Foreign Affairs articles from June 1993

Foreign Affairs archives from June 1993

Lessons of Chernobyl: the cultural causes of the meltdown. (1986 nuclear power plant meltdown)
June 22, 1993... In the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power station disaster, most of the lessons being learned by the scientific community and governments are about the technical, radiological, environmental and medical consequences of that tragic...

The post-Cold War press: a new world needs a new journalism.
June 22, 1993... Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent...

Reining in the U.N.: mistaking the instrument for the actor. (United Nations)
June 22, 1993... The United Nations is not and cannot be a political actor in a world of sovereign states. Despite the successful Persian Gulf War coalition, the humanitarian effort in Somalia and repeated calls for strengthening U.N. peacekeeping capability,...

The clash of civilizations?
June 22, 1993... THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT World politics Is entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be--the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the...

The case for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrant: debate.
June 22, 1993... THE LOGIC OF PROLIFERATION Most Western Observers want Ukraine to rid itself of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. In this view, articulated recently by President Bill Clinton, Europe would be more stable if Russia were to become...

The case against a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent: debate.
June 22, 1993... The case for Ukrainian acquisition of nuclear weapons rests fundamentally on two key arguments: first, Ukrainian nuclear weapons will promote peace and stability in a region that might otherwise be prone to conflict; and second, nuclear weapons...

A profile of Slobodan Milosevic. (Serbian president)
June 22, 1993... BANALITY TRIUMPHANT In 1989 a collection of Speeches and interviews of Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Serbia, was published in Belgrade. His narrow intellectual horizons and limited vocabulary were obvious; the chapter titles, in...

Invitation to war. (Balkans)
June 22, 1993... War in the balkans is widely thought to be atavistic, the product of a perverse time warp that unloads fourteenth-century hatreds at the edge of the Europe of Maastricht, high-speed trains and the Single Market. Its cruelty is imputed to...

A brief history of ethnic cleansing.
June 22, 1993... The Serbian campaigne to "cleanse" a territory of another ethnic group, while gruesome and tragic, is historically speaking neither new nor remarkable. Population removal and transfer have occurred in history more often than is generally...

The case for war crimes trials in Yugoslavia.
June 22, 1993... THE NEED TO ASSERT INTERNATIONAL LAW The credibility of international humanitarian law demands a war crimes tribunal to hold accountable those responsible for gross violations in the former Yugoslavia. Opponents in the bitter ethnic and...

The next great arms race. (Pacific Rim countries)
June 22, 1993... DANGER ON THE PACIFIC RIM Despite the end of the Cold War--perhaps because of it--the nations of East and Southeast Asia are engaged in accelerating arms races with significant implications for regional and international security. The...

The plutonium genie.
June 22, 1993... PUTTING IT BACK IN THE BOTTLE Plutonium is one of the most dangerous materials on earth. Ten pounds are enough to make a crude nuclear weapon; one-thirty-thousandth of an ounce will cause cancer if inhaled. Plutonium's lethality is...

Superpower without a sword. (United States)
June 22, 1993... GRAND GOALS AND DWINDLING BUDGETS Phase one of the great debate on post-Cold War American foreign policy is over. The Clinton administration's proposed fiscal 1994 defense budget makes it clear that, although the president may continue...

Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World.
June 22, 1993... By the close of the administration's first 100 days, President Bill Clinton's trade policy had come under heavy fire at home and abroad. Referring to the international shouting matches over computer chips, steel, minivans, aircraft...

The Highest Stakes: The Economic Foundations of the Next Security System.
June 22, 1993... By the close of the administration's first 100 days, President Bill Clinton's trade policy had come under heavy fire at home and abroad. Referring to the international shouting matches over computer chips, steel, minivans, aircraft...

The Next Battleground: Japan, America, and the European Market.
June 22, 1993... By the close of the administration's first 100 days, President Bill Clinton's trade policy had come under heavy fire at home and abroad. Referring to the international shouting matches over computer chips, steel, minivans, aircraft...

Promise and Power: The Life and Times of Robert McNamara.
June 22, 1993... Can we honor and respect Robert McNamara? From the time the young California native left a teaching position at Harvard Business School to join the Army Air Corps during the Second World War, McNamara has been a tireless improver and...

The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.
June 22, 1993... An investigative reporter and teacher of journalism, Christopher Simpson has long been interested in the Nazi period, having earlier written a book on America's alleged recruitment of war criminals after World War Il. Now he looks at genocide,...

Culture and Imperialism.
June 22, 1993... The distinguished author is a Columbia University professor of English and comparative literature, of Palestinian Arab origin, and a frequent commentator on the Arab-Israeli conflict. This unusual man writes unusual books. Here he builds upon...

Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century.
June 22, 1993... As in The Grand Failure, his recent survey of the reasons for the collapse of communism, Zbigniew Brzezinski uses Out of Control to analyze current political thinking and give the reader a dependable and sober view of the crises to come: the...

Religious Perspectives on War: Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Attitudes Toward Force After the Gulf War.
June 22, 1993... One year after the Persian Gulf War, the U.S. Institute for Peace brought together 24 theologians and scholars to discuss the relationship between religious ethics and the use of force. Assembled were individuals who could authoritatively give...

Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign Aid Regime, 1949-89.
June 22, 1993... Today Washington is reassessing the purpose and role of foreign aid. The consensus is that it has been very much an instrument of national policy. In the United States, foreign aid has usually been justified on national security grounds....

Women as National Leaders.
June 22, 1993... Do women achieve national leadership and then exercise political power differently than men? Case studies of Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto, Violeta Chamorro, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Isabel Peron and Margaret Thatcher seek to answer this...

The Line of Fire: From Washington to the Gulf, the Politics and Battles of the New Military.
June 22, 1993... This memoir begins with a 1989 trip to a Soviet cruiser, complete with a teary Mike Wallace in attendance for the visit of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to a Soviet warship. Crowe, who helped provide then-candidate Clinton with some...

Use of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy.
June 22, 1993... A slender reminder that Woodrow Wilson had fewer compunctions about using force than the average pundit now thinks. The author examines Wilson's uses of force for "protection, retribution, solution, introduction, and association" in the Mexican...

Hitler's Japanese Confidant: General Oshima Hiroshi and Magic Intelligence, 1941-1945.
June 22, 1993... Another entry in the excellent Modern War Studies series of the University Press of Kansas, this volume examines in detail what Allied intelligence learned from the intercepted communications of Japan's ambassador to Hider. Having broken the...

Defining National Security: The Nonmilitary Aspects.
June 22, 1993... The title says it all. The author looks at U.S. drug interdiction policy and the new notions of environmental, energy and economic security, shrugging aside the older, military conception of national security as having declining relevance in...

Weapons Don't Make War: Policy, Strategy and Military Technology.
June 22, 1993... A breezy swing through arms races, nuclear strategy and a miscellany of other contemporary strategic fare. Gray is a prolific writer on these subjects, and little here is new, but his theme - that technology does not drive strategy, but rather...

The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping: Case Studies and Comparative Analysis.
June 22, 1993... Traditionally trained students of national security scramble these days to learn about U.N. peacekeeping, a subject to which they paid scant attention during the heyday of the Cold War. They would do well to look at this volume of edited case...

The Elusive Transformation: Science, Technology, and the Evolution of International Politics.
June 22, 1993... An ambitious, if ponderously written, treatise on a subject of growing interest in the study of international relations. After a look at the theoretical and grand historical issues related to the subject, the author explores national security,...

Hoodwinking Hitler: The Normandy Deception.
June 22, 1993... Operation Fortitude was the Allied deception plan to fool the Germans as to the location and time of the 1944 invasion of France. It was critical to the D-Day victory. According to William Breuer, the author of a baker's dozen popular histories...

FDR: Into the Storm, 1937-1940, A History.
June 22, 1993... Admirers of F.D.R. will enjoy the wealth of personal anecdotes in this beautifully written fourth volume of a highly acclaimed biography. The book is wholly sympathetic to F.D.R.; for example, his 1940 campaign pledge, "I shall say it again and...

The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower's Response to the Soviet Satellite.
June 22, 1993... When Sputnik went into orbit in 1957, America went into a panic. Only President Dwight Eisenhower retained his composure and understood that the United States was far superior to the Soviet Union in scientific research as well as in military...

Eisenhower and the Mass Media: Peace, Prosperity, and Prime-Time TV.
June 22, 1993... Although John F. Kennedy is generally regarded as the "first television president," in fact Dwight Eisenhower provided the precedents, including the first televised fireside chats and the first TV news conferences. Ike was the first president...

Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy.
June 22, 1993... One of America's senior diplomatic historians, DeConde provides a two-century survey of the impact of ethnic interest groups on U.S. foreign policy. This is a balanced and scholarly book that manages both to cover the various incidents in those...

Icons of Democracy: American Leaders as Heroes, Aristocrats, Dissenters, and Democrats.
June 22, 1993... Examining the leadership styles of nine Americans - Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Theodore Roosevelt, Eugene Debs, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King - this study aims to...

At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War.
June 22, 1993... The coming together of one of Washington's top reporters, Strobe Talbott, and one of the nation's top historians, Michael Beschloss, has produced a remarkable work of instant history. Told in Time magazine's breezy style - short paragraphs,...

The Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited.
June 22, 1993... Eight essays on the crisis, based more or less on information that has become available in the past five years, especially on the Soviet side, at various conferences held around the world. The best essays are by Raymond Garthoff, who does a...

Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety About the Bomb.
June 22, 1993... "For all we know, we have created a Frankenstein!" declared H. V. Kaltenborn in one of the first public comments on Hiroshima. No one yet knows whether he was right or not. Allan Winkler, an accomplished historian from Miami University, Ohio,...

A Not So Silent Envoy: A Biography of Ambassador Samuel David Berger.
June 22, 1993... A frank and down-to-earth account of a remarkable career, drawing heavily on contemporary letters as wen as extensive autobiographical material from the loyalty investigations to which Berger was subjected in the 1950s after running afoul of...

On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought.
June 22, 1993... A leading European intellectual analyzes French thought on the multiplicity of peoples, customs and values. He traces the distortions of the humanism of Montaigne and of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking in subsequent writers, treating...

Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy.
June 22, 1993... The timing for the title and subtitle of this book could hardly be more inappropriate, yet this excellent work may have relevance to today's unprecedented crisis in Italian politics. Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, and his collaborators...

Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.
June 22, 1993... At once an attempt at a new interpretation of nationalism and a history of its development in England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States, ranging from the sixteenth century to the present. The author, a Harvard sociologist, regards...

Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust.
June 22, 1993... A collection of spirited essays from the 1980s, exposing the falsehoods of "revisionists," especially French revisionists, who deny the existence of the gas chambers. The author, a well-known French historian of ancient Greece, writes a polemic...

The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age.
June 22, 1993... Lukacs is a deeply cultivated, original, and somewhat self-indulgent conservative historian and a prodigious writer. This book, written after the liberation of Eastern Europe, is at once an analysis of Europe and America at the end of the...

Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics.
June 22, 1993... The senior U. S. senator from New York enlarges on a topic that has engaged him for many decades: the power of ethnicity and its resulting strife. He quotes his early apprehensions that ethnic conflicts might bring about the collapse of the...

Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean.
June 22, 1993... Prepared by a distinguished social historian as a companion text for a public television series, this magisterial work provides an accessible and engaging introduction to the complex tapestry of contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean.

Americas: New Interpretive Essays.
June 22, 1993... Fifteen leading academic specialists on contemporary Latin America from several different disciplines have contributed to this innovative collection, prepared in connection with a public television series. Three themes are discussed: the...

United States Economic Measures Against Cuba: Proceedings in the United Nations and International Law Issues.
June 22, 1993... Two lawyers with a New York firm that has wide-ranging experience representing states trying to cope with the impact of U.S. sanctions have compiled this interesting compendium of documents on the long-standing U.S. trade embargo against Cuba,...

Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War: 1944-1948.
June 22, 1993... These essays, II country reviews and two general essays prepared jointly by the editors, argue that the brief period from the end of World War II to the onset of the Cold War was a defining one in Latin America's political and social history....

Shining Path: Terror and Revolution in Peru.
June 22, 1993... Yet another book on Peru's frightening Shining Path insurgency, this one by a British journalist who lived in Peru from 1988 to 1992. Illuminating, particularly on the Shining Path's international activities, but ultimately inconclusive, this...

Inside Gorbachev's Kremlin.
June 22, 1993... In many ways this is the most interesting memoir yet produced by a leader from the Gorbachev era. Ligachev, at the outset a supporter of Gorbachev and his plans to reform the sclerosed Soviet system, became a conservative Cassandra warning of...

The Church and the Left.
June 22, 1993... In the mid-1970s Adam Michnik, the gritty intellectual star of the Polish democratic opposition, authored a short book exploring the twentieth-century estrangement between the Catholic Church - primarily its hierarchy - and the Polish left. By...

The Disintegration of the Monolith.
June 22, 1993... Kagarlitsky, a Russian politician from the left and an anti-Leninist socialist, does not really try to explain the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He is far more interested in laying out the deceptions, phony dreams and hypocrisies of those...

Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine After Totalitarianism.
June 22, 1993... Motyl is a lively writer with a vigorous, spicy intellect, and the reader has the benefit of both in this first full-length study of independent Ukraine. He believes that Ukraine, like virtually all of the post-Soviet states, is the victim of...

This I Cannot Forget.
June 22, 1993... In March 1938, when Stalin's regime shot Nikolai Bukharin, Anna Larina, his 24-year-old third wife and mother of his baby son, was already in the Gulag. In these spare, eloquent, intelligent, caring but unemotional memoirs - written in the...

Serbs and Croats: The Struggle in Yugoslavia.
June 22, 1993... As a further sad echo of the nightmare in the former Yugoslavia, outside experts on the region have increasingly been drawn into the maelstrom, some as willing warriors, some as the hapless targets of the warring sides. The author's purpose is...

No Breathing Room: The Aftermath of Chernobyl.
June 22, 1993... Medvedev is a nuclear engineer and a former senior figure in the Soviet nuclear power establishment. He helped design the Chernobyl plant, and he was among those sent in to assess the damage when it blew up. He wrote a chilling account based on...

The Demise of the Soviet Union.
June 22, 1993... Rather like Bill Moyers' quality television interviews, Urban over the years has published his active dialogues with intellectuals who have been at the center of the East-West struggle. This collection - given false billing as about the demise...

Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World.
June 22, 1993... Whoever says that modern Arab intellectuals have not engaged in intelligent analysis and criticism of their society, its values and its politics has not read the books of Fatima Mernissi. A Moroccan sociologist, she writes from a feminist...

Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World.
June 22, 1993... The author of Republic of Fear, now writing under his real name, has raised issues that are all too often ignored by Arab writers. Why is it, he asks, that the violence and oppression so common in Arab politics is seemingly tolerated by Arab...

Chaim Weizmann: The Making of a Statesman.
June 22, 1993... This second volume of the author's biography of Chaim Weizmann concentrates on the years from 1914 to 1922, when Weizmann capitalized on his scientific achievements to become an "insider" in his relations with prominent British politicians. He...

Shifting Lines in the Sand: Kuwait's Elusive Frontier with Iraq.
June 22, 1993... The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had almost no positive side effects. But the writing of this fine book was one. Well-researched and well-written, this study traces the history of Kuwait's relations with Iraq, with emphasis on the border, from the...

The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State.
June 22, 1993... The author of this broad survey of the contemporary Arab world is a Syrian-born sociologist and author. He is also a strong advocate of revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, which he believes has future as a unified nation -...

Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948.
June 22, 1993... The history of state formation is filled with cases of population exchanges, expulsions, "ethnic cleansing" and forced transfers. Zionist leaders, as this carefully researched study shows, were frequently outspoken in their belief that the...

Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb.
June 22, 1993... Radical Islamic politics seems destined to be part of the Middle East landscape for years to come. Thus, any serious study of the ideological origins of today's militant movements is welcome. The author focuses on the Egyptian Islamic thinker...

The Gulf, Cooperation and the Council: An American Perspective.
June 22, 1993... The author served in the State Department as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was being formed in the early 1980s. As a result, he has an insider's perspective on the early years of the GCC. Much useful information is provided on the council...

The Warriors of Islam: Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
June 22, 1993... In recent years it has been fashionable to note that the Iranian Revolution is once again turning inward. Many have noted that Islamic ideology is making way for traditional Iranian nationalism. But this study concentrates on the organization...

Ibn Saud: Founder of a Kingdom.
June 22, 1993... The founder of the Saudi kingdom, known in the West as Ibn Saud, is often treated as larger than life. This biography follows the tradition of highlighting the remarkable personal qualities of King Abd al-Aziz, but does so from a standpoint of...

Egypt's Bid for Arab Leadership: Implications for U.S. Policy.
June 22, 1993... The remarkable growth of the U.S.-Egyptian relationship from the mid-1970s to the present is, by most standards, a success story. The building blocks were the peace process, strategic cooperation in the Cold War and, most recently, Desert...

Scuds or Butter? The Political Economy of Arms Control in the Middle East.
June 22, 1993... This short monograph makes a vigorous and well-argued case for the possibility of Middle East arms control. That possibility, difficult to imagine in a region suffused with conflict and already stuffed to the gills with arms, springs from the...

Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
June 22, 1993... This book builds on Quandt's well-regarded Decade of Decisions (1977), which covered the years 1967-76, extending the story through 1992. It is, however, much more than an updating of the earlier book. Coverage of the Six Day War period is...

Doing Good or Doing Well? Japan's Foreign Aid Program.
June 22, 1993... These two detailed studies of Japan's foreign aid program reach different conclusions. Ensign, an American academic, contends that Japanese aid remains substantially tied to Japanese business interests, despite assertions of Japanese officials...

The Emergence of Japan's Foreign Aid Power.
June 22, 1993... These two detailed studies of Japan's foreign aid program reach different conclusions. Ensign, an American academic, contends that Japanese aid remains substantially tied to Japanese business interests, despite assertions of Japanese officials...

Real Reciprocity: Balancing U.S. Economic and Security Policies in the Pacific Basin.
June 22, 1993... The huge and chronic U.S. trade deficit with Japan has given rise to a cottage industry of books on U.S.-Japan relations. Denoon's contribution to the discussion is important because he lays out the connections between U.S. security and...

American Power, the New World Order, and the Japanese Challenge.
June 22, 1993... The huge and chronic U.S. trade deficit with Japan has given rise to a cottage industry of books on U.S.-Japan relations. Denoon's contribution to the discussion is important because he lays out the connections between U.S. security and...

Controlling the Waves: Dean Acheson and U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia.
June 22, 1993... This volume, a detailed, narrative history of Dean Acheson's policy toward East Asia in the early postwar period, won an award from the American Historical Association in 1990. The author concludes that Acheson's primary concern in East Asia...

Driven by Growth: Political Change in the Asia-Pacific Region.
June 22, 1993... This collection of essays by reputable scholars explores the relationship between economic growth and political change in East Asia. Unlike many volumes of this type, there is a stimulating final chapter that seeks to integrate the findings. It...

Vietnam at the Crossroads.
June 22, 1993... This is a thorough and readable account of the changes in Vietnam's economic and foreign policies in recent years. The author, a British Broadcasting Corporation correspondent, concludes that Vietnam has made a decisive shift toward a market...

High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood.
June 22, 1993... If one gives a sympathetic reading to this memoir by the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Africa in the Reagan years, it is an engaging and impressive story of restraint, logic and dogged persistence in the pursuit of a negotiated peace in...

Ghana: In Search of Stability, 1957-1982.
June 22, 1993... The first half of this valuable analysis of Ghanaian politics traces the succession of three civilian and five military governments from the country's independence to the late 1980s, emphasizing the reasons democratization efforts repeatedly...

Land Mines in Angola.
June 22, 1993... This brief study examines one of the less-known but major features of the ruinous Angola civil war: the human and economic cost of indiscriminate laying of hundreds of thousands of land mines. The author's research makes clear that even if...

South Africa's Other Whites: Voices for Change.
June 22, 1993... Not all South African whites approved of apartheid, but only a small fraction of those who disapproved worked for fundamental change. This book profiles 13 such individuals and their work in diverse fields including mental health, peace, rural...

At The Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife.
June 22, 1993... This provocative study by an investigative journalist tackles conservation in political and social dimensions, underscoring its complexity as an international issue. Bonner argues that the international ban on trade in ivory ignores expert...