few East German civilians who are waiting for their own trains seem to look right through you as though you were invisible—a ghost train heading for Berlin.

We know, or we think we know, what happened in 1945, and therefore President Reagan travels to Europe this month. There was triumph, we remind ourselves on the fortieth anniversary of the Allied victory, but there was also the revelation of Dachau. We also found Hitler, and now we live with Hitler, remembering other names that have become entangled with his: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Mylai. the Gulag…. Small wonder, then, that the terms of warfare preoccupying us today are terms of complicity and noncomplicity, terms such as “collaboration” and “resistance.” (Reagan himself thinks nothing of comparing the Contras of Nicaragua to the heroes of the Maquis.) Preoccupied by such terms, we are bound to think of France, of Occupied France and the Vichy.

Little noticed by the press. United States trade policy is undergoing significant changes aimed at promoting the rights of workers in foreign countries—changes achieved through the use of both a carrot and a stick. The carrot, now being offered to the less-developed world, is dutyfree access to the U.S. market for qualifying products exported by countries that meet certain new criteria on bbor. The stick is a ban on imports made by forced labor— something the Reagan administration is under increasing pressure to invoke against the Soviet Union. While it is too early to gauge the success of such attempts at exercising economic leverage, they may yet become a milestone in the march of human rights.

Americans can be thankful for their many wise and articulate analysts in such places as the Brookings Institution and Time's Washington bureau, as well as in the State Department and other branches of the U.S. Government. Leon V. Sigal, for example, was a visiting scholar at' Brookings when he wrote Nuclear Forces in Europe. His already wide reading knowledge had been enriched by experience as assistant director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in 1970-80 and by discussions with others at Brookings (for instance, Raymond L. Garthoff, former executive secretary of the SALT I delegation). Strobe Talbott has written two previous books on arms control and foreign policy while working in Washington as Time's diplomatic correspondent. Trained at Yale and Oxford, he has served also in the London and Moscow offices of Time. Talbott has read widely and seems to have easy access to many U.S. policymakers on arms control. Sigal and Talbott display not only a powerful mastery of the relevant facts, but also an ability to present complexities with elegant clarity. They have additional gifts of empathy, wisdom, and cautious realism concerning what can and should be done about arms limitation.