Two hundred oil specialists from around the world met in Vienna late last fall to talk with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC. As owners of two-thirds of world oil reserves and seven-eighths of oil exports, OPEC's members can make the future they want come true. Their conference in Venezuela last month only confirms this.

OPEC's headquarters is a squat, square building along the Danube Canal almost in the shadow of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Thirty-five countries sent official representatives, and though the United States sought no invitation, twenty Americans were on hand—about half from oil companies, the others researchers and scholars. The speeches were somber, even gloomy, reflecting troubled waters ahead.

William Wordsworth, born in 1770 and a "blissful" twentytwo when in Paris in the Year One of the new Republic, has given us The Prelude (1805), a very intelligible retrospective account of his enthusiasm and commitment during the heavenly dawn of the great Rebellion called the French Revolution. But he also hints, rather ambiguously, at involvement in some pathetic abortive rebellion during his "Residence in France," some murderous scheme of action in which, if he had continued in France, he might have "perished.... A poor mistaken and bewildered offering."

No aspect of our foreign relations produces more yawns on Main Street or occasional discomfort along Pennsylvania Avenue than our programs of economic assistance to developing countries. If we rather arbitrarily date the beginnings of that effort to coincide with President Truman's Point Four Inaugural, we are now in the thirty-first year of an enterprise that has already cost us more than $150 billion, with no end in sight. As to results, the general feeling is one of frustration, of being overwhelmed and undercompensated. It does not help to have other international and domestic problems clamoring for attention while one developing country after another denounces either our indifference or our interference. Instead of success and gratitude we seem to be reaping continuous foreign policy debacles amongst erstwhile or current Third World aid recipients—from Nicaragua and Mexico to Afghanistan and Iran.

In The White House Years, Henry Kissinger is, as ever, faithful to the conservative view of international relations he has espoused since his early study of Metternich. Yet, unlike Metternich, he is writing in a liberal democracy and must justify the survivalist ethic of balance- of-power Realpolitik in terms that give it what he calls at one point a "moral compass." What that consists in is not explicitly enunciated, but presumably it is related to the "idealism...humanity...and the embodiment of men's hopes" that in an eloquent passage he describes as his image of America when he was a boy suffering persecution in Nazi Germany.

For many years the German people liked to consider themselves America's closest allies on the European continent. Since the late 1940s, when former foes joined ranks against further Russian expansion, the Germans could be counted as one of the more solid rocks in the Western defense system. Within decades of a devasting war they not only surprised the world with a strong economy, but they took pride in developing a model democratic society. Even most East Germans (unofficially, of course) used to look to the young Federal Republic as an example and testing ground for the future of the entire country, although the East German state tried desperately to promote a model of its own. The general feeling was—and to some extent still is— that the Eastern model did not work, while the Western one did.