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Foreign Policy
Fall 1998
Articles
When India and Pakistan detonated 11 nuclear warheads, the nonproliferation regime looked like it had gone up in smoke. In reality, more nations have dismantled the bomb than are building it. This trend might reverse, however, if analysts fail to see that the quest for nuclear weapons often has more to do with politics than security.
After successful campaigns by nongovernmental organizations to ban landmines and create an international criminal court, the question facing governments, corporations, and multilateral institutions is no longer whether they should involve these new players in their activities and deliberations. It is how.
What difference do international-affairs journals make in today’s world? Editors from more than a dozen leading international affairs journals met at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on July 14–15, 1998 to consider the answer to that question in a roundtable sponsored by the Center for Applied Policy Research and Foreign Policy.
Mercenaries are back in business, but they have a new look. Nowadays, your average soldier of fortune wears a suit and tie and works out of corporate offices in Great Britain or South Africa. Are “private military companies” murderous profiteers, or do they represent the future of peacekeeping?
For all the talk of deft diplomacy and political courage, the largely unacknowledged prime mover behind this April’s historic Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland’s political future has been European integration.
It seemed like such a good idea—a treaty that would lower barriers to foreign investment, just like the GATT had liberalized international trade. Instead, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment became a lightning rod for opposition to the global economy and turned the World Wide Web into a virtual battleground.
Official Washington is increasingly convinced that in an age of off-the-wall terrorist groups and off-the-shelf weapons of mass destruction, a “superterrorist” attack is just a matter of time. Not only is such a prospect unlikely, but the kind of rhetoric and resources that policymakers are using to prevent it may be counterproductive.
How many bailouts will it take to stabilize Russia’s economy? Plenty, unless Moscow learns how to collect taxes. But if newly minted business tycoons and regional bosses have their way, the system will remain broken indefinitely.
The European Union has struggled for 25 years to stabilize currency fluctuations and move toward a single currency. The good news is that they succeeded. The bad news is that the fight over European monetary policy has just begun and will be even nastier.
What if the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean achieved democracy, embraced free markets, learned to love the United States, and...nobody cared? A guide to the hell of success that the nations of the Americas face at the turn of the millennium.
Book Reviews