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Global Flows 



Information on current events is only one of many kinds of flows 

 that cross national boundaries. The entire globe is a complex network, 

 bound together by systems of transportation and communication by 

 land, sea, air, and electronic linkages. Almost all nations contribute 

 to and receive these flows, and the traffic along the various media 

 continues to grow. The flows include trained persons moving to new 

 homes, students seeking further education, tourists learning about 

 the world, business people looking for opportunities for profit, scien- 

 tists seeking to exchange knowledge, and diplomats bent on facilitating 

 the conduct of international relations. Transactional flows also take 

 place, in the form of credit, materials and products, ideological views, 

 information, diplomatic influence, and expressions of national interests 

 and goals. Still other flows, ranging from highly destructive to some- 

 thing less than constructive, take the form of terrorist attacks, dis- 

 semination of weaponry, the international movement of dangerous, 

 drugs, the spread of disease epidemics, hostile signals and threats, 

 guerrilla and "underground" movements, and covert operations. 

 Encouragement and discouragement of various of these flows is the 

 business of every government, some more than others. Together with 

 the responses to them that feed back to the original source country, 

 these flows aggregate into what is called "foreign relations." Since 

 most flows are on the increase, it can be said that foreign relations 

 are progressively intensifying for all countries. In the case of the 

 United States, the indices of size, wealth, economic activity, military 

 strength, and other measures of a dynamic society, are all surpassingly 

 high; U.S. foreign relations are accordingly more intensive and com- 

 plex than those of any other country in the world. 



However, U.S. institutional mechanisms to manage, plan for, or 

 even keep track of these increasing flows are not growing correspond- 

 ingly. This fact suggests that the United States is less and less able 

 to administer a more and more demanding responsibility for foreign 

 policy. It is also probable that the same deficiency exists in other 

 highly dynamic developed countries. 



Disorientation 



Rarely, if ever, has U.S. foreign policy faced so many fundamental 

 changes — in the power base of its own political system, in the com- 

 plexities of the external world, and in the challenges and obstacles to 

 be met in furtherance of its goals. Disorientation is not too strong a 

 term for the state of U.S. foreign policy in the mid-1970s. 



The Nation has recently emerged from a tragic, divisive, and in the 

 minds of ninny a futile, war. National attitudes are mixed toward 

 further exercise of U.S. power and influence in the world, even to the 

 revival of the isolationism of the 1930s. Domestic issues are most 

 salient : worries oxer unemployment and inflation, apprehension over 

 threatened shortage of energy, concern for the deteriorating environ- 

 ment. 



A long list of disrupt ions abroad have also been of public and official 

 concern: the festering and periodically explosive A.rab-Israeli con- 

 did, the revolt of the Third World in the U.N. General Assembly. 

 Third "World economic challenges to prevailing patterns of commerce, 

 periodically renewed concern over the global increase in populations 



