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.

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.

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.

In Addis Ababa's vast Revolution Square there are large pictures of Marx, Lenin, and Engels, and of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the head of the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia and leader of the newly organized Workers Party of Ethiopia. In the decade since a military committee, the dirgue, dethroned Haile Selassie and abolished the monarchy, these four have been proclaimed the saviors of Ethiopia. Today, however, many Ethiopians believe the dirgue's policies are responsible for inciting the nationalities to insurrection, reducing agricultural yields in the south, helping to cause the famine in the northeast, tying Ethiopia to the capital-poor Soviet Union and its allies, and unnecessarily alienating the capital-rich West. In their opinion, the government has failed the. revolution by being repressive and rigid. Mengistu and the ideology he represent should give way to new and more flexible leaders and politics.