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January 1976
Vol 54, Number 2 << Previous: October 1975 | Next: April 1976 >> FIND FOREIGN AFFAIRS ON A NEWSSTAND NEAR YOU  |  |
Assuring Strategic Stability in an Era of Détente
Paul H. Nitze
Even though the translation of the Vladivostok Accord on strategic arms into a SALT II Treaty has not yet been resolved, I believe it is now timely to take stock of the strategic arms balance toward which the United States and the Soviet Union would be headed under the terms of such a treaty. To that end it is necessary to raise certain basic questions about the maintenance of strategic stability-in terms of minimizing both the possibility of nuclear war and the possibility that nuclear arms may be used by either side as a means of decisive pressure in key areas of the world.
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Controlling the Defense Budget
Barry M. Blechman and Edward R. Fried
When President Ford presented his 1976 defense budget to the Congress in January 1975, the Administration stressed the need to reverse what it described as a 10-year trend of declining U.S. military capabilities relative to those of the U.S.S.R. As a consequence, the President requested an appropriation of $105 billion for the Department of Defense, an increase of 15 percent over the previous year. About half of this increase was simply to offset the effect of inflation. The other half, however, was to fund the first-year costs of a continuing program to increase the size of conventional forces and to expand nuclear capabilities at a fairly rapid rate.
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The Thorns of the Portuguese Revolution
Kenneth Maxwell
During the early hours of that remote Portuguese spring of 1974, a graffito appeared at the Technical Institute of Lisbon. It read: "Revolution of roses: petals for the bourgeoisie, thorns for the people." Twenty months later, with Portugal on the brink of civil war and Angola plunged into fratricidal warfare, it is surprising anyone should have been so sanguine. There would be thorns enough for everybody. Real political, economic and strategic assets were threatened when Premier Marcello Caetano was packed off to a comfortable exile in Brazil. If this was not perceived at the time, it was because these assets had been taken entirely for granted for so long, and the end was so sudden and effortless.
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Goals, Ideology and Foreign Policy
Bayless Manning
A Commonly heard comment about American foreign policy these days is that the nation has lost its earlier sense of national goals and ideological objectives and that we should, as a nation, settle upon a new consensus as to our global moral objectives. This is a difficult subject, and, in my view, much of the discussion of it is made up of half-perceptions and half-truths.
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Food Politics
Emma Rothschild
There is no doctrine more deceptive than the new idea that food is power. According to the doctrine, the United States has new power in the world by virtue of its position as the largest producer and exporter of food: in particular, over those developing countries, from the most destitute states to the richest oil-exporting countries, which import American food. The doctrine of food as power is deluded for several reasons. It promises an impossible form of influence. And it nurtures a false view of what has happened in the food crisis of the 1970s; of the political consequences of the crisis; of the even more fearsome consequences to come.
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The Aid Programs of the OPEC Countries
Maurice J. Williams
During the past two years the oil-producing countries of OPEC have become important donors of economic assistance to non-oil Third World countries. There has been widespread interest in these aid efforts, with one major British newspaper stating that "never before have nations been so generous with their wealth as the OPEC countries are now showing themselves to be." Others applaud what they regard as the "Robin Hood role" of the OPEC countries in taking from the rich and providing for the poor.
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Europe and Africa: Decolonization or Dependency?
I. William Zartman
Fifteen years after most of Africa received its independence, Europe is still present and influential in the continent. The European presence has, however, shifted from overt and direct to more subtle forms. While military occupation and sovereign control over African territories have all but been eliminated, political influence, economic preponderance, and cultural conditioning remain. Britain and France, and with them the rest of the European Community, maintain a relatively high level of aid and investment, trade dominance, and a sizable flow of teachers, businessmen, statesmen, tourists and technical assistants. Perhaps most symbolically significant of all, the long-nurtured dream of an institutionalized Eur-African community was finally inaugurated on February 28, 1975, when the convention of trade and cooperation was signed at Lomé between the European Nine and the then-37 independent Black African states (plus nine islands and enclaves in the Caribbean and the Pacific).
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Labor and the Multinationals
Robert W. Cox
It is now generally accepted that the expansion of the multinational corporation is a major, perhaps the major, phenomenon of the international economy today. Large corporations with their headquarters in the United States, in other Western industrialized countries, and now increasingly in Japan as well, are expanding their activities both into industrialized countries, including the Soviet sphere, and into the less-developed world. Once heavily concentrated in mining and extractive fields, today it is the manufacturing activities of the multinationals that command growing attention.
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Reconsiderations: The Cassandra in the Foreign Commissariat
Vojtech Mastny
Toward the end of his long and distinguished career in the Soviet diplomatic service, Maxim Litvinov tantalized his foreign interlocutors with increasingly candid expressions of dissent from his employers' official line. There are several such incidents on record from May 1943 to February 1947-only some of which have been familiar to specialists in Soviet affairs though never adequately analyzed for what they are worth.1 Yet they raise altogether fundamental questions-about Litvinov and about the whole pattern of Russian behavior during the formative years of the cold war.
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