ORBIS articles from March 2000

ORBIS archives from March 2000

Editor's Column.
March 22, 2000... By the time this issue appears in late March 2000 the major parties' nominees for the presidency will probably be known. It's no fun knowing who will play in the World Series before spring training is even over, and I predict the American...

The Case for National Missile Defense.
March 22, 2000... After spending more than $70 billion over three decades on more or less urgent research and development, the United States appears finally to be moving toward the deployment of a ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. It will consist of...

Asymmetrical Adversaries.
March 22, 2000... Attrition is generally considered to be "the American way of war," inasmuch as the United States has been able to bring to bear overwhelming firepower thanks to its industrial and technological superiority. But what American-style warfare...

Rethinking Bio-Chemical Dangers.
March 22, 2000... Well before the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas subway attack of 1995, the Defense Department was forced to consider the implications of a biological weapons attack directed against the Pentagon. It was not a real threat, but rather a scenario posed...

Bad Medicine for Biological Terror.
March 22, 2000... In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on July 26, 1999, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen offered the most alarming depiction yet of America's vulnerability in what he called the "grave New World" of biological terrorism. In his...

The Interplay of Myths and Realities.
March 22, 2000... A nation is a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbors." [1] Karl Deutsch's harsh definition is being repeated frequently in the literature of ethnic conflict, becoming...

The Tactics of Third-Party Intervention.
March 22, 2000... There is no best third-party approach to conflict resolution, because the function of third parties is to compensate for the deficiencies of the disputants themselves. Hence, they must deploy as many cures as there are maladies. But that is...

Mediating Conflicts of Need, Greed, and Creed.
March 22, 2000... While civil wars are often seen as the product of unfulfilled basic needs, internal ethnic conflicts are commonly driven by private gain and collective beliefs as well. Such combinations of motives--mixing need, greed, and creed--pose...

Islamism in Sudan's Civil War.
March 22, 2000... During a recent public debate over the role of science and religion in history, Dr. Steven Weinberg remarked that, although religion had done some good in the world, "its influence on balance has been awful. With or without religion, you...

The Mentality of Messianic Assassins.
March 22, 2000... The Middle East has been a hotbed of ethnic conflict for centuries, but the level of violence there intensified in the twentieth century largely as a consequence of the struggle between Jews and Arabs for land and statehood in "holy"...

Imagining Wars Yet to Come.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age. By Paul Bracken. (New York: HarperCollins, 1999. 186 pp. $25.00.) The Rosy Future of War. By Philippe Delmas. (New York: The Free Press, 1995. 236 pp....

Trachtenberg on Europe's Cold War Chessboard.(Review)
March 22, 2000... A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963. By Marc Trachtenberg. (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1999. 448 pp. $60; $19.95, paper.) International relations are messy. States are more than neat...

Economists to the Rescue.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Towards a New International Financial Architecture: A Practical Post-Asia Agenda. By Barry Eichengreen. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1999. 200 pp. $18.95.) The Return of Depression Economics. By Paul Krugman....

Better Tools for Humanitarian Missions.
March 22, 2000... Submitted for your approval, a nightmarish scenario worthy of Rod Serling. Imagine, first, an unsettled international landscape, disturbed by a series of intense humanitarian emergencies in such economically disadvantaged regions as...