Some of NATO's faults are birth defects and others are accidents of history or the usual sort of problems that beset any human institution during a third of a century. Yet despite internal strains and external challenges, NATO watched over the political and economic reconstruction of Europe and has kept the peace. Today, new and multiple tensions strain the Alliance still further. Will the NATO that survives—and few actually contemplate its demise— be as successful?

The original deal was this: We would protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union and in return the nations of Western Europe would remain friendly to us and to Western ideas of government and international relations. West Germany also would be protected and, eventually, allowed to contribute to its own defense. We would not even ask the Germans to abandon hope for reunification or concern for their brethren to the east.

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?

Last October, seven years after the death of General Franco and five years after the re-establishment of parliamentary democracy, Spaniards elected a Socialist government. Felipe Gonzalez, at forty, became the youngest prime minister in Europe. The Socialist landslide victory brought them an absolute majority in the Cortes, the Spanish legislature, and responsibility for solving Spain's grave economic troubles.

A nine-month balance sheet on the Socialist government reveals a cautious, reformist approach at home combined with some far-ranging diplomatic probes abroad. Longterm prospects for success in either arena are not particularly good, but the past year has shown that the effort will be worth watching.