SOUNDING clean and clear through the flap and fuzzy thought about Middle East crisis, Week Two, was the calm counsel of a naval historian and philosopher who died 44 years ago. His name: Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, U.S. Navy (1840-1914). His counsel, delivered at century's turning point in brilliant books, such as The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 and The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, was that the U.S. national interest was to secure overseas bases, trade routes, to guard them with unbeatable military power. In his day and since, Mahan's doctrine has been criticized as imperialism. But Mahan's quiet point--applicable in the Middle East today --was that overwhelming U.S. power ought to be deployed not for ill ends of world conquest but for wise ends of deterring war and safeguarding peace in which all mankind could prosper. In any event, wrote Mahan in 1890, "Whether they will or no, Americans must now begin to look outward . . ." For a view of a naval commander with a 1958 outward look, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS--Restrained Power.

MUCH has been written--and much more said--about how the recession compares with the other two postwar business declines. Last week, studying a series of remarkable charts, economists and businessmen could prove what they had suspected: this recession is the shortest of all, and the one that sends into retreat some of Lord Keynes's cherished theories. See BUSINESS, Three Recessions.

GONE are the days when tall, aloof Nordic blondes dominated the beauty contests. Last year a warm-skinned lovely from Peru was crowned Miss Universe and last week a fiery Miss Colombia won the title. For the switch from underplayed femininity to the bold smolder, see THE HEMISPHERE, Fire v. Ice.

NEARLY half a century ago the modern art of Paris--the work of Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi et al.--was introduced to the U.S. at a Manhattan exhibition famed ever since as the 1913 "Armory Show." This summer the U.S. has sent to Europe a show of American abstract expressionist paintings that the sponsors consider, at last, the counterpart of the 1913 show. The abstract expressionists have made their impact on the U.S. art world (some collectors are willing to pay up to $30.000 for a drip painting by Jackson Pollock) and have already stirred up interest abroad (some European collectors and gallery owners are now shopping in Manhattan for U.S. moderns). But this summer is the first time Europe has had a wholesale view of what the U.S. abstractionists have to offer. For the story of the excitement, controversy and bafflement the show has aroused, along with four pages of color reproductions, see ART, American Abstraction Abroad.

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