World: Toward the Era of Negotiations

FOR the first time in 17 months, the planes and cannon of Israeli and Arab alike lay motionless in the troubled Middle East, silenced by a cease-fire that was brought about by patient diplomacy and the realistic fear of Russia and the U.S. that they were approaching an undesirable confrontation. In Bonn, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt prepared to fly off to Moscow this week to sign a hard-won treaty with the Soviet Union that in effect marks the close of World War II in Eastern Europe.

In the inexorable march of history, wrote...