A Letter From the Publisher

Early this year, Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott was in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, near the Iranian border, assessing Soviet policy in the tumultuous Middle East. A few months later, he was on the other side of Iran, flying over the Persian Gulf in an Omani air force helicopter, watching Iranian warships steaming out of the port city of Bandar Abbas. When border tensions between Iraq and Iran erupted into a full-scale war four weeks ago, Talbott was back at his desk in Washington. But he found that his recent opportunity to "look at Iran from both sides," literally as well as in terms of East-West diplomacy, had left him well prepared to write this week's cover story on the impact of the war on U.S. policy.

This journalistic version of shuttle diplomacy is not unusual for Talbott, who describes his job as "looking over the tops of this week's headlines in an effort to anticipate the headlines of the future." Accordingly, he was in Iran only months before the revolution that toppled the Shah and brought the Ayatullah Khomeini to power. He visited Afghanistan in 1978, long before Soviet tanks rolled across the border.

Talbott's travels for TIME have led him to produce a book, Endgame: The Inside Story of SALT II, published last year by Harper & Row. In the just released paperback edition, Talbott has added what he calls "a new and more pessimistic" epilogue that takes into account the Afghanistan invasion and the congressional suspension of the SALT II treaty. Says he: "The collapse of the SALT process is part of a larger deterioration of the international order."

Reporter-Researcher Tam Martinides Gray, who researched this week's story, has worked with Talbott on several diplomatic assignments during the past two years. Their most recent project was an account last month of U.S. efforts to preserve the oil flow from the Persian Gulf, a story that Gray calls a preamble to this week's cover. Gray started at TIME as a picture researcher 20 years ago, and moved from images to words in 1976. Since then she has found, as Talbott has, that looking closely at Middle East politics reveals something more fascinating than the movements of oil, arms and ideology that seem to dominate the subject. Says she: "All the principal characters are interrelated, and the psychology of those relationships becomes extremely important. It's like researching a family."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.