CIAO DATE: 10/02

Survival

 

 

Summer 2002 (Vol. 44 No. 2)

• Power Relations in the New Economy

  Edward N. Luttwak is a Senior Fellow in Preventative Diplomacy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC.

  Power has not been weakened by the supposedly anarchical Internet, and repression is likely to be enhanced by it, perhaps very significantly. More generally, states have not been significantly weakened by the emergence of the 'new economy' or, in the author's phrase, 'turbo-capitalism'. The military utilisation of IT is very extensive and very costly, but has not increased performance anywhere near as much as in civilian activities, because of bureaucratic resistance to the necessary structural changes. It will be interesting to see to what extent military policies around the world will shift in coming years in response to the innovations demonstrated by US forces in Afghanistan. In theory much should change, starting with cascading shifts in the very composition of the armed forces. In general, however, strategic relationships among the principal powers of the world have not changed as much as they might have - although had they changed that much, the result might have been negated by anti-hegemonic reactions.

• Enriching Expectations: 11 September's Lessons for Missile Defence

  Dennis M. Gormley is Consulting Senior Fellow for Technology and Defence Policy at the IISS.

  At a time when Americans feel more vulnerable than ever before, it is appropriate that a programme for the development of national missile defence moves forward. That programme, however, should fit within a broader strategic reckoning of America's new threat environment. The lessons of 11 September ought to guide the Bush administration's decision-making as it grapples with an expensive array of new and traditional security requirements. Critical to such decision-making are intelligence estimates on the ballistic-missile threat to the United States. Yet, 11 September is seen by many as a catastrophic 'intelligence failure'. In fact it was more a failure of 'strategic imagination' than of intelligence per se. As policymakers look to the future, they should take care not to mistake the most familiar threats - such as ballistic missiles - for the most likely ones. Likewise, in pursuing military-hardware solutions, they should not discount the importance of multilateral arms control.

• Waiting Out North Korea

  James Miles is the Beijing correspondent of The Economist.

  The controversy generated by President George W. Bush's reference to North Korea as part of an 'axis of evil' highlighted the chasm between American and South Korean perceptions of engagement with Pyongyang. Bush's visit to the South the following month, during which he denied the United States had any plans to attack the North, helped to calm the furore. But lessons need to be drawn from the episode in order to maintain the cohesion of the US-South Korean alliance and the effective coordination of diplomatic approaches to the North. While Bush's choice of words may have been imprudent, it is important to focus on the nature of South Korean engagement with the North and whether it is arousing unrealistic expectations of systemic change in Pyongyang. Engagement on many levels with the North is becoming an increasingly urgent task, but North-South summitry should be downplayed as an immediate goal. A 'passionless' form of engagement should be pursued that fully recognises the difficulty, if not impossibility, of changing the way the North Korean leader Kim Jong II runs the country.

• Ending Russian Assistance to Iran's Nuclear Bomb

  Robert J. Einhorn, a Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Gary Samore is IISS Senior Fellow for Non-Proliferation.

  Both the United States and Russia want to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Yet the transfer of sensitive Russian assistance to Iran continues, leading many in Washington to conclude that Moscow is tolerating a certain amount of leakage to protect it broader strategic and economic relations with Tehran. The time may be ripe to resolve this protracted and frustrating dispute. Washington should be prepared to relax its objections to Russian nuclear-power sales to Iran if Tehran accepts (and complies with) additional limits and restrictions on its nuclear activities. Tehran's willingness to accept these arrangements will test its true nuclear intentions. US-Russian agreement on an approach to solving this problem would not only make a major contribution to heading off a destabilising Iranian nuclear capability, but could also restore genuine cooperation between the two countries in pursuing their common nonproliferation interests.

• Nuclear Terrorism and Warhead Control in Russia

  Jon B. Wolfsthal is an Associate with the Non-Proliferation Project with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tom Z. Collina is Director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

  Russia possesses the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable nuclear materials. This Cold War legacy, inherited from the Soviet Union, is housed in an oversized, underfunded and poorly secured weapons complex that has proven vulnerable to infiltration and theft. Yet, at a time when the United States has made preventing terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction a top priority, the Bush administration has unveiled the outlines of a nuclear policy that is exacerbating the security problem in Russia and will likely lead Russia to maintain an unnecessarily large and insecure weapons complex. The proposed policies of the administration would result in the US deploying some 2,200 strategic nuclear weapons, but maintaining a force twice as large in active reserve, ready for rapid redeployment. Russia is likely to follow suit. The proposed US policy is misguided. Instead, the United States and Russia should be pushing each other to negotiate and adopt a monitored regime to securely store and eliminate nuclear weapons removed from active deployment and ensure that the materials released from dismantled weapons are quickly, safely and securely eliminated.

• Proliferation, Missile Defence and American Ambitions

  Victor A. Utgoff is a Deputy Director of the Strategy, Forces, and Resources Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.

  Several agressive states seek nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. They may hope to conquer their neighbours without risking intervention by outsiders. If the willingness of the US and others to stand up to nuclear-backed regional aggression were cast in doubt, nuclear proliferation would likely accelerate with painful global consequences. Thus, missile defences are needed to underwrite confidence that the US and its partners would continue to protect others against regional aggression. Further, such protectors have an overwhelming moral claim to defences to reduce their risks. Finally, the rest of the world need not worry that defences will turn the United States into an aggressive hegemon, for three reasons. First, pratical defences will be far from perfect. Second, the rest of the world has the basic resources to contain the US if this somehow became necessary. And third, the United States' deep historical dedication to democracy renders it psychologically incapable of seeking to become the world's dictator.

• Rumsfeld's Defence Vision

  Michael O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

  Donald Rumsfeld's defence review of 30 September 2001 is a reasonable - and quite conservative - document. After several months of speculation that he would make major changes in the size, forward deployments and basic nature of US military forces, he recognised that radical transformation was unwarranted. Indeed, in the end Rumsfeld produced what is surely the most cautious major defence review of the four that have been completed since the end of the Cold War. In most cases, Rumsfeld was right not to follow the advice of those advocating revolutionary reform, given the enduring importance of traditional defence missions and the technological impracticality of rapidly adopting a transformed force. But there is one major problem with the Rumsfeld plan: its cost.

• Rethinking Sovereignty: American Strategy in the Age of Terror

  Audrey Kurth Cronin teaches graduate courses on political violence and terrorism for the Security Studies Program, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.

  Terrorism is an act of political violence aimed not only at innocent civilians, but at the legitimacy of the state. Twenty-first century terrorism is gradually shifting away from direct state sponsorship and toward more amorphous groups, often having access to state resources but less and less likely to be under the control of the state itself. In an increasingly globalised environment, the traditional state-centric means of responding to terrorism will not be sufficient and may even be counterproductive. Thus, to be effective, American strategy must change fundamentally: the threat requires a flexible, broad-based globalised strategy, seamlessly incorporating international economic, political, legal, diplomatic, cultural and military elements. International terrorism is not dangerous because it can defeat the United States and its allies in a war, but because by marshalling unprecedented destructive power it can destroy the integrity of the state by undermining its ability to protect its citizens from direct attacks.

• Allies and Armaments

  Ethan B. Kapstein is Dubrule Professor of Economics and Political Science at INSEAD Business School, Fontainebleau, France, and Stassen Professor of International Peace at the University of Minnesota.

  One, often neglected, way to measure the health of the NATO alliance is through an exploration of European weapons-procurement policy. To be sure, weapons-procurement decisions only provide a single case study with respect to alliance relations - hardly a complete view of the political landscape. But neither should transatlantic efforts to shape the defence acquisition environment be dismissed as tangential to security policy. Ever since its inception, NATO has striven to promote the 'rationalisation, standardisation and inter-operability' of alliance weaponry. From this defence-industrial perspective, the alliance has made great strides over the past decade. For its part, the United States has undertaken a major reform of its technology-transfer bureaucracy, with the aim of promoting more transatlantic weapons collaboration. Alongside that development, the Europens have engaged in a radical restructuring of their defence industries, making them bigger and more competitive. These changes suggest continuing efforts on each side of the Atlantic to maintain if not strengthen their security relationship.