Foreign Affairs articles from September 1995

Foreign Affairs archives from September 1995

Rhetoric before reality. (U.S. foreign policy)
September 1, 1995... In a wry comment in early 1932 on American reluctance to translate its indignant rhetoric protesting the September 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria into anything more forceful, British statesman Stanley Baldwin commented, "You will get nothing...

The end of progressivism; a search for new goals.
September 1, 1995... The Cold War was nothing but a conflict between two extreme versions of progressivism--socialism and neoclassical capitalism. Both ideologies set a rapid increase and fair distribution of material welfare as their goal. According to socialists,...

Passing grades: branding nations won't resolve the U.S. drug problem.
September 1, 1995... In the evolving foreign policy of the post--Cold War world, Americans increasingly demand that U.S. diplomacy advance domestic interests. Nowhere is this more striking than in the most recent development in the U.S. drug war: the assigning of...

making peace with the guilty: the truth about Bosnia.(Cover Story)
September 1, 1995... English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid...

The U.N. idea revisited. (United Nations)
September 1, 1995... THE SLOW DEATH OF COLLECTIVE SECURITY THE UNITED NATIONS was born 50 years ago amid such euphoria that a fall from grace was inevitable. Its founding conference at San Francisco in April 1945 resounded with slogans of redemption and hope. Many...

Reforming the United Nations.
September 1, 1995... A BETTER INSURANCE POLICY FOR THE WORLD FIFTY YEARS AGO the free nations of the world met in general assembly to begin the task of establishing a postwar order that would secure the peace, advance global prosperity, alleviate poverty and...

The sorrows of Egypt.
September 1, 1995... A TALE OF TWO MEN A GENERATION after that day of October 6, 1981, when Anwar al-Sadat was struck down, a strange bond has been forged between Sadat and his assassin, Khalid Istanbuli. A place has been made in the country's narrative for both...

Social capital and the global economy.
September 1, 1995... A REDRAWN MAP OF THE WORLD CONVENTIONAL MAPS of the global economy divide the major players into three groups: the United States and its partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union (EU), and East Asia, led by Japan...

Does the CIA still have a role?
September 1, 1995... FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS WITH THE breakup of the Soviet Union, the CIA began to search for new roles to justify its existence--and the money it requires, which totaled $3.1 billion in its request to Congress late last year.(1) That spring, the...

Ichiro Ozawa: reformer at bay. (Japanese politician)
September 1, 1995... THE LESSON OF CARTHAGE WHEN ICHIRO Ozawa, a longtime Diet member and power broker, published Blueprint for a New Japan two years ago, his main goal was to reverse the country's reluctance to play a larger role in world affairs. Ozawa, at that...

Ecological roulette: damming the Yangtze. (Three Gorges Dam)
September 1, 1995... THE RISKS OF THE THREE GORGES DAM IF ALL goes according to plan, the People's Republic of China by the year 2009 will have completed the biggest, most expensive, and perhaps most hazardous hydroelectric dam ever attempted. The megadam is under...

Governing China: From Revolution through Reform.
September 1, 1995... The world is relearning a basic lesson about China: how it fits into international society depends on its internal politics. The ease of relations with China from 1976 to 1989 reflected the end of the Cultural Revolution and a great reduction in...

In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents.
September 1, 1995... A reader of Anatoly Dobrynin's important memoir is likely to be struck by a sense of having seen all this somewhere before. Colored throughout by nostalgia for a great but vanished empire, it is written in a conversational...

Media and Revolution: Comparative Perspectives.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The essays in this book wrestle with the role of the media in promoting revolution, from the seventeenth-century Puritan revolution in England through the American, French, and Bolshevik revolutions and the anticommunist upheavals in China and...

Beyond Westphalia: State Sovereignty and International Intervention.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The latest of a long series of recent books on the obsolescence of the nation-state, this conference volume considers whether anything like an international community, capable of intervention against states violating common international norms,...

Decline of the Nation-State.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Written in 1986 by a Spanish academic before the explosion of new nationalisms in the former communist world, this book argues that nationalist movements in Europe are profoundly retrograde because they have been associated historically with a...

Ethics and International Affairs: A Reader.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This reader contains selected essays from the journal Ethics and International Affairs, which for the last eight years has published some of the best writing on moral questions in global politics. Beginning with Robert Myers on Hans Morganthau's...

Edmund Burke and International Relations.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This is a thoughtful and illuminating analysis of the eighteenth century's foremost conservative thinker on international politics. Burke held a complex (some would argue contradictory) view of how the international system ought to work: on the...

The United Nations and Civil Wars.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... These two books analyze U.N. interventions in civil wars of member states, spurred by recent crises in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and elsewhere. The volume edited by Weiss focuses on the multifunctional character of recent peacekeeping...

International Organizations and Civil Wars.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... These two books analyze U.N. interventions in civil wars of member states, spurred by recent crises in Somalia, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, and elsewhere. The volume edited by Weiss focuses on the multifunctional character of recent peacekeeping...

The Charter of the United Nations: A Commentary.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This formidable tome is a detailed, article-by-article commentary on the U.N. Charter by a group of German, Austrian, and Swiss legal experts. It provides extensive background on the legislative history, interpretation, and application of the...

An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This book, by a professor of Christian ethics, starts from the unexceptional premise that the world would be a better place if nations and other political actors would practice greater forgiveness toward enemies, in light of the way that memories...

Opening America's Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The author, a historian who served on the International Trade Commission (ITC) during the 1980s, is well placed to write a history of American trade policy, and this book contains much interesting, even fascinating, material. It usefully corrects...

After the Gold Rush: The Trouble with Affluence - 'Consumer Capitalism' and the Way Forward.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Why is so much malaise associated with such general affluence? That is the topic of Lansley's book, written in Britain and drawing largely on British and European experience. The book's thesis is that while rapidly moving international events...

International Labour Standards and Economic Interdependence.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The U.N.-affiliated International Labour Organization celebrated its 75th anniversary last year. This celebratory symposium offers a useful introduction to a wide range of views and perspectives on international labor standards. These standards...

The Workers of Nations: Industrial Relations in a Global Economy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Modes of labor organization, the practices of collective bargaining, and legislation regarding the workplace and fringe benefits vary substantially across the rich industrialized democracies. Yet all are increasingly subject to the influences of...

The Oxford Companion to World War II.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Why another hefty one-volume compendium on World War II? This massive tome has some of the usual justifications, including an exceptionally distinguished list of contributors, among them British scholars Norman Davies, John Gooch, and Richard...

Defense Conversion.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This is a rather broader book than its title implies. Gansler, an experienced and well-regarded student of the defense industrial base, argues that civil-military integration--relying on a single industrial base--requires substantial changes in...

Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The author, a historian at Pennsylvania State University, enters the debate about the decision to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A vigorous defender of the traditional interpretation, namely, that the use of the bomb was inevitable...

Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the Gulf War by the Joint Forces Commander.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This memoir, ghostwritten in part by a journalist with experience in the region, is a useful contribution to the literature on the GulfWar. Khaled, eldest son of the Saudi defense minister, at age 42 was promoted from his position as commander of...

Savage Peace: Americans at War in the 1990s.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Lieutenant Colonel Bolger, a rising Army officer with a practiced pen (he has written three books, including one piece of fiction), has produced a popular survey of America's small wars in the 1990s. The book begins with a sniper ruminating on a...

Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Having a "CI," or counterintelligence, mentality was for quite some time in the intelligence community regarded as a professional and indeed personal defect. As the Aldrich Ames case tragically revealed, however, that was an error of monumental...

Dirty Tricks or Trump Cards: U.S. Counterintelligence and Covert Action.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Having a "CI," or counterintelligence, mentality was for quite some time in the intelligence community regarded as a professional and indeed personal defect. As the Aldrich Ames case tragically revealed, however, that was an error of monumental...

The U.N. Inspections in Iraq: Lessons for On-Site Verification.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The author, a former government official and senior fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, lays out clearly the lessons of the Iraq inspection effort. She covers a wide range of problems, from the mundane (the physical burdens of...

U.S. Intelligence at the Crossroads: An Agenda for Reform.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This volume, edited by three veteran intelligence scholars, is considerably better than the run-of-the-mill collection of articles. It reflects the labors of the Working Group on Intelligence Reform, a floating seminar run by the three editors...

China's Air Force Enters the 21st Century.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... One in a series of RAND monographs on air power around the world, this dense but informative volume sheds light not only on the People's Liberation Army Air Force, but also on the Chinese military more broadly. The authors describe an air force...

After the Crusade: American Foreign Policy for the Post-Superpower Age.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The declared enemy of these two former diplomats from Britain (Clarke) and New Zealand (Clad) is a U.S. foreign policy elite with an interventionist agenda worlds apart from a more skeptical public; their aspiration is "to empower our readers in...

Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Summer Welles.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This work probes the relationship among three men who played the principal role in American foreign policy before and during the Second World War. Its centerpiece is the feud that developed between Welles, "the most important undersecretary of...

Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This careful scholarly biography gives a convincing psychological profile of a highly controversial figure--one whom contemporaries often regarded as inexplicable. Wallace, whose vision of "One World" he believed was Franklin Roosevelt's own, was...

Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... An affectionate and amusing biography, largely focused on the 1950s, of one of the premier columnists of his day. A militant cold warrior perennially sounding the tocsin against the worldwide Kremlin conspiracy, Alsop--along with his younger...

The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The author, a professor at Boston University, assesses the outlook and effectiveness of U.S. diplomats in Russia, from the beginnings of relations in the late eighteenth century to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mayers considers the envoys up...

For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... A prolific British historian (the joint author of a well-regarded history of the KGB) provides a richly detailed account of the uses to which American presidents have put U.S. intelligence agencies. Most of the work deals with the Cold War period...

Argentina's Lost Patrol: Armed Struggle, 1969-1979.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Moyano, an assistant professor in the Department of National Security Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, has produced an outstanding diagnosis of actions and psychology in the violent and bloody guerrilla struggle in 1970s...

With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The late Warren Dean, who was professor of Brazilian history at New York University, has left his many admirers a formidable posthumous testimony to his skills and passionate concern for Brazilians and their environment. A pioneer in...

Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... A grim and compelling account of the 1988 kidnapping of Texas-born oilman and longtime Colombia resident Jake Gambini by Marxist guerrillas, written by Herbert "Tico" Braun, Gambini's Colombian brother-in-law and a history professor at the...

Radicals, Reformers, and Reactionaries: The Prisoner's Dilemma and the Collapse of Democracy in Latin America.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... While written with an academic audience in mind, this book is an important addition to the debate over the causes of democratic collapse in Latin America. Cohen, a professor of political science at New York University, rejects the deterministic...

The Big Five: Arms Control Decision-Making in the Soviet Union.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... From 1969 to 1991, if U.S. policymakers could have been flies on the wall, nowhere would they rather have been than the rooms in which their Soviet adversaries were deciding their next steps in strategic arms negotiations. General Detinov, a...

Zhirinovsky: An Insider's Account of Yeltsin's Chief Rival and "Bespredel" - the New Russian Roulette.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Before becoming the director of publications at the United Nations, Kartsev was from 1982 to 1989 the head of Mir, the largest Soviet foreign-language publishing company dealing in scientific and technical literature. A year into his tenure, he...

Stalin's Letters to Molotov.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Slowly and much less completely than Russia's new leaders promised, the Russian archives are revealing their Soviet secrets. This is the second in a planned series of 18 volumes to be published by Yale University Press bringing key documents to...

A History of Slovakia: The Struggle for Survival.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Kirschbaum traces the history of the Slovak people back to the sixth century and of their land to ancient times, bringing to bear a great deal of work done by Slovak historians, most of it until now unavailable in English. It is fitting,...

Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian Revolution.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Misleadingly subtitled, this book is only fleetingly about organized political opposition in post-independence Russia. Fish focuses instead on the varied and motley groupings that emerged under Gorbachev and sought to undo the existing system,...

Battling for Peace: A Memoir.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Memoirs by politicians, especially those still in office, are bound to be self-serving. But Israel's foreign minister has done more here than settle old scores and enhance his reputation. In dealing with his early career, Peres describes his role...

Bitter Harvest: Ideology and Politics in the Arab World.
September 1, 1995... At a time when Islamic movements seem to set the tone for much of the political discourse in the Arab world, it is worth being reminded that many other ideologies have competed with political Islam in recent years. This finely crafted work is...

The Mystery of Arafat.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... If you have spent long hours wondering why Yasir Arafat always seems to have a three-day growth of beard, why he never wears a tie, why he married so late in life, why he used to spend most of his time on airplanes, or where he was born, this...

Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women's Resistance.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... In increasing numbers, feminists are turning their attention to the Middle East. New interpretations of history are available, the consequences of political and economic developments for women are highlighted, and the voices of women from the...

The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... There is a cottage industry forming to predict the impending fall of the House of Saud. Some of the newsletters that take this line are bought off by the Saudi regime after a few issues. Others are more reputable, calling attention to real...

Violence and Diplomacy in Lebanon: The Troubled Years, 1982-1988.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Lebanon's former foreign minister (1982-84) and adviser to its president (1984-88) has written a straightforward, revealing memoir of this troubled period in Lebanon's recent history. He resists the temptation to blame all of Lebanon's ills on...

The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... With the end of the Cold War, interest in the heroic freedom fighters of Afghanistan has been replaced by either indifference or caricatures of fanatical Afghans turning their lust for violence against one another. Rubin has written a superb book...

Revolutionary Horizons: Regional Foreign Policy in Post-Khomeini Iran.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... At a time when Americans are being told that Iran is an outlaw state, it is worth noting the conclusions of a careful study of recent Iranian foreign policy. This book certainly does not try to whitewash Iran's image. But the author does argue...

A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the West.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The clash of civilizations thesis is tackled head-on in this book and found wanting. Or is it? The authors begin with a sensible criticism of those who overgeneralize by speaking of "Islam" and "the West," as if these categories were especially...

Civil Society in the Middle East, vol. 1.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... What is it about the Middle East that makes political systems there resistant to democratization? By now, a vast literature on this topic has developed, much of it emphasizing the role of Islam as an impediment to political liberalization....

U.S. Policy on Palestine: From Wilson to Clinton.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Palestinians and their supporters in the United States have long lamented the pro-Israel tilt in American foreign policy. In this volume, analysts look at the reasons for American hostility to the concept of Palestinian self-determination. Each...

China: Domestic Change and Foreign Policy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This RAND report is the most detailed and sophisticated analysis yet of the complex internal factors influencing Chinese foreign policy and the differing foreign policy views of the Chinese elite. The author sees three different tendencies in...

China and the American Dream: A Moral Inquiry.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Unlike most books by American China specialists about the People's Republic of China, this one focuses not on history, politics, or economics but on the intriguing conflict between Chinese and American dreams--the cultural myths that shape the...

Korea Approaches Reunification.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Carefully assembling a variety of economic and demographic data, this volume contrasts South and North Korean economic and social development and advances several hypotheses about the size of North Korea's military forces and other aspects of...

Pacific Cooperation: Building Economic and Security Regimes in the Asia-Pacific Region.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This is a collection of essays by prominent specialists about the prospects for regional economic and security cooperation in the Pacific. The conclusions vary, but two of the liveliest essays are pessimistic. The British scholar Barry Buzan...

North Korea and the Bomb: A Case Study in Nonproliferation.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... North Korea's nuclear ambitions have posed one of the most acute and complex foreign policy dilemmas for the Clinton administration and the nuclear nonproliferation regime. They are also an issue on which extreme differences remain. The author...

The Somali Challenge: From Catastrophe to Renewal?(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... When Somali dictator Siad Barre was driven from power by armed rebels in January 1991, he left behind a state and society in anarchic collapse. With urban areas of the country's north already despoiled by civil war, the southern centers fell prey...

The Cost of Dictatorship: The Somali Experience.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... When Somali dictator Siad Barre was driven from power by armed rebels in January 1991, he left behind a state and society in anarchic collapse. With urban areas of the country's north already despolied by civil war, the southern centers fell prey...

The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... The assertion that Africa's authoritarian leaders learned their politics at the feet of their former colonial rulers is not new. But this erudite study by a senior American Africanist probes the colonial state in new depth to decipher the...

Dividing the Commons: Politics, Policy, and Culture in Botswana.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... Botswana stands out among African countries for its stable democracy and steady economic growth based on sound management of mineral resources. The majority of its people, however, derive their livelihoods not from mining but from livestock, the...

The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1995... This book is an exciting attempt to bring methods and concepts from contemporary anthropology to bear on African politics. Discarding the simplistic images of Kenya as an African success story that became a disaster under the autocratic...

Positioned for the 21st century: the Republic of China as a regional operations center. (includes related article)(Special Advertising Section: Republic of China on Taiwan in the global community)
September 1, 1995... A small island has proved to be one of the great economic success stories of the late 20th century. And the Republic of China (R.O.C.) on Taiwan will likely play a bigger role on the global stage as it moves into the 21st century, especially if...

R.O.C. on Taiwan: China's first democracy.(Special Advertising Section: Republic of China on Taiwan in the global community)
September 1, 1995... Many observers view with optimism the democratization of Russia and the nations of Eastern Europe and the reemergence of political pluralism in Latin America. Some even suggest that the economic "opening" of Communist China might foster the...