Jose A. Cabranes, in Fo,·eigM Policy
~i~g2ect jl~V~tl;r:P:~~~,.984.
PO Bar Farming
From 1952 until the mid-1970s, Puerto Rico (population 3.2 million) prospered under its Commonwealth relationship with the United States. In 1975, however, the island's economy, which had become closely tied to that of the United States, almost collapsed. The "Opera- tion Bootstrap" boom, built on cheap labor and U.S. capital, was ended worldwide recession and foreign competition.
Today, wri...
a Senator is currently screened the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Committee on the Federal Judi-ciary of the American Bar Association and must pass muster with the Attorney General and the President. Finally, the President's nominee must be confirmed by the Senate, where the Judiciary Committee ac-tively seeks public comment.
The reformers' charge that judicial recommendations by elected offi-cials are subject to the abuses of partisan politics is unfounded, says Stevenson, because "there...
Thomas Jefferson as "the wisest in-vention ever devised the wit of man for the perfect exercise of self- government."
Only in Vermont has the town meeting retained much vitality; at-tendance stays high despite the fact that the towns have been steadily losing power to the state government. On the average, about one-quarter of a town's registered voters attend an annual town meeting lasting some 3 hours and 25 minutes. About 37 percent of those present speak. Attendance and participation...
the decision-makers, not the professionals who gather information and analyse it, writes Betts, research associate at the Brookings Institution.
Washington's failure to anticipate the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, for example, occurred both because evidence of the impending attack did not flow efficiently up the chain of command and because the evidence contradicted existing strategic assumptions. Pearl Harbor led eventually to the establishment of a Watch Committee and National...
projecting U.S. views onto the Soviets, they have underesti-mated the difficulties of achieving gentline strategic stability and over-estimated what has been and can be achieved through Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT).
Worst of all, Ermarth concludes, Americans' excessive confidence in strategic stability has encouraged Moscow to pursue a more assertive foreign policy. The United States should now deemphasize "stability" and develop a more dynamic strategic doctrine of its own.
IS...
others, says Wildavsky. It is the natural reaction of "a satisfied superpower happy to hold on and un-
willing to act except when provoked." The United States acts like a defensive power because it is a defensive power.
~~ Except for supplanting Soviet influ-
ence in Egypt after the 1973 Arab-
Richard M. Niron Israeli war, Nixon took no actions that put the United States in a stronger position than it was before.
Can defensiveness provide a sound defense? Not in the long run, W...
the enemy.
The Fragile "Western Europe's Relations with the
United States" Uwe Nerlich, in
artnershfp Daedalus (Winter 1979), 165Allandale St., Jamaica Plain Station, Boston, Mass. 02130.
The reconstruction of postwar Western Europe and the creation of the Atlantic Alliance (1949) were historic achievements of American foreign policy, even though they were more the result of improvisation than of any grand design.The Alliance brought an awkward dependence on
U.S. nuclear power, but...
Suzanne Bereer, in TheJournal of TheIn-
P\M Mi/itant/ilute for ~ocioeconomic studies (Winter 1978), Airport Road, White Plains, N.Y. 10604.
U.S. officials have already discovered that millions of illegal aliens
provide a vast pool of low-cost labor for menial work that unemployed
Americans refuse to do. Western Europe is learning that foreign labor
poses serious problems for the future.
Despite rapidly rising unemployn~ent, says Berger, M.I.T. political
scientist, 7 million immigrants...
unemployed nationals. In France, the status of 420,000 Algerian mi- grants is protected treaty. Moreover, under existing EEC legislation, migrants from one Common Market country working in another cannot be sent home. West European governments are reluctant to send mi- grants back to Spain and Portugal for fear of creating turmoil in those fragile new democracies that might destabilize the rest of Europe.
The children of these migrants are likely to be a volatile problem when they reach working...
continental European and Japanese multi- nationals and their development of sophisticated technology and managerial skills. The quadrupling of oil prices OPEC countries also gave a great boost to the demand for energy-saving products and proc- esses that were already on hand in resource-short Europe and Japan.
What about the future? U.S. multinationals must now compete with a variety of new trading companies, import houses, and retailers to provide private investment capital, technology, and marketing...