CIAO DATE: 10/2008
Volume: 87, Issue: 1
January/February 2008
Long Time Coming: The Prospects for Democracy in China (PDF)
John L. Thornton
Summary: Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.
JOHN L. THORNTON is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution.
The Rise of China and the Future of the West: Can the Liberal System Survive? (PDF)
G. John Ikenberry
Summary: China's rise will inevitably bring the United States' unipolar moment to an end. But that does not necessarily mean a violent power struggle or the overthrow of the Western system. The U.S.-led international order can remain dominant even while integrating a more powerful China -- but only if Washington sets about strengthening that liberal order now.
G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the author of After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars.
China's New Dictatorship Diplomacy: Is Beijing Parting With Pariahs? (PDF)
Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, Andrew Small
Summary: Beijing has recently stepped back from its unconditional support for pariah states, such as Burma, North Korea, and Sudan. This means China may now be more likely to help the West manage the problems such states pose -- but only up to a point, because at heart China still favors nonintervention as a general policy.
STEPHANIE KLEINE-AHLBRANDT was International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2006-7. ANDREW SMALL is a Program Associate at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Reconsidering Revaluation: The Wrong Approach to the U.S.-Chinese Trade Imbalance (PDF)
David D. Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale
Summary: Politicians in Washington are clamoring for currency revaluation in China to reverse China's trade surplus with the United States. But the trade imbalance is not the threat they make it out to be, and a stronger yuan is not the solution. Everybody should focus instead on properly integrating China into the global economy.
DAVID D. HALE is an economist and Chair of Hale Advisers LLC. LYRIC HUGHES HALE is Founding Publisher of www.chinaonline.com.
The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin's Crackdown Holds Russia Back (PDF)
Michael McFaul, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss
Summary: A growing conventional wisdom holds that Vladimir Putin's attack on democracy has brought Russia stability and prosperity -- providing a new model of successful market authoritarianism. But the correlation between autocracy and economic growth is spurious. Autocracy's effects in Russia have in fact been negative. Whatever the gains under Putin, they would have been greater under a democratic regime.
MICHAEL MCFAUL is a Hoover Fellow, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. KATHRYN STONER-WEISS is Associate Director for Research and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University
The Costs of Containing Iran: Washington's Misguided New Middle East Policy (PDF)
Vali Nasr, Ray Takeyh
Summary: The Bush administration wants to contain Iran by rallying the support of Sunni Arab states and now sees Iran's containment as the heart of its Middle East policy: a way to stabilize Iraq, declaw Hezbollah, and restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But the strategy is unsound and impractical, and it will probably further destabilize an already volatile region.
Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future." Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."
Europe's Eastern Promise: Rethinking NATO and EU Enlargement (PDF)
Ronald D. Asmus
Summary: After the Cold War, NATO and the EU opened their doors to central and eastern Europe, making the continent safer and freer than ever before. Today, NATO and the EU must articulate a new rationale for enlarging still further, once again extending democracy and prosperity to the East, this time in the face of a more powerful and defiant Russia.
RONALD D. ASMUS is Executive Director of the Transatlantic Center at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in Brussels. From 1997 to 2000, he served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs.
Global Corporate Citizenship: Working With Governments and Civil Society (PDF)
Klaus Schwab
Summary: Global corporate citizenship means that companies must not only be engaged with stakeholders but be stakeholders themselves alongside governments and civil society. Since companies depend on global development, which in turn relies on stability and increased prosperity, it is in their direct interest to help improve the state of the world.
KLAUS SCHWAB is Executive Chair of the World Economic Forum.
Public Footprints in Private Markets: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the World Economy (PDF)
Robert M. Kimmitt
Summary: The massive growth of sovereign wealth funds -- pools of capital controlled by governments and invested in private markets abroad -- should not cause alarm. But it does raise legitimate questions for the United States, pointing to the need for new policy principles for both the funds and the countries in which they invest.
ROBERT M. KIMMITT is Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury
Stopping Nuclear Terrorism: The Dangerous Allure of a Perfect Defense (PDF)
Michael Levi
Summary: Nuclear terrorism poses a grave threat to global security, but seeking silver bullets to counter it does not make sense. Instead of pursuing a perfect defense, U.S. policymakers should create an integrated defensive system that takes advantage of the terrorists' weaknesses and disrupts their plots at every stage, thereby chipping away at their overall chances of success.
MICHAEL LEVI is Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of On Nuclear Terrorism.
A New Realism: A Realistic and Principled Foreign Policy (PDF)
Bill Richardson
Summary: The United States needs a foreign policy that is based on reality and is loyal to American values. The next U.S. president needs to send a clear signal to the world that America has turned the corner and will once again be a leader rather than a unilateralist loner. Getting out of Iraq and restoring our reputation are necessary first steps toward a new strategy of U.S. global engagement and leadership.
BILL RICHARDSON, Governor of New Mexico, is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
America's Priorities in the War on Terror: Islamists, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan (PDF)
Michael D. Huckabee
Summary: The Bush administration's arrogant bunker mentality has been counterproductive at home and abroad. American foreign policy needs to change its tone and attitude, open up, and reach out. In particular, it should focus on eliminating Islamist terrorists, stabilizing Iraq, containing Iran, and toughening its stance with Pakistan.
MICHAEL D. HUCKABEE, former Governor of Arkansas, is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Review: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: The Making of the Modern World (PDF)
Owen Harries
Summary: Walter Russell Mead rightly argues that the United Kingdom and the United States made the modern world. But his call for Washington to pursue both a maritime grand strategy and Niebuhrian realism will not fly.
OWEN HARRIES is a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, in Sydney, and Editor Emeritus of The National Interest.
To the Editor: Securing Iraq (PDF)
Bing West
To the Editor:
In "COIN of the Realm" (November/December 2007), Colin Kahl divided counterinsurgency (COIN) theory into two opposing schools of thought: "hearts and minds" and "coercion." Kahl cited me as an advocate of "coercion," quoting my observation about "a radical religion whose adherents are not susceptible to having their hearts and minds won over."
To the Editor: Defense Dollars (PDF)
Miriam Pemberton
To the Editor:
Richard Betts ("A Disciplined Defense," November/December 2007) laments that most "organizations associated with mainstream policy thinking," instead of arguing for military budget rationality, have been cowed into silence. He refers to recent proposals by my own organization -- the Institute for Policy Studies, which has been known over the years for its far-reaching proposals to scale back the military budget -- that focus on a set of cuts amounting to only about $56 billion, or 11 percent of the total. Betts is right that this $56 billion is only the low-hanging fruit.
To the Editor: Israel Lobby and its Discontents (PDF)
R. T. Curran
To the Editor:
In "Jerusalem Syndrome" (November/December 2007), Walter Russell Mead is disappointed in John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I am disappointed in Walter Russell Mead. The U.S. relationship with Israel is difficult and complex. I was directly involved in Middle East matters at the State Department and the White House in the 1970s and early 1980s and have worked in key Middle Eastern capitals, including Amman, Cairo, and Jerusalem.
To the Editor: Armenia, Armenia (PDF)
Ara Chutjian
To the Editor:
In "The Old Turks' Revolt" (November/December 2007), Ömer Taspinar states, "Unlike the Ottoman elites, the Kemalists rejected multiethnic and multinational cosmopolitanism and banned Armenians, Greeks, and Jews from holding government jobs." On the night of April 24, 1915, the Ottoman police rounded up over 200 Armenian intellectuals, poets, politicians, writers, journalists, and translators from their homes in Istanbul; sent them to remote holding places; and murdered them. This began the systematic genocide of approximately 1.5 million Armenians, with another 2-2.5 million uprooted from their millennia-old homeland in central and eastern Turkey.
To the Editor:Asian Blunders (PDF)
Leon V. Sigal
To the Editor:
Defending the indefensible is an occupational hazard for even thoughtful former officials in Washington these days, but Victor Cha's "Winning Asia" (November/December 2007) goes too far. Instead of lauding President George W. Bush's admirable turnaround on North Korea last summer, he would have readers believe that the administration's North Korea policy was right all along.
Many of Cha's claims are at war with the facts. Even worse, they obscure the main lesson that Washington has yet to absorb from the experience: that a policy of pure pressure is more likely to provoke nuclear arming than prevent proliferation.
Kenya's Great Rift (PDF)
Joel D. Barkan
Summary: Barkan's update to his January/February 2004 essay "Kenya After Moi."
Joel D. Barkan is Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Iowa.