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CIAO DATE: 12/02
Summer 2002 (Volume 27 Issue 1)
Editor's Note
Does the increase in the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as international relief groups indicate the presence of a robust global civil society? Few would dispute the contribution of these NGOs to alleviating world suffering. But according to Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and James Ron of McGill University, the growing number and involvement of NGOs in international assistance activities also has a down side. Cooley and Ron suggest that "organizational insecurity, competitive pressures, and fiscal uncertainty" are becoming increasingly common in the transnational sector: In seeking to "reconcile material pressures with normative motivations," NGOs "often produce outcomes dramatically at odds with liberal expectations." Cooley and Ron use three case studies of transnational assistance to show how market pressures can increase the likelihood of dysfunctional and opportunistic behavior by international relief organizations.
Victor Cha of Georgetown University explains why President George W. Bush should continue U.S. engagement with North Korea, contrary to the opinion of hardliners in his administration who contend that engagement is a failed—and potentially dangerous—policy. Cha agrees with skeptics in the Bush administration who argue that the Clinton administration's engagement of North Korea did not fundamentally alter the regime's malevolent intentions. Indeed, despite a variety of economic and political incentives fromWashington, Seoul, and Tokyo, Pyongyang has neither dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program nor discontinued work on developing ballistic missiles. He disagrees with the skeptics, however, that North Korea sees engagement as a sign of U.S. weakness. Cha proposes a policy of "containment-plus-engagement" that would use a combination of carrots and sticks to "prevent the crystallization of conditions under which the North Korean regime could calculate aggression as a 'rational' course of action even if a [North Korean] victory was impossible."
In a challenge to much of the conventional wisdom, Jerome Slater of the State University of New York writes that observers in the United States and Israel have unduly laid blame for the decades-old Israeli-Syrian conflict on the leadership in Damascus. Although both Israel and Syria have been "inflexible, ideological, and prone to maximal demands," Slater says, Israel bears greater responsibility for the lack of a comprehensive Israeli-Syrian settlement. Slater begins with an overview of the conventional wisdom and then assesses challenges to it by Israel's "new history movement." He then traces the "lost opportunities for peace" between the Israelis and the Syrians since 1948. Slater concludes that the key stumbling block remains Israel's unwillingness to withdraw to its pre-June 1967 borders.
The discovery of mailed anthrax spores shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, rattled an already-shaken nation. Since then, public awareness of the dangers of biological weapons has increased tremendously. Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies examines the Nixon administration's decisionmaking process that in 1969-70 led to the U.S. declaration to renounce biological and toxin warfare. In addition to examining some of the unintended consequences of this decision, Tucker seeks to show how "understanding the factors that shaped those decisions can illuminate some of the key issues facing the United States as it confronts the growing threats of biological warfare and terrorism."
Glenn Snyder of the University of North Carolina reviews John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which lays out Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism. According to Mearsheimer, states are forever locked in a limitless power struggle within an anarchic international system. To enhance their security, they constantly seek to accumulate more power. Snyder praises the work as a "a major theoretical advance," but argues that Mearsheimer's pessimistic assessment of state behavior and the international system is not fully justified. In his "unremitting focus on power-security competition among great powers," argues Snyder, Mearsheimer gives "short shrift" or omits entirely many other important aspects of international politics. Robert Jervis and Henry Nau take issue with several points made by Randall Schweller in his review of John Ikenberry's After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars. Schweller responds. Finally, Helen Purkitt and Stephen Burgess criticize Peter Liberman for failing to consider political psychology as an explanation for South Africa's decision to develop and then dismantle its nuclear weapons program. Liberman replies.
The NGO Scramble by Alexander Cooley and James Ron
Hawk Engagement and Preventive Defense on the Korean Peninsula by Victor D. Cha
Lost Opportunities for Peace in the Arab-Israeli Conflict: Israel and Syria, 1948-2001 by Jerome Slater
Until the year 2000,during which both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian negotiating processes collapsed, it appeared that the overall Arab-Israeli conflict was finally going to be settled, thus bringing to a peaceful resolution one of the most enduring and dangerous regional conflicts in recent history. The Israeli-Egyptian conflict had concluded with the signing of the 1979 Camp David peace treaty, the Israeli-Jordanian conflict had formally ended in 1994 (though there had been a de facto peace between those two countries since the end of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), and both the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian conflicts seemed on the verge of settlement.
Yet by the end of 2000, both sets of negotiations had collapsed, leading to the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel's prime minister in February 2001, and mounting Israeli-Palestinian violence in 2001 and 2002. What went wrong? Much attention has been focused on the lost opportunity for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to the collapse of the Israeli-Syrian peace process. In fact, the Israeli-Syrian negotiations came much closer to producing a . . .
A Farewell to Germs: The U.S. Renunciation of Biological and Toxin Warfare, 1969-70 by Jonathan B. Tucker
In autumn 2001, letters containing powdered anthrax spores were sent through the U.S. mail, killing five people, infecting several others, temporarily disrupting the operation of all three branches of the federal government, and frightening millions of Americans. These unprecedented attacks transformed the largely hypothetical threat of biological terrorism into a harsh reality and increased public interest and concern about U.S. government efforts to address the problem. Because current U.S. policies on biological weapons date back to the Nixon administration,understanding the factors that shaped those decisions can illuminate some key issues facing the United States as it confronts the growing threats of biological warfare and terrorism.
On November 25, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon announced that the United States had decided to renounce the possession and use of lethal and incapacitating biological weapons even for retaliation, and would henceforth confine its biological research program to defensive measures. The administration also declared that it would destroy its entire stockpile of biological weapons over the next few years. "These important decisions," President Nixon said, "have been taken as an initiative toward peace. Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction. By the examples we set today, we hope to contribute to an atmosphere of peace and understanding between nations and among men.
The U.S. renunciation of biological weapons, which was expanded in February 1970 to cover toxins (nonliving poisons produced by bacteria and other organisms), was the first time that a major power had unilaterally renounced an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. Despite the importance of this. . .
Mearsheimer's World — Offensive Realism and the Struggle for Security by Glenn H. Snyder
. . . More than fifty years have passed since Hans Morgenthau introduced "realism" as an approach to the study of international relations. Since then, the approach has withstood not only a steady assault from such external quarters as liberal institutionalism, the democratic peace school, and "constructivism" but also a marked divisive tendency. Splinter groups have emerged, each waving an identifying adjective to herald some new variant or emphasis. The first of these came in the late 1970s, when Kenneth Waltz's "neorealism" marked a major split from Morgenthau's traditional realism, which henceforth became known as "classical" realism. Since then, especially duringthe last decade, new variants and new tags have proliferated. The field of international relations now has at least two varieties of "structural realism," probably three kinds of "offensive realism," . . .
Correspondence: Institutionalized Disagreement by Robert Jervis, Henry R. Nau and Randall L. Schweller
To the Editors (Robert Jervis writes):
Randall Schweller's discussion of John Ikenberry's book After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars is acute, but his criticisms of the role of institutions miss the dynamics that can be involved. Schweller is convincing when he argues that international institutions are too weak to restrain major powers when their leaders decide that their interests call for breaking the rules or disregarding the views of the institution's other members. He does not discuss, however, the more important if more elusive role of institutions: their ability to shape even a powerful state's preferences. Thus while at the point of decision a major power will not be bound by the institution, its capabilities, outlook, and even values may have already been affected by how the institution operated previously. What Schweller downplays is how things can change over time—how institutions can strengthen themselves by altering the environment and the views of policymakers.
Part of the difficulty may be that political scientists usually look at discrete events or compare instances over time, through either case studies or large-N analysis, trying to hold constant as much as possible. Unlike historians, political scientists are less accustomed to thinking about how one event influences succeeding ones, and the feedbacks are missed by the standard comparative method—and indeed can subvert it. These effects are not captured by the common phrase "institutions are sticky," which implies that they keep their shape for a while before yielding to external pressures. Rather, institutions can influence the actors and the incentives they face. What mechanisms might be involved? One is simply habit. Although not a strong force when vital interests are concerned, its influence should not be dismissed. Bureau- . . . .
Correspondence: South Africa's Nuclear Decisions by Helen E. Purkitt, Stephen F. Burgess and Peter Liberman
To the Editors:
In his article "The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb," Peter Liberman uses organizational politics theory to explain South Africa's latent development of a nuclear weapons program before 1977. He cites post-1976 security threats (from the Soviet Union and Cuba) as triggers for the militarization of the nuclear program and the building of six bombs. Although Liberman is less clear about the motivations for disarmament, he does suggest three contributing factors: the end of security threats, the change in South Africa to a more outward-looking leadershipin 1989, and the unacceptable expense of the nuclear weapons program. Liberman produces new insights on both the South African case and contending theories that can be used to explain it. In seeking parsimony, however, he weighs the explanatory value of only three theories and overlooks other relevant factors—most notably, political psychology. This omission leads to a portrait of South Africa as a seemingly ordinary state, rather than the minority-ruled, security-obsessed regime that darkened the international stage for four decades and that developed a secret, sophisticated chemical and biological warfare (CBW) program in the 1980s . . .