The real crunch for Israel will probably come during 1977 if Ford is elected—it will be delayed by only a few months if a Democratic candidate wins.” So writes Wolf Blitzer, editor of the “Jewish lobby's” Washington publication Near East Report, in a recent issue of the Jerusalem Post.

With the same sense of urgency Abba Eban insists that “Time is of the essence, and unhappily for us, time is running out. We ought to grasp the central issues now and involve the United States in resolving them.” He and a growing number of his colleagues fear that should Israel not choose to “cooperate” with the U.S., the Americans might run right over Israel on the road to Geneva and some form of imposed settlement.

Signs in the trains and in the stations quote Gandhi on the merits of traveling light. No one pays attention to this sensible advice. On the platform at Siliguri, waiting for the night train to Benares, I noted there was as much space taken up by bulky bedrolls and piles of household gear as by the crowds of people jockeying for position. Finally, to the accompaniment of much shoving and some angry shouting, the train puffed and clanked to a halt alongside the platform.

The third-class cars we were all waiting for were even more jampacked than the platform. Friends had come to the station to see me off and had engaged one of the red-turbaned porters to help. Now they hurried up and down the platform looking for an opening chink through which to get me aboard.

Dictatorship starts with the gagging of the opposition press,” Indira once declared. Between the time she uttered those remarkable words and now, several memorable events have taken place. Two spectacular events in particular have focused world attention upon her: First, she won in the war against Pakistan and made Bangladesh possible; second, she declared a state of emergency, which includes, among other measures, press censorship.

Some people contend that whatever she is doing now is at great personal cost and that she is courageously undertaking the defense of her democratic country and her people against anarchy. Others bewail the passing of democracy and compose eloquent obituaries. Still others contend that “a democracy” may have died, but a promise of another, more indigenous in nature and more suitable for the service of its people, may be in the working.

About thirty years ago behavioral scientists introduced the idea of a “zero-sum” game. Poker, chess, and football—these were “zerosum” games. Winning the game implied that someone else lost; an advantage for one party was necessarily a disadvantage for another. At that time the “zero-sum” analogy was not applied to societies as a whole. If the middle class increased its wealth, this did not imply that the resources of the lower class were decreased. The success of Western industrial societies did not necessarily imply the poverty of underdeveloped countries. The total wealth of the planet could expand; the extension of rights to blacks and other minorities did not necessarily undermine the position of the majority. These were the guiding assumptions of liberals in the sixties.

But today these assumptions are under attack. The metaphor of the “zero-sum” game is now thought to describe societies as a whole.

While reading Herbert Butterfield's Christianity, Diplomacy and War recently, I was struck as much by some marginal notations a previous reader had left behind as by the masterful text itself (published in 1953). One notation was the word “Vietnam” scribbled in the margin next to Butterfield's treatment of the Korean War. I remembered suddenly an experience I'd had during the Korean War period. I was helping then to care for an elderly gentleman, and we used to listen regularly to radio broadcasts from the battlefield. The old man, whose capacity to differentiate between past and present had failed him, would ask for further news on the war: “And how are the Central Powers doing?” World War I and Korea had for him collapsed into a single struggle.

A new tone of optimism is being sounded in some recent reports on Christian-Jewish relationships. For instance, we have been hearing about a “decade of progress” in Jewish-Roman Catholic dialogue ever since 1975, when a Vatican commission issued “Guidelines and Suggestions” to implement the 1965 Vatican Council declaration Nostra Aetate. The new initiatives in Jewish-Evangelical conversations have been hailed as exceedingly heartening. Many and varied forms of dialogue between Christians and Jews are taking place on the local scene all across the land. Finally, the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches, held in Nairobi, avoided adopting a statement on the Middle East so offensive to the Jewish community as to cause the breakdown of conversations.

In March the Venezuelan government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez celebrated its second anniversary. I was in Caracas that month, posing questions about Venezuela's role in hemispheric and world affairs to a variety of Venezuelans—government officials, opposition politicians, journalists, and people from the private sector. At the end of my stay I spoke with President Pérez—often referred to in the Venezuelan press by his initials, CAP—and asked similar questions of him. I have grouped my questions and his responses around several major themes.

The fall of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to the forces of communism in the spring of 1975 heralded a distinct shift in the balance of power in the West Pacific. The United States had lost its footholds in the Indochinese Peninsula, was being forced to evacuate military bases in Thailand, and faced a demand for the negotiation of new arrangements to govern the use of naval and air bases in the Philippines. There was a rise in Asian nationalisms, and a corresponding growth of local trends toward neutralism with respect to American “security” projects.

The domino effect of those developments had been less pronounced than some of the American “worstcase” analysts had speculated a quarter-century before; the setback was nevertheless of a magnitude that seemed to call for a massive revision of our grand strategy for Asia. In fact, certain basic American strategic concepts were projected unchanged into the future.