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EDITORIAL

WORLD POLITICS and international diplomacy have taken some very sharp turns in the recent period. Consequences and symptoms of this are the official pronouncements that the Cold War is over in international relations. Obviously, one of the factors contributing to this important change was the significant diplomatic defeat which U.S. policy-makers suffered when the United Nations voted to seat the People's Republic of China and to unseat Chiang Kai-shek's island regime from that international body. No doubt this action, by the majority of nations in the U.N., mirrored the general outrage felt by world public opinion at the kind of atrocities being committed by the U.S. Military in Southeast Asia.

Then there are economic difficulties of some importance which have now made the American foreign policy of the last twenty-five years economically untenable. Among them are the end to the "privileged" status of the dollar as an international currency and the fact that the United States has experienced, over the last three years, foreign trade deficits for the first time since 1888.

In view of this, some of our activists will not find it difficult to understand the picture of Richard Milhous Nixon, who has been the most virulent anti-communist politician on the national scene over the last quarter century; rushing to Moscow and Peking to talk business.

These developments make it very timely that our Movement make a serious appraisal of the impact of the "Cold War" on Black Americans. We can learn much from such an evaluation, for it's more than a matter of merely understanding our recent history; it will also help us to better comprehend some of the things that Watergate is surfacing, and enable our Movement to avoid being naive about certain very hard realities. This will be all to the good.

 We believe Charles Cheng's article makes an important contribution towards an honest public discussion of this matter.

The Editors

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-26 08:31:06