Ignoring the potential threat of this diversity, Huntington says, was what brought about Diem's downfall. By the same token, he adds, the existence of so many groups makes some form of coalition democracy the only kind which can hold the country together. Future stability depends on whether the Thieu-Ky government can accommodate the growing plural consciousness of population it depends on for support. Huntington thinks that there are signs that this may happen.

Ultimate stability, of course, depends on more than Vietnamese national politics. Huntington takes the present American involvement as given, and comments only on present and future, not past, policy. The war cannot end, he says, until "the North Vietnamese are convinced that they will be unable to gain their objectives by military intervention." He thinks that the military phase of the war is running decisively against the North, and that they can eventually be defeated without escalation.

Huntington opposes the idea of immediate negotiations--"there is nothing to negotiate right now"--or of a unilateral bombing pause on the part of the South or the U.S. without "a strong likelihood of a constructive result." An unsuccessful bombing pause, he feels, would only strengthen the hand of the hawks, and "the net result is likely to be a vast escalation spurred by popular impatience."

Huntington is convinced that psychological losses are offsetting military victories for the South. "The only reason the North is still fighting is because they look at our domestic dissent and figure we will get tired and pull out, like the French," he says. "They know they're losing; they can't move supplies and they have had to greatly increase taxes. We have to recognize the fact that dissent has political consequences.

"A lot of domestic criticism of the war stems from ignorance," Huntington adds, admitting that "some of it is due to the Administration's failure to explain its policies." Regardless of the strategic importance of South Vietnam, Huntington comments, American success there has become vital for domestic stability. Withdrawal now, he says, would be followed by "an incredibly strong rightist reaction that would make McCarthyism look like pink tea."

Huntington doubts that the Administration is now prepared to make any new initiatives, and predicts that the war will continue on the same level until after the November '68 elections. However, if the Republican Party nominates Reagan or Nixon as he expects them to, he adds, the North Vietnamese might decide that it would be to their advantage to come to terms with Johnson before the election, on the chance that a more militant hawk might reach the White House.

Despite the increasing closeness to China of American bombing raids, Huntington discounts the possibility of Red China entering the war. "They have nothing to gain," he comments, except in the "very unlikely situation" that their internal political crisis leads current leadership to turn to a war with the U.S., which it believes to be inevitable eventually, as the only way of unifying the country.

Vietnam, Huntington says, is the first country in which the U.S. has involved itself without a previous history of cultural or academic contact. Because Vietnam was always considered the property of the French, it was largely ignored by American scholarship, and Huntington feels that a backlog of literature and of "old Vietnam hands" in the State Department might have significantly contributed to understanding in the early stage of American commitment. "This gap in knowledge and understanding has directly contributed to the shrillness and superficiality of much of the debate over American policy," he wrote recently in Asian Survey.

After two study tours in an attempt to close that gap, Huntington still considers himself much more of a detached observor than an active policy maker or suggestor of policy. His dispassionate attitude toward what might conservatively be called the most dangerous world crisis in the last 25 years gives the feeling that Vietnam is, first of all, another fascinating case study, a testing ground for theory. "It's not hopeless by a longshot," Huntington remarks. "It's not too good, but it's not too bad. What we need is an awful lot of patience.