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Foreign Affairs
May/June 1999 (Volume 78, Number 3)
Comments
The anti-interventionist rules of the U.N. Charter have fallen out of sync with the modern concept of justice, so NATO is taking the law into its own hands.
North Korea is ailing. For the first time in 40 years, there is real hope for reconciliation with the South. Pyongyang should be engaged — but cautiously.
Poverty is growing rapidly in developing countries, heralding greater instability everywhere. The West must increase development aid and political investment.
Calls for capital controls are growing louder as battered emerging markets try to get back on their feet, but such measures are no substitute for real financial reform.
Essays
After NATO’s air strikes against Yugoslavia, the Kosovo Liberation Army is girding for a long guerrilla war to win an independent Kosovo now and a Greater Albania later. To Washington’s consternation, the KLA radicals have supplanted moderate Kosovar leaders and won the support of most of the Serbian province’s ethnic Albanians. The West is still wedded to autonomy for Kosovo, but Serbian brutality has left the KLA bent on outright secession. So we had better get to know the KLA — both because it is not going to go away and because it is likely to win.
As Cold War threats have diminished, so-called weapons of mass destruction — nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and ballistic missiles — have become the new international bugbears. The irony is that the harm caused by these weapons pales in comparison to the havoc wreaked by a much more popular tool: economic sanctions. Tally up the casualties caused by rogue states, terrorists, and unconventional weapons, and the number is surprisingly small. The same cannot be said for deaths inflicted by international sanctions. The math is sobering and should lead the United States to reconsider its current policy of strangling Iraq.
The Clinton administration supports crippling economic sanctions that punish the Iraqi people but seems ready to live with the demise of international inspections to monitor Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs. Washington has it exactly backward. It should offer Baghdad a blunt trade: lightened sanctions in return for renewed, intrusive arms inspections. The sweeping sanctions regime does nothing to advance U.S. interests, undermine Saddam, or contain Iraq. Leaving Saddam’s arsenal unwatched is folly. Better to have arms inspections without sanctions than sanctions without arms inspections.
Conventional wisdom claims that Japan’s “economic miracle” stemmed from its unique model of government guidance and its revolutionary corporate management techniques. An in-depth study proves this seriously wrong. Rampant government intervention has caused more business failures than successes, and a fundamental cautiousness has led Japanese companies to ignore strategic thinking and shun risk. To pull out of its current slump, Japan must embrace competition, innovation, and bold leadership.
The Netherlands’ vaunted drug policies — legalizing the public sale of cannabis products in the now-famous coffee shops and adopting a generally lenient attitude toward drug use — have turned the country into the narcotics capital of western Europe. Dutch cops admit that Holland is to synthetic drugs what Colombia is to cocaine. Not only is Holland’s increasingly potent marijuana not staying in the legal coffee shops, but its illegal export brings in far more money than that traditional Dutch export, tulips. Meanwhile, drug addiction has tripled. There are no easy answers to drugs, but naive Dutch legislators have made a hash of drug policy.
After Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election, a new political force — the neoconservatives, former anti-Nixon liberals now bent on total victory over the Soviet Union — emerged to undermine his diplomacy. Nixon and his heir, Gerald Ford, sought to carefully wear the Soviets down, but the neocons yearned to vanquish communism with a burst of ideological elan. The new right’s insistence on smearing detente as appeasement led them to ignore subtle Soviet encroachments and abandon Ford when he urged Congress to aid Indochina and Angola. The neocons undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was between the White House and the liberals.
Book Reviews
In The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Thomas L. Friedman argues convincingly that globalization is here to stay, thanks to the Internet and the microchip.
The last volume of Henry A. Kissinger’s memoirs offers a fascinating — if unwittingly revealing — self-portrait of detente’s architect during the gloomy Ford era.
Eliot Cohen on The Haunted Wood; G. John Ikenberry on David Fromkin; Kenneth Maxwell on Rigoberta Menchu; L. Carl Brown on A Portrait of Egypt; Stanley Hoffmann on World War I; Lucian Pye on U.S.-China relations.
Stuart E.Eizenstat supports sanctions; Richard Falk defends international law; Spencer Weart and Bruce Russett clarify the democratic peace; and others.
A special commemorative section on the alliance that won the Cold War and its search for identity in triumph’s aftermath. Michael Howard takes a look back; Vojtech Mastny gives the view from the other side of the Iron Curtain; and Robert E. Hunter and Michael E. Brown offer dueling perspectives on NATO’s future, in a section edited by Peter Grose and copy-edited by Alice H.G. Phillips.