CIAO DATE: 9/01

From CIAO's Board: Commentary on the Terrorist Attacks against the United States

Colleagues:

Let me press the issue, perhaps unfairly enlisting Jack’s support in a war he doesn’t want to fight. Steve begins his piece by saying that to win the war against terrorism we need to “target the right enemy and enlist the right allies” and later goes on to say that those right allies are Russia and the states of the Middle East. Steve is particularly straightforward in discussing the importance of changing our stance toward the Middle East conflict and becoming more even-handed, which I strongly applaud. But I still don't believe that the alliance model gets to the heart of the dilemma, which resides in the extraordinary difficulty we face in the advanced industrial states, in “friendly” (let alone unfriendly) authoritarian regimes and in failed states in undertaking the actions required to root out such networks. It is not clear to me how establishing a better relationship with Russia, or even changing our posture towards Israel, will really address those questions. Is there any position that the United States might have plausibly taken with respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would have avoided this disaster? My answer to that question is “no.”

My implicit critique of Bob Keohane is even more unfair because he does not elaborate exactly what he sees the UN doing, what “working through the UN” means in practice. I do believe that the unremarked security council resolution of September 12 does play some political role for states like Pakistan, and the well-known functions of monitoring compliance and offering technical assistance and sidepayments may come into play; we need to offer something in return for the demands that we are making. But I honestly don’t see the role of international organizations as currently configured to be central to this fight, unless perhaps we are talking about new forms of police cooperation which raise their own set of problems.

I suppose I can be made content with the idea that all of these approaches are in the end complementary: that international organizations and alliances are elements of a strategy that also includes the types of tough foreign policy decisions that Jack raises. But analytic choices do color how we go about things, and as a point of sociology of knowledge it is interesting that we all reach for our own personal and familiar tool kits. But do they fit the problem at hand? As Miles Kahler has suggested to me in another communication, the problem may be less akin to forming a grand alliance then it is is to a conditionality game in which we are trying to convince governments to undertake actions which carry extraordinary risks, even as we face difficulties in taking some of those actions ourselves.

Commentary

Stephen M. Walt
Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Bruce Jentleson
Professor of Public Policy, Duke University
Director, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy

Response by Etel Solingen
Professor of Political Science
University of California, Irvine

Response by Stephan Haggard
Professor, Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies
University of California, San Diego