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491 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 10 (1987)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0491 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE Since a very modest beginning 40 years ago, some 156,000 men and women have participated in the international educational exchange program outlined in the Fulbright Act of 1946. Many of these men and women now occupy positions of importance and influence in their respective societies. These people have acquired a capacity for empathy: they bring to their commu- nities an understanding of other countries, their customs, religions, and history and are thereby capable of sound judgment in making decisions affecting the relation- ship of their respective countries with other countries with different traditions and cultures. In this era of strife and violence, people who are capable of understanding and of mitigating the passions that arise from the conflict of ideological convictions are essential if the community of nations is to find a way to adjust to the reality of the age of nuclear weapons. I do not think it is pretentious to believe that the exchange of students, that intercultural education, is much more important to the survival of our country and of other countries than is a redundancy of hydrogen bombs or the Strategic Defense Initiative. Conflicts between nations result from deliberate decisions made by the leaders of nations, and those decisions are influenced and determined by the experience and judgment of the leaders and their advisers. Therefore our security and the peace of the world are dependent upon the character and intellect of the leaders rather than upon the weapons of destruction now accumulated in enormous and costly stockpiles. The direct result of the exchange program is significant, but we should not overlook the fact that after the American program demonstrated the validity of the concept, other countries have themselves initiated their own government-supported exchanges, so there has been a considerable proliferation of similar schemes. This is gratifying, but, in truth, all together the numbers pale into insignificance compared to the enormous expenditures of money and talent on military armaments. It is a critical question whether the truce we now enjoy under the auspices of deterrence based upon the parity of military power will last long enough for the effect of intercultural exchange and other joint ventures to rise to the level of leadership in the United States and the Soviet Union, as it has already done in some smaller countries. The fundamental challenge in this nuclear high-tech era is one of psychology and education in the field of human relations. It is not the kind of problem that is likely to be resolved by expertise, even the sophisticated expertise of our most gifted military thinkers, who delight in exotic weapons and strategic doctrines that threaten the solvency of the richest nations as well as their physical survival. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and under- standing between cultures. The cultivation of these attributes is the highest calling of all true educators, a calling to which the American Academy of Political and Social Science has made a very significant contribution. J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT 10

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