Survival

 

 

Fall 2001 (Vol. 43 No. 3)

• Washington's Misguided China Policy

  Lanxin Xiang is Professor of International History and Politics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva. He is author of Recasting the Imperial Far East (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), Mao's Generals (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998) and most recently, The Origins of the Boxer War (Richmond: Curzon, forthcoming in summer 2001). He holds a Zijiang Chair at the Russian Centre and the Eurasian Centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

  A central premise of the Bush foreign-policy team is that China is trying to challenge the status quo. China is seen as a rising power with a grudge against the international system. In short, we are said to be entering the twenty-first century equivalent of the early twentieth century, when a democratic England struggled with a rising, authoritarian Germany. But this analogy - of a `Wilhelmine China' - is flawed, for it is hardly obvious, in the year 2001, just who is defending the status quo. At the very moment of China's decision to integrate fully into the international system, the United States seems to have started the process of changing the rules. Just as China aspires to become a `normal state' for the first time in its history, the criterion for `normal' is changing. As China goes multilateral in its foreign relations, America turns unilateral.

   

• China or America: Which is the Revisionist Power?

  David Shambaugh, is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, and Director of the China Policy Program in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program and Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies (CNAPS) at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.

   

• From Oslo to Taba: What Went Wrong?

  Ron Pundak, is Director-General of the Peres Center for PEace in Tel Aviv. He has played a leading role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, having been involved in the 1993 Oslo negotiations and helped prepare the framework agreement that formed the basis of the 1999-2001 Israeli-Palestinian final status negotiations. This article is based on a lecture given by the author at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, in March 2001.

  There are three possible explanations for the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that started in Oslo in 1993. One could argue that peace between Israelis and Palestinians is simply impossible, or that the two sides were simply not ready to make the necessary painful concessions. But the evidence points to a third explanation. There was, in fact, an opportunity for peace, but it was squandered through miscalculations and mismanagement of the entire process. The Palestinian leadership shares considerable blame for the crisis. Yet the story of the August 2000 Camp David summit that is often told in Israel and the United States - of a near-perfect Israeli offer which Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lacked the courage to grasp - is too simple. Above all, it is a story that tends to obscure the excruciating difficulties and frustrations of the Palestinian side, which were too often the unnecessary products of flawed Israeli policies.

   

• Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt

  Yezid Sayigh, is Consulting Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the IISS and Assistant Director of Studies at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He has lived part-time in the West Bank and Gaza since September 2000.

  In October 2000, at the onset of the latest intifada, key political and security officials on both the Palestinian and the Israeli side still considered an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to be politically realisable. Some of the substance of a mutually acceptable deal finally emerged at the bilateral talks held in the Red Sea resort of Taba in late January 2001, but by then it was too late to alter the course of events. The present situation of low-intensity conflict will almost certainly persist for the rest of 2001, and in all likelihood for at least another year beyond that. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat bears much of the responsibility for this precarious state of affairs, though not for the reasons cited by official Israeli sources. Contrary to the Israeli account, his behaviour since the start of the intifada has reflected not the existence of a prior strategy based on the use of force, but the absence of any strategy. His political management has been marked by a high degree of improvisation and short-termism, confirming the absence of an original strategy and of a clear purpose.

   

• A Consensus on Missile Defence?

  Ivo H. Daalder and Christopher Makins. Ivo H. Daalder is a Senior Fello in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. Christopher Makins is president of the Atlantic Council of the United States.

   

• The Flawed Case for Missile Defence

  Steven E. Miller, is Director of the International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

  The Bush administration assumed office deeply committed to the deployment of missile defence and eager to modify substantially or even to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to achieve that objective. The president and his team, naturally, are eager to persuade sceptics at home and abroad of the merits of their approach to missile defence or, at least, to minimise the diplomatic costs of and the domestic political opposition to their preferred course of action. However, it seems more likely that other powers, whether friends and allies or potential adversaries, will bow to the inevitable rather than being genuinely persuaded by the case for missile defence. The case the Bush administration has put before the world is not compelling. Even those who share the administration's concern about the future missile threat could conclude that it is premature to race ahead with immature missile-defence technologies in order to offset speculative missile threats. Even those who share the administration's willingness to consider seriously the eventual utility of missile defences could conclude that it is not desirable to press urgently forward now.

   

• Imagining European Missile Defence

  Richard Sokolsky, is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Washington DC. In 1997-1999 he was a Senior Fellow at RAND. He is coauthor, most recently, of Persian Gulf Security: Improving Allied Military Contributions. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000)

  Since assuming office in January 2001, the Bush administration has pledged that its missile defence programme will protect America's allies and friends. The attitudes of most US allies towards American missile-defence plans, however, range from misgivings to outright hostility. They do not want America to build its own missile defence system if it requires withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and they are hardly likely to make missile defence a high priority for themselves. In trying to shift the balance of opinion within NATO on missile defence, the Bush administration will need to craft an approach that takes account of European interests and political realities. The United States should not try to impose its strategic perspectives on European allies. It will also need to resist viewing European missile defence as an exclusively NATO project and allied commitment to it as a test of European fealty to the transatlantic relationship. On the other hand, European allies will need to confront the potentially damaging political and strategic consequences of being vulnerable to ballistic-missile attack while the United States builds defences against such a threat.

   

• A Third Oil Crisis?

  Mamdouh G. Salameh, is an international oil economist, a consultant to the World Bank in Washington DC and a technical expert of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in Vienna. He is Director of the Oil Market Consultancy Service in the UK and a member of The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London.

  Oil is back. Since March 1999, the buoyancy of global oil prices has alarmed governments and baffled analysts. A crisis mentality is starting to pervade not only oil markets but also natural gas markets. The US Department of Energy suggested in early 2001 that the United States is facing its most serious energy shortages since the 1970s. Analysts are starting to think the unthinkable: that a potential supply shortage is keeping prices high and that, over the coming two or three years, the world might be heading towards its third oil crisis. Oil has a tendency to confound expectations. However, unlike the 1973 and 1979 oil crises, any future third oil crisis is likely to have relatively less impact on the global economy - unless the oil price rose to [dollar]50 per barrel, an unsustainable prospect in the long-term.

   

• War in Sierra Leone

  John L. Hirsch, is Vice-President of the International Peace Academy and served as US Ambassador to Sierra Leone in 1995-1998.

  From the outset, Sierra Leone has been the `side-show' of the West African security scene, caught between the divergent regional interests of the local actors and the narrowly compartmentalised policies of the major Western powers. More than a decade after its start, its civil and cross-border war has widened to include the border regions of Guinea and Liberia. Even after two peace agreements and numerous cease-fires between the democratically elected government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), Sierra Leone remains partitioned, its economy in tatters, its population displaced and traumatised. Despite the deployment of over 13,000 peacekeepers to UNAMSIL, neither the Sierra Leone government nor the UN has a long-term strategy for ending the war. The success or failure of what is now the largest peacekeeping operation in the world remains a test case for international engagement in Africa more broadly. As in Somalia, however, there is a limit to the commitment and endurance of the major outside powers on whose involvement the United Nations effort ultimately depends.

   

• Defence Spending and the US Economy

  David Gold, is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Change and Governmance at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He is author of 'Could We Have Done Better? A Retrospective on the 1990s Peace Divident in the United States', in Ann Markusen (ed.), America's Peace Dividend, Council on Fireign Relations and Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO), www.cc.columbia.edu/sec/dlc/ciao/book/markusen/.

  For more than a decade, military spending in the United States and throughout most of the world declined steadily and steeply. Now, this period of declining military budgets is over. US military outlays have been rising since FY1998 and are projected to continue rising throughout at least the first decade of the new century. The debate about the eventual size of those increases is only just beginning. Although initial increases are quite modest, the Pentagon clearly expects to get considerably more after a thorough-going defence review. Yet uncertain economic conditions, the policy fallout of President George W. Bush's tax cuts and looming conflicts over how military dollars should be spent suggest that future funding for military revitalisation could be seriously constrained.

   

• Review Essay. Had Kennedy Lived

  Richard E. Neustadt, is the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, Emeritus, at Harvard University. A White House assistant to President Harry Truman and consultant to presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Neustadt is the athor, amont other books of Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: the Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Pree Press; 1990) and Report to JFK: the Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)

   

• Review Essay. Faustian Dividends

  Stephen F. Szabo, is Interim Dean at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.