Foreign Affairs articles from November 1995

Foreign Affairs archives from November 1995

After the oil boom: the holiday ends in the Gulf. (Persian Gulf region)
November 1, 1995... The most unmanageable risk facing American interests in the Persian Gulf is neither Saddam Hussein nor Iranian expansionism. Rather, it is the slow but sure decay of the economic and political structures of the United States' key regional allies....

Chirac of France: a new leader in the West? (French President Jacques Chirac)
November 1, 1995... After his first six months as president of France, Jacques Chirac, like the proverbial prophet, is more honored abroad than at home. The discrepancy is sharpest with the United States, where the press has been quick to appreciate Chirac's...

Dominance through technology: is Japan creating a yen bloc in Southeast Asia?
November 1, 1995... The recent recession in Japan and the resurgence of American competitiveness in various industries have helped reestablish the preeminence of U.S. manufacturing in world markets. However, while the Japanese economic threat may have receded...

Our overstuffed armed forces.
November 1, 1995... Despite their differences, President Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress have agreed on two things. The first is that the federal deficit should be eliminated by slashing federal spending rather than increasing taxes; indeed, both...

A new China strategy. (US-China relations)
November 1, 1995... The People's Republic of China has been in the news this year for a number of disturbing reasons. It has mounted muscular military actions to back its diplomacy regarding Taiwan and the South China Sea, allegedly transferred m-11 missile...

Is America abandoning multilateral trade?
November 1, 1995... COMMITMENT TO A NEW WORLD TRADE ORDER In two years of travel for the Clinton administration in Asia, Europe, and Latin America, I have found foreign leaders' most recurrent concern to be that America is moving away from its historically strong...

Changing Iran: the limits of the revolution.
November 1, 1995... I thought I knew what I would find when I arrived in Tehran last spring for the first time. Never a fan of the Islamic revolution, I was not surprised by the sign at the airport that said, "Death to America." In my hotel a banner with similar...

Changing Iran: Germany's new ostpolitik.
November 1, 1995... TRADING WITH THE ENEMY German-American friendship has been a pillar of the Western alliance in the post-Cold War era, even when that alliance has been strained over issues ranging from Bosnia to trade liberalization. The U.S. and German...

Jimmy Carter's modest quest for global peace.
November 1, 1995... THE MISSIONARY MAN Jimmy Carter has won public accolades for his high-profile parachutes for peace into North Korea, Haiti, and Bosnia. But the former president has also been roundly criticized by those who feel he blurs U.S. foreign policy...

My American Journey.
November 1, 1995... Memoirs by retired generals and admirals usually have titles like A Soldier Reports or Command Missions, more simply, Soldier, or even the starkly declarative Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Colin Powell has called his book My American Journey, a...

The New Ecological Order.
November 1, 1995... A specter is haunting the French humanist mind these days - a radical ecology movement that threatens to replace the idealization of humanity with an idealization of nature. Already we see "the passing of the humanist era," writes Luc Ferry, a...

The End of the Nation-State.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This book, widely read in France, is written by a brilliant former French policy planner and current ambassador to the European Union. It argues that the territorial nation-state is giving way: from without, to a welter of overlapping,...

Jihad vs. McWorld: How the Planet Is Both Falling Apart and Coming Together and What This Means for Democracy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This analysis is strikingly similar to that of the Guehenno volume: the nation-state, the institutional cradle of democracy and citizenship, is being threatened from two directions. McWorld - the consumer-oriented capitalist global economy - is...

Contemporary Crisis of the Nation-State?(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Yet another collection of essays speculating on the future of the nation-state, this volume is less focused and coherent than most. The editor asks in the introduction whether the facts be out the common belief in a crisis of the nation-state....

Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Institutions.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This volume examines transitional regimes as a factor in democratization. In the manner of previous texts of his, Linz provides a useful conceptual framework and a meticulous taxonomy of transitional regime types. Case studies range from...

Value Change in Global Perspective.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This book reports on the 1990-91 World Values Survey as well as more detailed studies by the authors of value changes in Europe. The central hypothesis is that higher levels of economic development bring a shift from "materialist" to...

Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Preposition.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This book exhaustively reviews the literature on the proposition that democracies do not fight one another, cautiously concluding that the idea remains supportable on empirical and theoretical grounds. The author opens a new phase in discussion...

Wary Partners: Diplomats and the Media.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... A textbook designed to introduce diplomats and journalists to each other's profession, this volume explains such elementary facts as the day of the week a news magazine files, how press guidances are cleared in the State Department, and the...

Competing Solutions: American Health Care Proposals and International Experience.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This book addresses health care reform in the United States, after the debacle of 1994. It offers excellent critiques of the Clinton plan and its congressional alternatives, concluding that the Clinton plan attempted to combine two quite...

Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Some environmentalists have expressed concern that trade liberalization and acceptance of trade rules (with, for example, the World Trade Organization) will retard and even undermine national regulations for consumer protection and environmental...

The Reluctant Superpower: A History of America's Economic Global Reach.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Despite its title, this book is really a concise history of the world economy during the twentieth century, with a focus on the United States but interesting excursions on Europe and, especially, Japan. Drawn largely from secondary sources and...

The True State of the Planet.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Eleven chapters by 13 authors cover population growth and food production, pesticides, global warming, resource scarcity, environmental causes of cancer, deforestation, biodiversity, water use, ocean management, and air quality. All are concerned...

The Political Economy of Policy Coordination: International Adjustment.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... A history of post-world War II international cooperation on macroeconomic policy in the major market economies. The book advances two related theses. First, the form of cooperation has changed as the structure of the world economy has evolved,...

Defense Planning for the Late 1900s: Beyond the Desert Storm Framework.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Brookings, 1995, 150 pp. $16.95 (paper). Throughout the 19800 fixture of the debate about the American defense budget was the regular appearance of a slender Brookings Institution volume, written by William W. Kaufmann, guaranteed to annoy the...

War: A Cruel Necessity? The Bases of Institutionalized Violence.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Most academics who write about war and appeal to a policy audience are political scientists or historians. There is, however, a rich anthropological literature about war that repays an occasional visit, and this volume edited by two Cambridge...

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Although individual pieces of this story have been told before and told well, Rhodes' contribution is in putting together a comprehensive picture of the development of the hydrogen bomb. He depicts the American and Soviet scientific efforts, the...

Sun Pin Military Methods.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Sun Pin is said by some to have been the great-grandson of Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War. With this translation of the former's writings, Ralph D. Sawyer, who has translated and edited not only Sun Tzu's book but a number of other Chinese...

The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The Pentagon is agog with discussions of a revolution in military affairs, the technologically driven transformation of warfare that some believe is now under way. This volume deals with a much earlier period, the mid-sixteenth through the...

Power Rules: The Evolution of NATO's Conventional Force Posture.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The history of defense budgets, force structures, and committee-devised plans does not make for enthralling reading, but it is nonetheless an important subject. This workmanlike study, based on considerable archival research, presents a solid...

Fulbright: A Biography.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... An engrossing biography of the long-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959-75), J. William Fulbright. The junior senator from Arkansas, who died this year, became a thorn in the side of every sitting president, yet his...

Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Nordlinger, who taught at Brown until his premature death last year, is an isolationist with a difference. Like the old isolationists, he believes that the interventions and commitments the United States undertook in this century made it more...

America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... An enjoyable portrait of the "little Americans." Kauffman is a writer for Chronicles, the flagship Journal of the paleoconservatives. He has "the free swinging wit of a man who knows he's a fanatic and can't help it," as he says of one of his...

The Making of Detente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... A lucid account of the forces that pushed the superpowers toward detente in the early 1970s. Not a conventional diplomatic history but a series of reflective essays, it concisely analyzes the breakdown of old arrangements in both countries and...

Cooperation among Democracies: The European Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This work investigates why European allies were successful in influencing U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Risse-Kappen, who teaches at the University of Konstanz in Germany, shows how the norms of consultation and co-determination worked...

Her Excellency: An Oral History of American Women Ambassadors.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... These two books advance the understanding of a neglected topic. Miller Morin's interviews with 15 women ambassadors, including Clare Boothe Luce, Rozanne Ridgway, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, are full of interesting anecdotes of their diplomatic...

Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917-1994.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... These two books advance the understanding of a neglected topic. Miller Morin's interviews with 15 women ambassadors, including Clare Boothe Luce, Rozanne Ridgway, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, are full of interesting anecdotes of their diplomatic...

Jacques Delors and European Integration.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Ross, a political sociologist, spent the crucial year of 1991 as a participant observer in the cabinet of Jacques Delors, president of the Commission of the European Communities. His book is a splendid study of Delor's highly centralized and...

Eminent Churchillians.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Under a title that evokes Lytton Strachey, a young conservative British historian submits Churchill's political contemporaries to the kind of debunking Strachey initiated and present-day British writers seem to adore. The tide is partly...

From the Boer War to the Cold War: Essays on Twentieth-Century Europe.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This collection of approximately 70 essay of varying lengths, including many book reviews and talks for the BBC, is a dazzling display of Taylor's knack for incisive, witty, and opinionated analysis and his passion for understanding the motives...

The Crisis of the Italian State: From the Origins of the Cold War to the Fall of Berlusconi.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This analysis of the crisis of Italy's parliamentary and party system by a learned and thought-provoking professor of European studies at The Johns Hopkins University Bologna Center provides an account of the turbulent politics of 1992-94. That...

The Italian Revolution: The End of Politics, Italian Style?(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Anyone wishing for a much more detailed account of the Italian political crisis than the one offered in McCarthy's book win find it here. Gilbert, a political scientist, is reluctant to speculate about the future, but he does a very good job...

Nazi Germany: A New History.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This massive study by an intellectual historian is an excellent, clear, comprehensive, and sensible synthesis of all that is known about Hitler and his hideous regime. Fischer wisely emphasizes the many factors that made Germans susceptible to...

Farewell, Revolution: Disputed Legacies, France, 1789-1989.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Originally published in France, this book by a historian of that country's eighteenth century is a highly entertaining, exhaustive (but not exhausting) account of the politics and theater of the commemoration in 1989 of the 200th anniversary of...

The Black Diaspora: Five Centuries of the Black Experience Outside Africa.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... A Tocquevillesque wandering through the history and contemporary life experiences of communities of African origin, this book focuses on the world bordering the Atlantic. A well-known writer with several excellent books to his credit, Segal is...

The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Containing historical texts dealing with Peru's rich past, some of which are difficult to obtain elsewhere, the introductory readings chosen by the editors provide excellent accounts of the ancient civilizations of the Andes, cover the conquest...

The Brazilians.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Brazil is the second-largest democracy in the Western Hemisphere and a notoriously difficult place to write about. A good and up-to-date introduction to Brazil has been sorely lacking for some years, and that is precisely what Page provides. A...

Brazilian Mosaic: Portraits of a Diverse People and Culture.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Brazil is the second-largest democracy in the Western Hemisphere and a notoriously difficult place to write about. A good and up-to-date introduction to Brazil has been sorely lacking for some years, and that is precisely what Page provides. A...

Sustainable Democracy.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... No one knows whether the new democracies in eastern and southern Europe and Latin America will sustain themselves. In the interim, they have certainly sustained a self-recruiting coterie of social scientists on a lavish conference circuit -...

The Consolidation of Democracy in Latin America.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... No one knows whether the new democracies in eastern and southern Europe and Latin America will sustain themselves. In the interim, they have certainly sustained a self-recruiting coterie of social scientists on a lavish conference circuit -...

Political Recruitment Across Two Centuries: Mexico, 1884-1991.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... A fascinating work that examines political recruitment practices in Mexico from the beginning of the second administration of Porfirio Diaz in 1884 until midway into the Salinas administration (1988-94), providing the reader with a snapshot of...

United States Policy in Latin Amerca: A Decade of Crisis and Challenge.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Thirteen leading scholars tackle key aspects of U.S.-Latin American relations over the past decade in this updated edition of one of the classics of the field. While there is little here that is original, overall the volume is valuable for its...

Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Harrison, a longtime student of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and Cordovez, the United Nations' principal intermediary through much of it, team up to give the first detailed and behind the-scenes account of how the Soviets stumbled into,...

Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Because the names and details seem so obscure and the distance from any obvious Western interest so apparently great, most have no trouble ignoring the turbulence in the Caucasus and the place of Azerbaijan in it. Reading Swietochowski's broad...

Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Colton's history of Moscow is many things, the most important of which may not be instantly apparent. Truly it is a grand history of one of the world's ancient and great cities, and, for that, it is also a major modern contribution to the field...

L'Algerie et la Democratie: Pouvoir et Crise du Politique dans l'Algerie Contemporaine.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Algeria is a difficult country to understand. Just a decade ago it seemed to typify a certain kind of modernizing autocracy. Then, faced with an economic and social crisis brought on by declining oil revenues, it seemed to lurch toward rapid...

Algerie: Le Grand Derapage.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Algeria is a difficult country to understand. Just a decade ago it seemed to typify a certain kind of modernizing autocracy. Then, faced with an economic and social crisis brought on by declining oil revenues, it seemed to lurch toward rapid...

Inside the Kremlin During the Yom Kippur War.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... For more than 20 years, scholars and pundits have been writing about the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war with one enormous handicap: the missing piece of the puzzle was what was going on in Moscow during a crisis that brought the world to the brink...

Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... For years, Benvenisti and his West Bank Data Project chronicled the seemingly unstoppable encroachment of Israeli settlers on Palestinian lands. Many assume that Benvenisti was an Israeli dove warning that settlements would complicate the peace...

The Zionist Ideology.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The creation of the state of Israel is a powerful example of the role of ideas in history. It was, after all, only 100 years ago that the idea of a Jewish state began to take hold among Jews in the European diaspora. This intelligent book places...

The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Few who have ever visited the Gaza Strip will need to be convinced that it faces enormous economic problems. But was Gaza's underdevelopment inevitable, or was it the result of Israeli policies? Roy argues forcefully that Israeli policy...

Making Peace with the PLO: Policy and Politics in the Rabin Government.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... More than any other writer to date, Makovsky has unraveled the politics that explain why Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shifted course in 1993 and decided to deal with the PLO. We learn that Rabin was involved with the initiative from the outset,...

Civil-Military Relations in Israel.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... An experienced politician turned academic has produced an enlightening study of civil-military relations in Israel. His information comes in part from numerous interviews with high-level Israeli officials, and he generally arrives at reassuring...

Securing the Covenant: United States-Israel Relations After the Cold War.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... If one believes that the primary anchor of the U.S.-Israeli relationship is strategic, then there is reason to conclude that the end of the Cold War will produce significant changes in this dyad. But as Reich argues in this eminently sensible...

U.S.-PLO Dialogue: Secret Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The Arab-Israeli peace process has been a series of mediated or negotiated agreements embedded in a larger political framework. While the official dimension has produced formal documents, for over two decades citizens outside government have...

The Changing of the Guard: President Clinton and the Security of Taiwan.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Although this book was completed before the recent mini-crisis in U.S.-China relations caused by Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui's visit to the United States, it anticipates that crisis - and potentially more serious ones - by warning about a...

The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995, 428 pp. $45.00. An ambitious effort by a sociologist at Yale University, this book has already been widely praised by prominent American political scientists and historians for answering how the Japanese...

Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... Manohar, 1995, 205 pp. $24.00. This case study of the India-Pakistan crisis of 1986-87 was precipitated by India's year-long Brasstacks Exercise. The largest military exercise conducted in South Asia in recent decades, it was comparable to the...

Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from the Unofficial China.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The authors are correspondents for The Christian Science Monitor who speak Chinese, understand Chinese history, and spent five years reporting from China. This is a unique analysis of how the Deng Xiaoping reforms are affecting Chinese society at...

Japan: Who Governs? The Rise of the Developmental State.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This collection of essays by Chalmers Johnson, a well-known American Japanologist, covers a wide variety of subjects, from the role of the state in Japan's economic life to the nature of Japanese politics and bureaucracies to Japan's...

Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... This book is a path-breaking effort to analyze state disintegration, focusing on African cases, the editor says, not so much to learn about them as from them in exploring a wide range of contemporary political issues. What have been the causes of...

Losing Mogadishu: Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... If you have time to read only one book on Somalia, this should probably not be it, but set among the growing literature on the U.N.-U.S. intervention in the early 1990s, it adds new perspectives and opinions that some will find interesting. The...

Between State and Civil Society in Africa.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... The relationship between state and civil society, particularly with regard to the question of democratization, has become central to much contemporary work on sub-Saharan Africa. It is unfortunate, then, that this collection of essays by African...

In Sight of Surrender: The U.S. Sanctions Campaign Against South Africa, 1946-1993.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... There are no surprises in this competent but unexciting account of the American sanctions movement by a former South African diplomat. We learn nothing about internal policy debates on the South African side, nor does the author offer any...

The United Nations and Apartheid: 1948-1994.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... These two volumes in the U.N. Blue Book series present a very useful record of the world body's role in promoting human rights and peace in southern Africa. Each reproduces the texts of key U.N. and other selected documents, preceded by a...

The United Nations and Mozambique: 1992-1995.(Brief Article)
November 1, 1995... These two volumes in the U.N. Blue Book series present a very useful record of the world body's role in promoting human rights and peace in southern Africa. Each reproduces the texts of key U.N. and other selected documents, preceded by a...

Emerging markets are here to stay. (response to Paul Krugman, Foreign Affairs, 1995)
November 1, 1995... Paul Krugman calls into question the future of emerging markets ("Dutch Tulips and Emerging Markets," July/August 1995). He argues that the efficacy of the "free markets-sound money" model - the so-called "Washington consensus" - was oversold,...

Appease with dishonor: the truth about the Balkans. (response to Charles G. Boyd, Foreign Affairs, 1995)
November 1, 1995... General Charles G. Boyd complains thAT the "conventional wisdom" on the war in Bosnia is "stunted by... a tragic ignorance or disregard of history" ("Making Peace with the Guilty," September/October 1995). But his own article is far from an...

Peace principles. (response to Noel Malcolm, Foreign Affairs, this issue)
November 1, 1995... I was pleased to read the four responses sparked by my article as well as the supportive commentary that has come directly to me. Thoughtful, concerned people everywhere care deeply about the tragedy in the Balkans, and it was precisely this...