Game theory in both popular and academic circles is prominently associated with the nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. But game theory, unfortunately, is not easy to use, and much of its application to the nuclear dilemma has only fathered confusion. Two of these confusions are particularly destructive.

The first comes from thinking of strategic interactions as games, to be won like chess and poker. We owe this confusion directly to John von Neumann, who gave the name “game theory” to his analysis of the logical structures of strategic interactions. It is too late to change the name, but it may not be too late to quit thinking of poker and chess when we are involved in the more crucial strategic interactions that fill our lives.

Americans have long been ignorant of Mexico. For years the U.S. public has tended to view our southern neighbor as a sunlit collage of glitzy tourist havens and sleepy retirement communities. We have seen Mexico not as an emerging middle-range power but as a playground—a land of never-ending mananas and fun-loving mariachis. The stereotype has its darker side as well. Concern over debts and narcotics has aroused U.S. fears that Mexico has fallen prey to chaos and corruption. Mexico's people have thus been reduced to a hodgepodge of dozing peasants, fawning tourist guides, and scheming politicians. Our ignorance is pervasive, profound, and dangerous.

Once upon a time there were two Papandreous—Papandreou plre and Papandreou fils—and one Caramanlis. Now there is only a Papandreou fils, Andreas.

The last of these to depart the political scene, President Constantine Caramanlis, was the man who Queen Frederica and the United States had chosen over many more senior heads of the conservative Right for the premiership of Greece in 1955. Then a mere forty-eight, he reigned over an ultraconservative government that was at times severely repressive and not above rigging elections or making use of political thugs. Forced out by Frederica in 1963 amidst the scandal of the Lambrakis case—the subject of the highly successful film Z—Caramanlis went into selfimposed exile in Paris.

At a time when countries in the Southern Cone of Latin America are returning to constitutional democracy (Argentina in 1983, Uruguay in 1984, and gradually Brazil, where indirect presidential elections are scheduled for January 15), the trend is being reversed in Chile. After eighteen months of protests by trade unions and opposition parties, Chile's military ruler, Augusto Pinochet, has imposed a state of siege, exiled hundreds of Chileans to remote areas of the country, heavily censored the press and radio, conducted police roundups and security checks of lower-class areas of Santiago, and, to repress a protest demonstration, called out the Army at the end of November. His interior minister has also taken action against a leading churchman, incurring the wrath of the newly appointed moderate archbishop of Santiago, Juan Francisco Fresno.

Imagine the scene. A river running through a green valley. Under the trees, the river looks like a black-green stream. Pontoons are stretched across the surface, while long lines of tanks wait to cross—sixty-ton behemoths, with the menacing barrels of their 105 mm guns pointing at the opposite shore.

The ill-again/well-again image of Ferdinand Marcos is attributed by doctors to a kidney ailment similar to the one that did not succeed in killing Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. Still, Marcos has already had a “piggy-back” kidney transplant (the donor reportedly one of his children) and may be in much more, danger of dying from the ailment than Somoza ever was—a prospect that has prodded some of the opposition to produce a new “fast-track” scenario to take effect upon his demise.

The heightened expectations of Marco's imminent death have reduced interest in an earlier scenario drawn up last April in Hong Kong by six opposition figures: former Senators Lorenzo Tanada, Jose Diokno, and Jovito Salonga, former President Diosdado Macapagal (represented by Abraham Sarmiento, Constitutional Convention vice-president in 1971), Agapito Aquino (brother of the martyred Senator Benigno Aquino), and this writer.

For Ines de Jesus Castellanos, a forty-two-year-old northern dirt farmer, there was one underlying reason to vote in El Salvador's March 31 legislative and municipal elections. According to Castellanos, it was essential to have a government stamp on his voter registration card just in case soldiers swept through his hometown of Jutiapa and demanded that residents of the rebel-dominated northern zone demonstrate their support for the regime.