Foreign Affairs articles from July 1996

Foreign Affairs archives from July 1996

Dollars and sense diplomacy: a better foreign policy for less money.
July 1, 1996... Pressure to eliminate the budget deficit has grown increasingly intense, and the United States has responded by slashing its spending on foreign relations. The international affairs budget has fallen 51 percent in real terms since 1984, and the...

NATO englargement's American hurdle: the perils of misjudging our political will.
July 1, 1996... As the debate over the merits and implications of extending NATO to include Central and Eastern Europe rages on, a critical question has largely been ignored: will Congress and the American people support the initiative? Adding new members...

Toward a neo-Reaganite foreign policy.
July 1, 1996... THE TEPID CONSENSUS IN FOREIGN policy, conservatives are adrift. They disdain the Wilsonian multilateralism of the Clinton administration; they are tempted by, but so far have resisted, the neoisolationism of Patrick Buchanan; for now, they...

A post-heroic military policy.(post-Cold War US military policy)
July 1, 1996... THE NEW SEASON OF BELLICOSITY THE STRATEGIC culture of the Cold War combined great eagerness to accumulate weapons with great caution in their use. Fearing that any act of war might start a progression of moves and countermoves leading to...

The rise of the virtual state.
July 1, 1996... TERRITORY BECOMES PASSE AMID THE supposed clamor of contending cultures and civilizations, a new reality is emerging. The nation-state is becoming a tighter, more vigorous unit capable of sustaining the pressures of worldwide competition....

Cuba refrozen.
July 1, 1996... DEFIANCE AND DOLLARIZATION UNTIL THE moment in February when a Cuban air force MiG-29 shot down two civilian planes sponsored by the Miami-based exile group Brothers to the Rescue near Cuba, people on both sides of the Florida Strait assumed...

Taiwan's new nationalists.
July 1, 1996... DEMOCRACY WITH TAIWANESE CHARACTERISTICS THE PRESIDENTIAL election was over. Discarded baseball caps with party insignia still littered the streets of the old city center as municipal workers tore down election posters. For the first time in...

Mexico's circle of misery. (economic conditions)
July 1, 1996... HOW U.S. BAILOUTS POSTPONE REFORM SINCE THE debacle of December 1994, when the peso collapsed and Mexico nearly defaulted on its debt, the country has suffered a series of blows to its self-confidence and stability. Mexico has been through...

Asia, a civilization in the making.
July 1, 1996... EAST ASIA, THE PACIFIC, AND THE MODERN AGE As the specter of communism fades, some warn of a new East-West confrontation. The remarkable rise of East Asia in recent decades, they say, has been fostered by a civilization very different from the...

Inside enemy archives: the Cold War reopened.
July 1, 1996... Only three or four years ago, historians of the Cold War worked without knowing what was in Soviet archives. They relied heavily on Western records, inferring the motivations and goals of Soviet foreign policy. But the Russians and their former...

Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY DAVID HELD. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 324 pp. $49.50 (paper, $16.95) This ambitious book argues that modern liberal democracy is no longer a sufficient political system. The author notes that the rise of contemporary...

Bringing Transnational Relations Back In: Non-State Actors, Domestic Structures and International Institutions.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... EDITED BY THOMAS RISSE-KAPPEN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 323 pp. $54-95 (paper, $18.95). This inelegantly titled book makes an important point: transnational actors, from multinational corporations to international...

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY JOHN H. HOLLAND Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995, 185 pp. $24.00 Contemporary realist theory starts from the premise that the international system is "anarchic," as if anarchy were somehow an anomalous condition. But in a discussion of complex...

Divided Sun: MITI and the Breakdown of Japanese High-Tech Industrial Policy.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY SCOTT GALLON. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 240 pp. $29.50. The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia from 1540 to the Pacific War. BY CHRISTOPHER HOWE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996,...

The Origins of Japanese Trade Supremacy: Development and Technology in Asia From 1540 to the Pacific War.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY CHRISTOPHER HOWE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 471 pp. $49.95. Here are two worthwhile books on what these days is called "industrial policy" as applied in Japan. Howe of the University of London recounts the evolution of the...

Wriston: Walter Wriston, Citibank and the Rise and Fall of American Financial Supremacy.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY PHILLIP L. ZWEIG. New York: Crown Publishers, 1996, 952 pp. $40.00. Banking is regarded by many as a dull activity run by dull people, but both come alive in this biography of Walter Wriston, CEO of Citicorp for 17 years from 1967 to 1984....

Market Unbound: Unleashing Global Capitalism.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY LOWELL BRYAN AND DIANA FARRELL. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996, 268 pp. $27.95. The basic thesis of the authors, who were employed by the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, is that the theoretical notion of a single integrated world...

The Political Economy of the World Trading System: From GATT to WTO.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY BERNARD HOEKMAN AND MICHEL KOSTECKI. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 301 pp. $55.00 (paper, $27.00). The completion in 1994 of the Uruguay Round and the creation of the World Trade Organization were major achievements in...

Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY PAUL B. STARES. Washington: Brookings, 1996, 171 pp. $24.95. The consumption of cocaine and heroin has often been viewed as just one more manifestation of American social ills. Unhappily, the habit is spreading, not only to Europe but to...

Secret Soldier: The True Life Story of Israel's Greatest Commando.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY MUKI BETSER. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996, 276 pp. $23.00. Despite the derring-do title, this is an insightful memoir by a former senior officer in Israel's elite Sayeret Matkal reconnaissance unit of the general staff, the...

The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY DAVID G. HERRMANN. Princeton University University Press, 1996, 307 pp. $39.50. Historians and political scientists have closely examined the naval race of the pre-World War I period--the so-called Dreadnought revolution--and its aftermath....

Dominant Battlespace Knowledge: The Winning Edge.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... EDITED BY STUART E. JOHNSON AND MARTIN C. LIBICKI. Washington: National Defense University Press, 1995, 149 pp. These two brief works take different but useful looks from the think tank world at the impact of the information revolution on...

Information Technologies and the Future of Land Warfare.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY BRIAN NICHIPORUK AND CARL H. BUILDER. Santa Monica: RAND, 1995, 87 pp. $15.00 (paper). These two brief works take different but useful looks from the think tank world at the impact of the information revolution on warfare. The RAND volume...

Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY THOMAS A. KEANEY AND ELIOT A. COHEN. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995, 314 pp. $38.95. The authors were charged by the U.S. Air Force with developing an assessment of the Persian Gulf War air campaign comparable to the U.S. Strategic...

At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY GEORGE F. KENNAN. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, 315 pp. $27.50. The graceful essays collected in this volume embrace a wide variety of topics but mostly trace the author's growing horror at the direction of American foreign policy in the...

From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ROBERT M. GATES. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, 529 pp. $27.50. An engaging account--part memoir, part history--of the last half of the Cold War. Gates is a career CIA official and Soviet specialist who served variously as an assistant...

The Imperative of American Leadership: A Challenge to Neo-Isolationism.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY JOSHUA MURAVCHIK. Washington: AEI Press, 1996, 261 pp. $24.95. A spirited polemic that urges the United States not to succumb to "the isolationist temptation." Muravchik, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, insists that the...

The Case Against Immigration: The Moral, Economic, Social, and Environmental Reasons for Reducing U.S. Immigration Back to Traditional Levels.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ROY BECK. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, 287 pp. $24.00. A powerful and disturbing tract that recommends reducing legal immigration to as close to zero as possible. Beck argues that immigration at recent levels--720,000 legal immigrants were...

A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ROBERT KAGAN. New York: Free Press, 1996, 903 pp. $30.00 A brilliant and encyclopedic history of the American intervention in Nicaragua. Kagan served in the Reagan State Department and was a midlevel participant in many of the events he...

U.S. Foreign Policy and the United Nations System.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... EDITED BY CHARLES WILLIAM MAYNES AND RICHARD S. WILLIAMSON. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996, 304 pp. $27.50. One of the most striking paradoxes of the 1990s is that strong currents in American opinion have turned against the United Nations at...

United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY VERNON W. RUTTAN. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 657 pp. $65.00 The author, a professor of applied economics at the University of Minnesota, provides a painstaking history and analysis of the U.S. development assistance...

A History of Fascism, 1914-1945.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY STANLEY G. PAYNE. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, 613 pp. $39.95. Fascism continues to fascinate historians and political scientists, both because the crushing of the fascist states in World War II did not completely destroy...

Fascism: A History.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ROGER EATWELL. New York: Allen Lane, 1996, 432 pp. $32.95. Fascism continues to fascinate historians and political scientists, both because the crushing of the fascist states in World War II did not completely destroy it as a political force...

Fascism: Past, Present, Future.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY WALTER LAQUEUR. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 263 pp. $25.00. Fascism continues to fascinate historians and political scientists, both because the crushing of the fascist states in World War II did not completely destroy it as a...

The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY HERBERT KITSCHELT. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996, 332pp. $49.50. Having previously studied European social democracy, the political scientist Herbert Kitschelt now applies his erudite and systematic mind to the new radical...

Politics after Hitler: The Western Allies and the German Party System.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY DANIEL E. ROGERS. New York: University Press, 1995, 206 pp. $40.00 These two books are complementary. Rogers, a historian, makes an important contribution to the history of the Allies' occupation of western Germany by concentrating not on...

German Politics, 1945-1995.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY PETER PULZER. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 195 pp. $39.95 (paper, $14.95). These two books are complementary. Rogers, a historian, makes an important contribution to the history of the Allies' occupation of western Germany by...

Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY TZVETAN TODOROV. New York: Henry Holt, 1996, 307 pp. $27.50. In this luminous book, originally published in France in 1991, Todorov, the great literary theorist and historian, scrutinizes the behavior of those who lived (and so often died)...

Military Rebellion in Argentina: Between Coups and Consolidation.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY DEBORAH L. NORDEN. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996, 242 pp. $35.00 (paper, $17.50). This important book delves into a concern fundamental to many of the new democracies in Latin America: how to establish civilian control over...

Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY MARIA CRISTINA GARCIA. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, 290 pp. $35.00. This comprehensive book focuses on the immigration and adaptation of the first three waves of Cuban migrants to the United States following Castro's...

Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY PETER H. SMITH. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 377 pp. $30.00. Smith, Simon Bolivar Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and former president of the Latin American Studies Association,...

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY MICHELROLPH TROUILLOT. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 192 pp. $22.00. Trouillot, a distinguished Haitian scholar who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, has produced a sparkling interrogation of the past. He examines the suppression of the...

The United States and the Caribbean: Challenges of an Asymmetrical Relationship.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ANTHONY P. MAINGOT. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994, 260 pp. $62.50 (paper, $19.95). Maingot, professor of sociology at Florida International University, looks at U.S.-Caribbean relations from the 1820s until the end of the Cold War in this...

Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY VLADISLAV ZUBOK AND CONSTANTINE PLESHAKOV. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, 338 pp. $29.95. Old enough to have experienced an elder generation's way of thought, young enough to have had their own irreverent, quizzical view in the...

The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY JOHN GARRARD AND CAROL GARRARD. New York: Free Press, 1996, 437 pp. $25.50. Berdichev is a small Ukrainian city not far from Kiev. On September 15 and 16, 1941, while the Wehrmacht's 11th Panzer division was moved to Zhitomir and...

Travels With A Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY MARK KRAMER. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996, 320 pp. $24.95. Russia has always inspired travelers, from Giles Fletcher in the sixteenth century to the Marquis de Custine and George F. Kennan's uncle in the nineteenth century. Lately the...

Lebanon: A Shattered Country.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY ELIZABETH PICARD. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1996, 202 pp. $29.50. Lebanon is often treated by its neighbors as if it no longer existed as an independent country. And yet, as this excellent history shows, Lebanon has developed a distinctive...

Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence After Oslo.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... BY GRAHAM USHER. East Have: Pluto Press, 1995, 146 pp. $1395 (paper). A journalist with extensive experience in Gaza casts a skeptical eye on the Oslo accords and their aftermath. Like many Palestinians, he resents the unfairness and inequality...

Across the tracks. (global economy) (response to 'Workers and the World Economy' by Ethan B. Kapstein, May-June 1996 issue)
July 1, 1996... Three cheers for Ethan Kapstein for opening a debate on how to address the needs of workers in the so-called global village. He accurately details the good intentions of the framers of post-World War II economic policy and their expressed concern...

Unleashing growth. (how to create economic growth)(response to 'Workers and the World Economy' by Ethan B. Kapstein, May-June 1996 issue)
July 1, 1996... Kapstein has no need for pessimism. The United States and other advanced industrial countries could easily grow at significantly faster rates than they do now. These countries are on the cusp of a new era that will fundamentally alter the way...

Political economy. (how to rebuild economic policy)(response to responses to 'Workers and the World Economy' by Ethan B. Kapstein, May-June 1996 issue)
July 1, 1996... In The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes wrote of the power that classical economic theory still had over his discipline during the 1930s, a period remembered as the Great Depression: "That it could explain much social...

A Modern History of the Kurds.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Kurds in the Middle East now number some 25 million and represent major political and security challenges to the governments of Turkey and Iraq. Yet little has been written about them, their history, emergent nationalism, or enduring tribal...

Friends or Rivals? The Insider's Account of U.S.-Japan Relations.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... A superb book that can be profitably read at many levels. First and foremost, it is a valuable firsthand account of U.S.-Japan relations during the critical period 1989-93, when Armacost was the American ambassador. Then, as now, the issue was...

Korea-United States Cooperation in the New World Order.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... This volume results from an annual conference of South Korean and American government officials, former officials, private-sector leaders, and academics under the auspices of the Institute for International Economics in Washington and the...

Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism: Asian Values, Free Market Illusions, and Political Dependency.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Christopher Lingle became an international celebrity after he wrote an article critical of Singapore's political leadership in the International Herald Tribune that aroused the ire of the government. At the time, Lingle was a visiting professor...

Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Confirming the observation that all too often yesterday's science is today's common sense and tomorrow's nonsense, this absorbing study scrutinizes a century of scientific and academic theorizing about race, highlighting the role of South...

Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Whether the United Nations can become a more effective force for peace in the next century will depend in part on how well it can analyze and absorb the lessons of its peacekeeping ventures in the 1990s. Somalia presented problems of civil...

Conflict in Africa.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Although the vast majority of Africans live in peace with their neighbors, life has been nasty, brutish, and short for millions of others who live in ill-fated parts of the continent where Hobbesian civil wars have recently raged. These conflicts...

Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Although the vast majority of Africans live in peace with their neighbors, life has been nasty, brutish, and short for millions of others who live in ill-fated parts of the continent where Hobbesian civil wars have recently raged. These conflicts...

Seretse Khama, 1921-1980.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1996... Born the hereditary ruler of the Bangwato people of the Bechuanaland Protectorate Seretse Khama sparked a furor among British colonial officials when he married an English woman, Ruth Williams, in 1948. Fearing a white backlash that would help...

First, do no harm.(response to 'Workers and the World Economy,' by Ethan B. Kapstein, Foreign Affairs, May/June 19966)
July 1, 1996... When a fire breaks out in a single-family home, firefighters know what they have to do. Fires in private houses are all pretty much alike. But when a fire breaks out in a warehouse, the firefighters make an effort, to find out what is inside...

Resist the binge.(response to 'Workers and the World Economy,' by Ethan B. Kapstein, Foreign Affairs, May/June 19966)
July 1, 1996... Kapstein is correct in saying that the problems of workers in the developed world are serious. I agree, too, that ignoring their plight could have tragic political consequences. But by overstating the effects of the world economy and ignoring the...

Mollycoddled.(response to 'Workers and the World Economy,' by Ethan B. Kapstein, Foreign Affairs, May/June 1996)
July 1, 1996... Kapstein's "Workers of the World" was interesting but wrong-headed. First, he implicitly equates workers of the world with workers of only the industrial world. They indeed may have something to worry about with the globalization of the economy,...