“Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States!” So goes a popular Mexican lament, true for more than a century-and-ahalf and still appropriate today. In recent years, however, important factors in U.S.-Mexican relations have altered sharply; and when President Reagan meets with Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo and other American leaders in Cancun, Mexico, this October for a conference on world development, it is likely that a number of thorny issues will arise. What is unlikely is that they will result in any quick resolutions.

On March 23, 1981, I received a telephone call from Mr. Victor Tagashov, an official at the Soviet embassy .in Washington. He asked me to respond to four questions (see below), the replies to be published by TASS. I asked for a written copy of the questions and promised a written answer. He agreed, and after receipt I sent him my answers with a specific request to publish them in full and to send me copies of the papers in which they were published.

In 1878 the young Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was on his first trip as a student from India to England. Though only seventeen, he was fascinated by the combination of charm and productivity he saw in the European countryside. And he feasted on it as he traveled by railroad from Brindisi to Calais. It was, in his words, a case of “perfect union of man and.nature, not only through love but also through active communication.” He was filled with wonder and admiration at the sight of a continent “flowing with richness under the age-long attention of her chivalrous lover, western humanity.” The shaping of the continent by human labor was a “heroic love-adventure of the West, the active wooing of the earth.”

In our collective fascination with contemporary Poland we have focused almost exclusively on the democratic or, more properly, anarchistic workers movement. But while Solidarity may be the soul of contemporary Poland, it is far from being its arm. A year after Gdansk it remains without institutionalized assurances of constructive input at the level of policy formation, having to rely on strike threats and other forms of “coercive” action. Moreover, its registration as a legal, independent organization has sparked the creation of numerous other groups, some of which appear intent on beating back the popular movement of which they themselves are a product.

War and peace. Jimmy Carter's aides called it “the Tolstoi issue.” The incumbent hammered at it endlessly. The differences between the candidates were “stark,“ he said: Trigger-happy Ronald Reagan would lead America into war; he, the president, would be prudent and safeguard the peace.

The economy. Ronald Reagan blamed the Carter administration for rising unemployment and recordsetting inflation. The free-spending Democrats would lead us into a depression, Reagan warned; the thrifty Republicans would stop inflation and “put America back to work.”

Yet not once during the long campaign did either of the main candidates mention the link between the two. Not once did they discuss how the military budget affects the civilian economy. The American electorate was offered a choice between spending a little more on the arms race or spending a lot more. Carter and Reagan were as one, though, in assuming that military arms equal national security and that arms spending equals a strong economy. In fact, both assumptions are wrong.

For over half a century Henry Steele Commager has been an historian and educator of rare insight and clarity, bringing to the study of U.S. policy and international affairs both a practical eye and strong moral concerns. His thinking has often contrasted sharply with the Establishment's; today that contrast appears more distinct than ever.

With George Santayana, Dr. Commager believes that “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” Few embody this definition as well as he. Dr. Commager has taught at Columbia, New York University, Cambridge, Oxford, and Amherst. Today he is Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington in Seattle, where this interview was conducted.

The West is today what it has been for a number of decades, the center and source of powerful ideas incarnated in institutions and practices from whose effects no corner of the globe is wholly immune. It is the great disturber of other cultures. Thus, mutatis mutandis, the West takes its place with the ancient Orient, with classical Greece, with Islam, with the great civilizations that extended and imposed themselves through differing proportions of military power, commerce, and high cultural confidence.

In its development the West has been informed by the profound contributions of the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions, and it cannot be understood without reference to them. But the factors that allowed the West first to become a great economic force and second to extend that force into the ecumene have their immediate causes in the eighteenth century. This period in Europe, variously termed the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, elevated to prominence and gave particular meaning to such abstract social concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” “rights,” and “authority.”

Science fiction, the literature about the future, is a genre of considerable age and distinguished lineage—or so say its practitioners and afficionados, who have inducted Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, and Poe posthumously into their ranks. This can be seen as a charming historical corrective, but it is more: an invocation of great minds of the past to draw attention to serious discussion of the future and make it worthy of our consideration.

As events continue to unfold in Poland, Western experts still fail to realize that what they are witnessing is not simply a “revolt of the workers” joined later by intellectuals, farmers, and students. Rather, it is a fullscale social and spiritual revolution, what the Poles prefer to call odnowa, renewal. It had been fomenting for four extraordinary years before it burst through the crust at Gdansk, and it has roots deep in Polish history. What the general public—and possibly some Kremlin leaders—still fail to grasp is that Solidarity is not just a labor union but a mass movement involving the overwhelming majority of the Polish people, including 39 per cent of the Communist party.

Three thousand years ago the Cheshnuk dynasty of Libyan nomadic tribesmen ruled over a vast North African empire stretching from Morocco to the Red Sea. With his recent annexation ot neighboring Chad, openly claimed as part of Libya's “vital living space,” Colonel Qaddafi has taken the first successful step toward his much-publicized aim of recreating that empire. If his seizure of Chad is consummated by the planned political union between the two states, Qaddafi at last will be able to strut around as a latter-day duce, lord and master of four million people and an arid mass of sand and mountain the size of Western Europe.

Undoubtedly the colonel has a problem. Libya is a vast country, rich in oil, but with a population of only a million and a half–scarcely adequate for a would-be successor to Garnal Abdul Nasser or the Cheshnuk emperors.