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COPYRIGHT 2001 JAI Press, Inc.
The administration of George W. Bush, which one might term Bush II in view of the fact that many of the new president's foreign and defense advisers are veterans of his father's administration, inherits a world of challenges any one of which may spawn a crisis at a spur of the moment. Thus, however daunting the tasks of leadership after a contested election, and of building consensus in a divided Congress, the president and his team have no choice but to try to fashion a strong foreign and defense policy posture. Perhaps they will have sounded the trumpet by the time this issue appears. But will they have answered for us the two yawning questions of the post-Cold War era? First, given the multitude of existing or potential threats to American security, interests, and values around the globe, what standards should govern the commitment of force and expenditure of diplomatic capital overseas? Secondly, how much and what sort of military power will be required to sustain U.S. commitments at a politically accepta ble level of risk? There will be a strong temptation to continue "kicking the can" down the street, in the damning metaphor coined by Don and Fred Kagan (see below). But the neighborhood is still tough, and the more alleys past which Uncle Sam shambles, the more likely that muggers, gangs, or vandals will burst forth from the shadows. When Americans call, in polls and op-eds, for bipartisanship, they are presumably expressing impatience with scandals, impeachments, special prosecutors, and elections decided in courtrooms, and a hunger for action on such matters as education and social security. But nowhere will bipartisanship be more desperately needed than in foreign affairs.
In These Pages
To the Clinton administration, the slogan "it's the economy, stupid" applied as much to foreign policy as domestic. To be sure, the United States intervened (albeit usually late and always half-heartedly) in numerous trouble spots on four continents in the names of peacemaking, state building, crisis management, human rights, or nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton's rhetoric suggested that the futures of Africa, Latin America, the Balkans, the Middle East, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, not to mention China and Russia, would be shaped above all by the irresistible forces of globalization, the Internet, and the new economy. Critics of this Washington Consensus, as it was dubbed, insisted on the other hand that the influence of revolutionary technologies and economic competition could not be decisive in the absence of secure regional and global balances of power. Hence, the debates of the 1990s often reduced to a clash between those who defined security in terms of the military and di plomatic equations that make economic and social progress possible, and those who defined security in terms of the economic and social progress that make military calculations unnecessary. And that means we Americans are still, in a sense, fighting the old Cold War fight: is military deterrence (i.e., containment) critical to the defeat of the bad guys, or will economic assistance and social uplift (i.e., global meliorism) suffice to do the job by winning "hearts and minds"?
The articles in these pages demonstrate the complexity of the debate. Rachel Bronson, for instance, willingly stipulates the now widely accepted conclusion that "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran has failed. But rather than calling on Washington to deploy still more firepower to the Persian Gulf, she advocates a new, long-range approach based on economic development (beyond petroleum), political reform, and regional security cooperation among the nations and sheikdoms of the Gulf. In a similar vein, Arthur Cyr examines the spate of recent books on globalization and gives an optimistic but realistic assessment of the ability of free flows of capital, technology, goods, and people to transcend power-political rivalries. James Kurth deploys his incisive logic to the question of religion's role in ethnic conflicts. And Felix Chang, our shrewd and meticulous observer of Chinese affairs, examines Beijing's intensive, cooperative, and heretofore peaceful campaign to locate at home and abroad the oil and natural ga s needed to sustain China's helter-skelter economic modernization. A China that depends on overseas energy supplies and Western firms to develop its own resources has a powerful disincentive to wage war.
On the military side of the ledger, Alvin Z. Rubinstein opens the fat sheaf of transcripts produced by his "not for attribution," top-level interviews with Israeli defense officials and analysts, and reveals their thoughts about long-range security in the Middle East. Does Israel dare to trade land for promises of peace--either because the new threats mounted by missiles and terrorism render buffer...
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