But the same diversion among governments endangers everyone's survival in a very troubled world community. Even temporary euphoria among world leaders leaves permanent distortions in its wake. Surely, taking up their elective posts, democratic leaders accept the burdens of constant vigilance. Certainly, only their general recognition of the hard international truths can pave future pathways to a better world.
For 1986, we would select the following as among those realistic assessments most necessary in democratic capitals:
— The continuing tide of world-wide popular longing for basic peace and progress will impel Washington and Moscow to new agreements. But the democratic pluralism of the West and Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism will remain pervasively incompatible, and the world situation will be no less tense and troubled.
— Haunted by chronic economic failures and internal gloom, Moscow and Peking will flutter like moths about the name of a new Red-axis (the better to both shake the world and facilitate internal crackdowns). But the Soviets will refuse to barter away their superior power positions on Red China's borders, and the familiar Washington-Peking-Moscow triangle game will continue.
— Communist China will intensify its worldwide campaign of bribe, threat, and cajolery to disrupt diplomatic and international organization ties with the Republic of China. But its temporary successes, as in the past, will be over-whelmed in the now-historical phenomenon of rising ROC economic-cultural impact in the world community (look about, and the ROC presence is everywhere).
— On the mainland, the Chinese Communist Party's avid wish is that the Hongkong golden goose will continue producing its gilded eggs till they finally fall, in far greater numbers, directly into Peking's coffers. But, in their greed for control, the Communists will meddle too much (one of the latest moves has been to demand a halt to all Hongkong political development till 1997, as if the vigorous Chinese Hongkong community could stand still in time). Increasing Communist interventions will drastically speed the erosion of Hongkong's stability and prosperity.
— The Teng regime will continue to experiment with limited free market systems to stir individual initiative and rescue Communist China's failed, irrational economy. But the recent sporadic spurts in productivity and individual morale will mire down ever more deeply in the mainland's spreading plague: inflation, runaway official corruption, the fervid jealousies of those left economically behind, and the stifling controls of Communist China's police-state society.
— In the United Nations, many third world member-countries will continue to deplore the global tragedies of poverty and disease, and attack those who could devote more resources but do not do so. But the very same nations will devote their own major resources to armaments, internal political repression, and grand and expensive international diplomatic facades. The main support for their impoverished peoples will continue to come from the productive free nations they continually deride.
Obviously, we could go on—and so can our readers, which is, in truth, the central object of these comments.