Foreign Affairs articles from September 1996

Foreign Affairs archives from September 1996

Saving the U.N.: a challenge to the next Secretary-General.
September 1, 1996... Not long ago, while accompanying U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright to an appearance in North Carolina, I was asked by a reporter whether the United States should withdraw from the United Nations. It was a valid question, to which I responded,...

Can Europe work? A plan to rescue the union.(European Union)
September 1, 1996... The future of Europe has become a very complicated and technical subject, although it really ought to be very simple. We need a strong and viable European Union. Without it, the world would be back where it was at the end of the First World...

How we lost Poland: heroes do not make good politicians.
September 1, 1996... Poland's election last year of Aleksander Kwasniewski, its former communist minister of youth affairs, as president does not augur a turn away from reform, but it does mark the end of the Solidarity era. After a brief intermission from 1989 to...

Postmodern terrorism.
September 1, 1996... NEW RULES FOR AN OLD GAME AS THE nineteenth century ended, it seemed no one was safe from terrorist attack. In 1894 an Italian anarchist assassinated French President Sadi Carnot. In 1897 anarchists fatally stabbed Empress Elizabeth of...

Chinese realpolitik. (foreign relations with China)
September 1, 1996... READING BEIJING'S WORLD-VIEW SCHOLARS AND policy analysts seem almost obsessed with China's continuing rise toward the status of a great power. Debates rage about whether there is a "China threat" to East Asia or the United States, how...

The Middle East: no more treaties.(informal diplomacy)
September 1, 1996... BETWEEN PEACE AND WAR IT HAS been a remarkable five years in the Middle East. Beginning in October 1991, when Arabs and Israelis first met face to face in Madrid, it went on to include two Israeli-PLO accords, an Israeli-Jordanian peace...

Why Yeltsin won.(Russian presidential elections)
September 1, 1996... A RUSSIAN TAMMANY HALL BORIS YELTSIN'S rise from the depths of unpopularity to win Russia's presidential election July 3 is one of the most surprising feats of recent political history. As of January, only six percent of voters planned...

The muslims of France.
September 1, 1996... ISLAM ABROAD FRANCE TODAY has roughly four or five million Muslim inhabitants, nearly a tenth of the population. Approximately half have French citizenship. More precise figures are not available, since the French state, being officially...

Will Canada unravel? (Quebec separatism)
September 1, 1996... PLOTTING A MAP IF QUEBEC SECEDES EVER-LOUDER rumblings north of the border should not be dismissed as another Canadian nonevent. Potentially, they portend much greater consequences for American interests than many nationalist breakups...

Euro fantasies. (European political, economic union; includes related article on the Maastricht Treaty)
September 1, 1996... FOR NEARLY 50 years, Europe has been on a course of ever-widening and -deepening integration. For just as long, Germany has been building a reputation as the global champion of hard money to which the deutsche mark stands as its monument. The...

Liberalism's Crooked Circle: Letters to Adam Michnik.
September 1, 1996... This unusual and inventive work by Ira Katznelson, professor of political science at Columbia University, is an insider's account, more testament than analysis, of "the impact of the wreckage of Soviet-style socialism on the left." Because the...

Preventing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy for Preventive Diplomacy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Since the debacles in Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, the buzzword in Washington has been "preventive diplomacy" as the key to future intervention. The idea that the international community should intervene in local conflicts at an early stage,...

Democracy's Place.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This collection of seven essays provides measured critiques of many of the existing theories of democracy, including the public choice school of Buchanan and Tullock, John Rawls' theory of distributive justice, and Locke's theory of the labor...

Radical Democracy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Since the collapse of communism, there has been a dearth of realistic ideas on how to redefine an agenda for the left. The present volume accepts the general conclusion that socialism's former heavy dependence on the state to bring about...

Beyond Progress: An Interpretive Odyssey to the Future.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... In an extended essay that is impressive in its scope and ambition, the author questions the value of economic and political progress. He notes that progressive views of history (or recently, declinist theories from the likes of Ezra F. Vogel...

The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This massive volume exhaustively analyzes the domestic, regional, and international dimensions of internal conflicts, seeking to go beyond the "ancient hatreds" interpretation of popular journalism to understand why such conflicts are...

Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This postmodernist collection of essays "constitute[s] a literary intervention in the process by which all those discourses and systems of intelligibility that fail to contest dominant territorialities have daily helped to reproduce the...

The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Will Shape Tomorrow's World.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This is a book with a majestic sweep. It addresses the fate of capitalism as both a set of values and a framework for organizing the economy and society amid what Thurow calls the moving tectonic plates of the contemporary world: the shift in...

Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Freedom of international trade has been favored by most economists since Adam Smith made a powerful case for it 220 years ago. Since then, free trade doctrine has come under sustained intellectual assault by politicians, businessmen, labor...

World Economic Primacy: 1500-1900.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... In 1990 the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies inaugurated a program on the "vitality of nations," a term that is vague but pregnant with meaning. A product of that effort, this book focuses on the economic dimension...

Freer Markets, More Rules: Regulatory Reform in Advanced Industrial Countries.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... The empirical core of this well-argued book is regulatory reform of telecommunications and finance in Britain and Japan during the past two decades, along with brief discussions of France, Germany, and the United States. The author suggests...

Snow Job? The War Against International Cocaine Trafficking.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This book is a thorough and informative RAND corporation study of the international aspects of the U.S. war on drugs, especially the efforts to eradicate coca production in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru and to interdict cocaine shipped mainly...

Ben-Gurion's Spy: The Story of the Political Scandal That Shaped Modern Israel.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... The author, who is something less than halfway through a multivolume biography of Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, has taken a break from that mammoth effort to write this volume. It describes the Lavon affair, a disastrous...

The New Military in Russia: Ten Myths That Shape the Image.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A dense book packed with footnotes and tables, in which the author takes a dark view of the Russian military's present and future. Despite its claims to the contrary, the military engages in politics, resists reform, seeks to preserve the...

Secret and Sanctioned: Covert Operations and the American Presidency.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This is really two books, the first an account based largely on secondary sources and published papers of covert action by American presidents from Washington through Lincoln, the second a polemic against congressional micromanagement (or,...

Intentions and Capabilities: Estimates on Soviet Strategic Forces, 1950-1983.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This compendium of documents opens a view into a subject that may seem increasingly arcane to students of international relations: assessments of Soviet nuclear (misnamed "strategic") forces by the American intelligence community. This...

New World Vistas: Air and Space Power for the 21st Century.
September 1, 1996... As World War II drew to a close, the chief of the Army Air Forces turned to the director of Cal Tech's aeronautical laboratory, Theodore von Karman, to head a scientific advisory group whose first mission would be to peer 20 years into the...

Despatch on War Operations: 23rd February 1942 to 8th May 1945.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris orchestrated the Royal Air Force's campaign against Germany during World War II. Hard-bitten, ruthless, and contemptuous of any strategy save that of leveling German cities, he maintained the confidence...

Winning the Peace: America and World Order in the New Era.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This excellent study seeks to articulate the policies of cooperative security and economic multilateralism necessary in America's "third attempt" at establishing world order in the twentieth century. "Remembering the future," Ruggie argues...

Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3d ed.
September 1, 1996... The earlier editions of this classic on so-called low-intensity conflict appeared around the turn of the century. Their author was a British soldier-scholar with considerable personal experience and a wide-ranging intellect. In the...

America Adrift: A Strategic Assessment.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This muscular pamphlet is a bid to reassert the contours of a conservative internationalism against resurgent isolationists among the Republicans and "assertive multilateralists" among the Democrats. It is of interest not only for its...

Fighting with Allies: America and England at Peace and War.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This engaging narrative of Anglo-American relations begins with a British naval officer sitting down to dinner at a soon-to-be-torched White House in 1814, but it mostly focuses on the years since the Second World War. Renwick, who served as...

Reversing Course: Carter's Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and the Failure of Reform.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A disappointing attempt to apply theories of foreign policy change to the experience of the Carter Administration. The author, a political scientist at Drake University, wants to explain why the Carter administration, which came into office...

America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations Since 1941.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This volume, most of which appeared previously in Diplomatic History, includes 14 essays by eminent authorities on the voluminous historiography of U.S. foreign policy since 1941. The emphasis is on the literature produced in the last 15...

The United States and the Integration of Europe: Legacies of the Postwar Era.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A useful but uneven collection of papers concerned with the relationship between American policy and European integration from 1945 to 1960. The editors' previous collection on a closely related subject (NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic...

De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... After having written a fine book about Raymond Aron as a political scientist and edited some of Aron's best essays, Mahoney has turned to the statesman who provoked in Aron an inseparable mixture of admiration and exasperation: Charles de...

The Propaganda Warriors: America's Crusade Against Nazi Germany.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This study of American efforts to combat Nazi propaganda with a propaganda campaign that could match it focuses on the difficulties and rivalries that plagued the agencies that were put in charge (after a number of private initiatives that...

Italian Foreign Policy: The Statecraft of the Founders.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Few people other than scholars of European diplomatic history are likely to read this enormous volume, published in Italy in 1951, nine years before the death of its author, one of Italy's greatest historians. And yet it is a most impressive...

Integrating Gender: Women, Law, and Politics in the European Union.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This fascinating study of "the development of the European Union's policy on women's rights from its origins in Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome on equal pay, through its current spread of policy initiatives, legislative provisions and...

Europe and America: A Return to History.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A versatile American political scientist and a German expert on the history and politics of the Cold War have written two (respectively short and long) essays that try to discern the future of transatlantic relations in light of past patterns...

Bordering on Chaos: Guerrillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians, and Mexico's Road to Prosperity.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A fast-paced, engrossing narrative, in fine journalistic style, of the inside story of the crisis in Mexico. As is to be expected from Pulitzer Prize winner Andres Oppenheimer, senior correspondent for The Miami Herald, there is much new...

A New Time for Mexico.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Carlos Fuentes has a great ability to quickly set in historical and cultural context the political and economic transition under way in Mexico. But Mexico is a very complex country, as Fuentes always reminds us, and he warns against overly...

The New Economic Model in Latin America and Its Impact on Income Distribution and Poverty.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... How has the new economic model of export-led growth in Latin America affected poverty and inequality? Victor Bulmer-Thomas, director of the Latin American Institute at the University of London, has assembled a solid team to answer this vital...

Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin America.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Leading Latin American academics, under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, look at the relationship between human rights issues and activist organizations and the institutions of the democratic regimes established in Latin...

Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... After a curious beginning in which the author, relying on a number of dubious sources and her own labored speculations, accuses Mikhail Gorbachev of having plotted the August 1991 putsch and Boris Yeltsin of knowingly overdrawing the danger of...

Enlarging NATO: The Russia Factor.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Of the great, even historic, decisions in recent international affairs, the decision to expand NATO is almost surely the one least debated or discussed in the broader American polity. Among a narrow range of foreign policy specialists,...

The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook the World, from Stalin to Yeltsin.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Over the years journalists have written up their accumulated thoughts after serving in Russia. It happened in Khrushchev's day, in Brezhnev's, with considerably more excitement in Gorbachev's, and now in steady numbers in Yeltsin's. But no...

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... The story will not be complete until Kremlin archives are opened and the deliberations of Soviet leaders examined. Still, Gaiduk, a young Russian historian, has pieced together as full a picture of Soviet policy during the Vietnam War as one...

A Democracy of Despots.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... By "democracy," Murray, a Canadian broadcast journalist, means the process through which Russia has been lurching since the Soviet Union's last days. By "despots" he means Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the men on whom they have relied, whom he...

Latvia in Transition.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... If some hold the notion that the Baltic States have escaped into a democratic, market-oriented future without the afflictions and trials plaguing other former Soviet republics, this book should disabuse them of it. As Dreifelds describes the...

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This lucid volume is almost certainly the capstone in the career of a distinguished historian of the Middle East. As such, it is more synthetic than path-breaking, broad in scope rather than sharp in focus. The major themes are of enduring...

Islam and the Myth of Confrontation: Religion and Politics in the Middle East.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This collection of previously published essays by one of Britain's most original thinkers on the Middle East covers a wide range of topics, from the Iranian revolution to human rights in Islam. One of the best chapters deals with Orientalism...

Israel's Changing Society: Population, Ethnicity, and Development.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Israeli society is a remarkable mix of peoples, including Jews from a host of different countries alongside native-born Jews and Arabs. This careful demographic account examines the makeup and development of Israeli society and the role of the...

Islam and Democracy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... By broadening the discussion of Islam and democracy beyond the Middle East to include Pakistan and Malaysia, the authors are able to point to Islamic movements that have been successfully incorporated into a pluralistic political process....

The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Perhaps it is only when a nation's survival is assured that its founding myths can be attacked. If so, then Israelis may well be on their way to becoming a "normal" nation. In this forceful book, an Israeli sociologist details the dismay he...

London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... The term "Middle East" was invented, and most of the now-familiar lines on the map of the region were drawn, during the first two decades of this century. This lively presentation of the origins of the modern Middle East focuses on the small...

The Iranians: Persia, Islam, and the Soul of a Nation.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Iran seems destined to perplex many Americans for years to come. It is routinely labeled a rogue state, the humiliation of the hostage crisis of 1979-80 has not faded from memory, and Iran is now seen by many as the major impediment to...

The Mediterranean Debt Crescent: Money and Power in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkey.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Political pundits typically focus on personalities, ideology, and infighting when they try to account for the unimpressive record of Middle East countries on economic development and political democratization. Here is a very different--and...

The Arab Middle East and the United States: Inter-Arab Rivalry and Superpower Diplomacy.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... An introduction to American Middle East policy since World War II, this straightforward history emphasizes the importance of inter-Arab divisions, the Cold War, and the role of oil, especially in the 1970s and again in 1990. A few issues are...

The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... The historiography of American involvement in the Middle East is coming of age. Archives are being opened, new understanding of old issues is now possible, and the politicization that colored some Cold War-era scholarship is fading. This...

Public Opinion in America and Japan: How We See Each Other and Ourselves.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Two public opinion specialists analyze a variety of U.S. and Japanese poll data to discern public perceptions of the nations' economic and military relationships, attitudes toward family, work, and leisure, and satisfaction with democracy....

Cultural Norms and National Security.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A well-known American social scientist ventures into a study of Japanese attitudes toward national security. He argues that the two main paradigms of American specialists in international relations--realism and liberalism--are insufficient...

China and Europe: 1949-1995.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... A short but meaty account of Europe's relations with China, which concludes that the prospects for these relations are excellent, despite a few potential "hiccups" on the horizon, such as weapons sales to Taiwan. Since 1992 the European Union...

Pacific Passage: The Study of American-East Asian Relations on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Like most conference volumes, this collection of essays by American and Asian historians has its high and low points. The high point is a brief epilogue by the distinguished Harvard historian Ernest May, who points out that over the past two...

Power and Prosperity: Economics and Security Linkages in Asia-Pacific.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Although some of these conference essays, drafted in 1992, may have been updated, in general they show the dangers of a four-year gap between writing and publication. For example, although several papers touch on PRC-Taiwan interaction, most...

Requiem for the Sudan: War, Drought, and Disaster Relief on the Nile.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... Until the world media discovered the Sudanese civil war in mid-1988 and apocalyptic scenes of violence and starvation began to force the State Department to acknowledge the human tragedy, Sudan's plight drew the attention of few Americans...

Managing Arms in Peace Processes: Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... In 1979, at the end of Zimbabwe's 15-year war of independence, Britain's Lord Carrington worked skillfully to impose a compromise settlement on the warring parties. Excluding the United Nations from the peace process, Whitehall then...

African Perspectives on Development: Controversies, Dilemmas, and Openings.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... These two works review Africa's lackluster record of economic and political development in recent decades and focus on the inability of standard theories adequately to explain, predict, or prevent Africa's current development crisis. Having...

Democracy and Development in Africa.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... These two works review Africa's lackluster record of economic and political development in recent decades and focus on the inability of standard theories adequately to explain, predict, or prevent Africa's current development crisis. Having...

African Exodus: Refugee Crisis, Human Rights and the 1969 OAU Convention.(Brief Article)
September 1, 1996... This report on a three-year study of conditions in seven countries presents the most succinct analysis so far of the legal protection of African refugees, as distinct from humanitarian relief or the root causes that generate refugee...

Misreading Reagan's legacy: a truly conservative foreign policy. (response to William Kristol and Robert Kagan's 'Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy,' in the July-August 1996 issue of 'Foreign Policy')
September 1, 1996... William Kristol and Robert Kagan's vision of a Pax Americana helps further the ever unsettled debate over America's role in the post-Cold War world ("Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," July/August 1996). But in attempting a conservative...