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During an interview with TIME last week, President Jimmy Carter was asked why his advisers had not warned him that his human rights policy would annoy the Soviets. Replied Carter with a broad smile: I will have to search the pages of TIME to see if you were materially more prescient than I was six or seven months ago "

We may not have been more prescient, but neither were we especially surprised by theSoviet reaction. At any rate, we have carefully monitored Carter's policytoward the Soviet Union and other powers. This week we undertake a major assessment of Carter's international performance to date. In accompanying articles we discuss secretary of State Cyrus Vance and how he fits in to the mechanism that shape foreign policy, and we report the ideas of National Security Adviser Zbigmew Brzezinski.

Associate Editor Burton Pines, who wrote our cover story, has had extenisive foreign experiences: he has served as correspondent in Bonn and Saigon, and covered Eastern Europe from Vienna As a writer m New York for the past four years, he has specialized in stories concerning diplomacy and national security. Fourteen correspondents in eleven bureaus around the world supplied Pines with reports on foreign perspectives. The major reporting was done in our Washington bureau: Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott State Department Correspondent Christopher Ogden, White House Correspondent Stanley Cloud and Pentagon Correspondent Bruce Nelan.

The Washington correspondents find that covering Carter's foreign policy is markedly different from covering that of Nixon and Ford. "There is an openness within the Carter Administration," says Ogden. "This means that officials you deal with now are seeing information they never received under Kissinger. In those days, many officials resorted to asking reporters what they had heard from Kissinger." Not that this particular question has gone out of style--as shown in Hugh Sidey's column on the former Secretary of State, who is in demand by foreign statesmen, not to mention reporters.

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