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  • Editor's Note

This issue begins with an article by Grace Ai-Ling Chou discussing the role of U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Hong Kong in the 1950s. Hong Kong, a British crown colony until 1997, was strategically located near mainland China, which fell under Communist rule in 1949. Although the United States did not attempt to reverse the Communist seizure of China, it did seek to forestall any further Communist encroachments in East Asia. Largely for that reason, the NGOs in Hong Kong often found themselves, consciously or not, caught up in the U.S. government's efforts to contain Communist expansion. Chou argues that the NGOs, in promoting the development of higher education institutions in Hong Kong, contributed to the goal of containment but also changed what containment meant in practical terms. The NGOs' interests in some respects converged with, but in other respects diverged from, the interests of the U.S. government, and in that sense the NGOs became a complicating factor in U.S. Cold War foreign policy.

The issue moves next to a forum dealing with the collapse of U.S.-Soviet détente in the late 1970s. The authors of the main article, James G. Blight and janet Lang, organized a series of conferences in the 1990s that brought together former policymakers from both sides to discuss what went wrong in the bilateral relationship. In 1977 both the new U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, expressed hope of improving bilateral ties and overcoming tensions. Far from attaining an improvement, however, the two leaders presided over a deterioration and eventual breakdown of the détente that had been fashioned in the early 1970s. Blight and Lang believe that the oral history conferences helped former policymakers on both sides understand the importance of empathy. Empathy, as Blight and Lang repeatedly stress, is not the same as sympathy. Empathy merely requires that officials on both sides try to understand how the other side perceives things and what its goals are. This understanding might not result in any change of one's own policy, but, they argue, it does allow for a more informed policy and might even ensure that some points of contention can be avoided. Using extended excerpts from one of the oral history conferences, Blight and Lang contend that a lack of empathy was the main source of the superpower conflict and that the sessions offered lessons for future policy. They believe that empathy can become an intrinsic element of countries' foreign policies.

The emphasis given by Blight and Lang to empathy as the dominant source of conflict is not universally shared (I, for example, find their argument and their "virtual history" unconvincing). The forum continues with responses from five former U.S. officials—Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Mark Garrison, Robert A. Pastor, and Raymond L. Garthoff—all of whom were involved in U.S. foreign policy (in [End Page 1] varying capacities) during the Carter administration. The commentators diverge significantly in their responses, but most of them express doubt that U.S. foreign policy can or should be altered to take account of the purported lessons of the Carter Brezhnev period. Even though Blight and Lang might show that the lack of empathy in the late 1970s was one factor that contributed to the downward spiral of relations, this does not necessarily mean that U.S. policymakers in the future will be able to develop a meaningful sense of empathy for bilateral relationships or other policies abroad. At best, the oral history conferences showed that in retrospect some degree of empathy might be feasible. The forum ends with a reply by Blight and Lang to the commentaries.

The issue includes two review essays, the first by Richard Drake focusing on the evolution of the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Drawing on two new Italian books about the PCI and its connection to the rise of far-left terrorism in Italy in the 1970s, Drake discusses how internal rifts within the PCI gave rise to violent splinter groups in the late 1960s that in turn brought about the remarkably violent...

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