Lulled by a serene exterior and enchanted by exquisite scenery, visitors to New Zealand continue to look upon it as “God's own country.” Roughly the size of Japan or the state of Colorado and populated by ten million cows, seventy million sheep, and a mere three million people, how could it be otherwise? Even the venerable James Reston has swallowed the line that New Zealanders are free of the problems that vex the rest of the world. “Otherwise, all is as silent here as the sheep in the fields,” he wrote after a visit to the Antipodes several years ago, “and this may be their most serious dilemma. For they make no trouble and therefore make no news.” No news, perhaps, but like most places throughout the world, New Zealand has its troubles.

For the past decade New Zealand has been having increasingly serious economic difficulties; and since the country is generally twelve to eighteen months behind major international economic movements, predictions are that conditions will continue to deteriorate, at least through 1983.

When NATO came into being in 1949, not a few believed that before long it would succumb to threats from without. They thought the fledgling organization would prove unequal to the task of keeping Soviet power from spilling over the boundaries of the Alliance. But they were wrong.

Still others believed that NATO would succumb to problems from within. They doubted that Alliance members would be willing to subordinate their own narrowed interests to the interests of the community as a whole. But they too were wrong.

Only a handful of the collective security organizations in history have matched NATO's record of longevity. At the age of thirty-four the Alliance is not just alive—it is flourishing.

The Falklands conflict left in its wake a remarkable amount of psychological and conceptual disarray—even consternation— in both Latin American and U.S. policy-making circles. As a consequence, there is a good deal of stock-taking on all sides regarding the nature of hemispheric relationships and where to go from here. This has occurred not because the Falklands crisis itself created substantially new facts or circumstances but because it made explicit certain international trends and new realities that up to now have been implicit and only partially understood.

The conflict demonstrated, for example, the persistence and primacy of national interests in motivating individual Latin American countries, and also how discontinuous such interests can be with larger global issues.

In 1911, Kuno Francke, professor of German at Harvard and an officially recognized spokesman of Wilhelminian Germany for cultural affairs, edited a multivolume pendant to President Eliot's “Five-Foot Shelf” of World Literature. Francke's presentation of all of German culture is still to be found in almost every college, university, and public library in America. The volumes are never checked out. Even a casual browser in the library stacks cannot but be struck by their datedness. The trauma of two world wars, wars, in which the U.S. viewed Germany in all of its manifestations as the enemy, is part of the reason. But even more it is Francke's hidden agenda that marks their age.

Since Fidel Castro came to power nearly a quarter-century ago, diplomats from Latin America, politicians from North America, and academics from both hemispheres have been asking how to involve Cuba in the Caribbean peacemaking process. More often than may be warranted by evidence, they have assumed that Cuban interests are consonant with those of the other states of the Caribbean region. Any objection to the word interests as being too strong is met by a barrage of rhetorical arguments purporting to demonstrate that, at the very least, a modus vivendi is possible. But Cuban communism is a sore thumb and not easily disposed of by appeals to use the opposite hand.

The second government formed by Menachem Begin, following the Likud party's narrow victory in the June, 1981, elections, represented a real change in Israeli foreign policy. Dominated by a group of hard-liners committed to the ideology of "Greater Israel" and powered by a drive for regional hegemony, this government led Israel along a nationalistic and militant course, culminating within one year in a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. The election results, which gave the Likud 48 seats in the new Knesset compared with the Labor party's 47, hardly provided an unequivocal mandate for the pursuit of Begin's far-reaching political program, a program that can be summed up in the two words Eretz Yisrael—the whole land of Israel. Nor could a coalition with the religious parties, which commanded a wafer-thin majority of 61 in the 120-member Knesset, be considered a natural vehicle for bringing about such a radical change in foreign policy.

World trade is often a purveyor of social and political values as well as of goods. The economic development of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore—and increasingly China itself—will likely bring attempts at changing today's standards of international commerce and law to bring them into greater conformity with those that prevail in the East. As this process unfolds, different concepts of obligation— as between the Judeo-Christian tradition prevalent in Europe and areas settled by Europeans and the Confucian tradition prevalent in China and other countries of East and Southeast Asia—will become far more noticeable than in the past.

In the last few centuries the conventional assumption of both modern secularists and the religious communities has been that our world is too new, our problems too unprecedented, for the ancient systems of religious thought and practice to be useful. I am proposing exactly the opposite approach: That precisely because our world is so new, we must draw on the ancient wisdoms.

We might test this approach against the one fact of our lives that is the most radically unprecedented: that the survival of the human race is in danger, and even the survival of all life on earth is in serious question. How could there emerge from ancient religious traditions that are rooted in a world of firewood and olive oil, spears and chariots, any useful answers to this unprecedented possibility?