ABSTRACT
The Carter administration's attempts to use human rights as its unifying policy suggest the difficulty of synthesizing a strategy with principles that are less than absolute. Sometimes unwittingly asserting liberal principles rather than more egalitarian ones in international forums, the Third World intelligentsia is slowly realizing that "the revolution" is not so much a historical necessity as it is a historical myth. Third World answers to questions such as "For which nation do you have the most respect?" suggest that the United States has held and even slightly increased its large favorable margin over the Soviet Union as well as over countries such as West Germany, Canada, and Great Britain. With the breakdown of colonial and now postcolonial constraints, Third World governments are free to use military force to achieve conventional goals such as the acquisition of land and resources, or to settle longstanding ethnic disputes.
