CIAO DATE: 09/05

The Washington Quarterly

Spring 2005, Volume 28, Number 2

• U.S. Visa Policy: Securing Borders and Opening Doors (PDF, 12 pages, 80.8 KB)
  Maura Harty

  The U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Consular Affairs is responsible for protecting the lives and interests of U.S. citizens overseas and for making lawful and conscientious judgments about applications for passports for U.S. citizens as well as visa applications for visitors and immigrants. Unquestionably, it is the department's responsibility to decide whether or not to grant immigrant and nonimmigrant visas that places it squarely at the forefront of the global war on terror.

• What China Whispers to North Korea (PDF, 14 pages, 86.3 KB)
  Anne Wu

  To some, China appears to be taking a decisive if typically understated diplomatic role as the host and central catalyst in the often rocky sixparty talks among North and South Korea, Russia, Japan, the United States, and China to negotiate a multilateral solution to the most pressing security dilemma in Northeast Asia: North Korea's nuclear weapons program. To others, Beijing is still being too cautious and lenient toward Pyongyang, limiting itself to opaque, behind-the-scenes attempts to influence the hermit kingdom diplomatically, without being willing to get tough and use real leverage.

• Unraveling the A. Q. Khan and Future Proliferation Networks (PDF, 18 pages, 105.9 KB)
  David Albright and Corey Hinderstein

  The most disturbing aspect of the international nuclear smuggling network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, widely viewed as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, is how poorly the nuclear nonproliferation regime fared in exposing and stopping the network's operation. Khan, with the help of associates on four continents, managed to buy and sell key nuclear weapons capabilities for more than two decades while eluding the world's best intelligence agencies and nonproliferation institutions and organizations. Despite a wide range of hints and leads, the United States and its allies failed to thwart this network throughout the 1980s and 1990s as it sold the equipment and expertise needed to produce nuclear weapons to major U.S. enemies including Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

• Washington's New European Allies: Durable or Conditional Partners? (PDF, 13 pages, 84.9 KB)
  Janusz Bugajski and Ilona Teleki

  By attaining NATO and European Union membership by 2004, eight new democracies from Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) have achieved the goals they set for themselves when communism disintegrated in the early 1990s. Now what? The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia are gradually redefining their strategic objectives within a transatlantic context that has been recently strained over a number of issues including the war in Iraq, the U.S.-led campaign against Islamist terrorism, and disagreements over the appropriate measures to eliminate the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

• A Transatlantic Strategy to Promote Democratic Development in the Broader Middle East (PDF, 15 pages, 93.6 KB)
  Ronald D. Asmus, Larry Diamond, Mark Leonard, and Michael McFaul

  Since the September 11 attacks, a number of U.S. and European strategists have stepped forward to call for a fundamental paradigm shift in how the United States and Europe engage the broader Middle East-that wide swath of the globe, predominantly Muslim and overwhelmingly authoritarian, stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan. The West, they have argued, must abandon the chimera of stability offered by an autocratic status quo and instead put the weight of Western influence on the side of positive democratic change. Washington and Brussels must join forces in a partnership with reformers in the region to promote democratic transformation and human development as an antidote to those radical ideologies and terrorist groups that seek to destroy Western society and values.

• A Year of Opportunity in the Middle East (PDF, 13 pages, 86.8 KB)
  Aluf Benn

  Events at the end of 2004 conspired to create a fresh opportunity to transform the Israeli-Palestinian relationship away from confrontation toward negotiation and to revive the defunct peace process in 2005 after more than four years of fighting. Both sides are fatigued, seeking a way out after suffering more than 1,000 Israeli and 3,000 Palestinian casualties, along with economic hardships and devastated morale. The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on November 11 removed a major obstacle to diplomacy. With Arafat's passing, Israel also lost its main argument-or excuse- for avoiding negotiations, namely, that it had "no Palestinian partner." Arafat's elected successor, Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), is a moderate who called the intifada, or armed uprising against Israel that began in September 2000, "a mistake" even when Arafat was still alive. Abbas is an old acquaintance of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and the two leaders have pledged to work together. The string of Palestinian elections in 2005- local, presidential, and later parliamentary-could modernize the Palestinian political structure and legitimize the post-Arafat leadership.

• The Great Guessing Game: Russia and the Iranian Nuclear Issue (PDF, 18 pages, 110.3 KB)
  Vladimir A. Orlov and Alexander Vinnikov

  Since the mid-1990s, Russia had featured in virtually every mention of Iran's nuclear program. Indeed, Russia is the only state to have openly cooperated with Iran in the nuclear field and has spent the better part of the last decade at the receiving end of fierce U.S. criticism for its efforts. Yet during the last two years, Russia has somehow been largely absent from the flurry of diplomatic activity, media speculation, and scholarly debate over Iran. During that time, the international community has managed to navigate between the U.S. administration's propensity for confrontation, the preference of the EU-3 (Germany, France, and the United Kingdom) for negotiation, and Iran's predilection for uttering half-truths and driving wedges among the United States, Europe, and Russia.

• Reality Bites: The Impending Logic of Withdrawal from Iraq (PDF, 14 pages, 85.1 KB)
  Barry Rubin

  Despite the Iraq war's complexities, the arguments made and policy options proposed in discussing this issue have been remarkably limited and largely confined to a U.S.-centered framework. The realities of Iraq are all too often neglected, misunderstood, or ignored. Indeed, the basic conception both of the Bush administration and of its most bitter opponents regarding the situation in Iraq is inaccurate and increasingly disastrous. The ruling premise in Washington is that, by staying the course, maintaining a large-scale U.S. presence, defeating the insurgents, and strengthening an elected government, it is possible to achieve both stability and a large measure of democracy in Iraq. Critics of these policies assert that the U.S. government is mishandling Iraq's problems or perhaps should not be dealing with them at all. Yet whether U.S. policy has been working or failing, the present situation in Iraq demands a new U.S. approach for the future.

• Cooperative Threat Reduction beyond Russia (PDF, 14 pages, 82.6 KB)
  Rose Gottemoeller

  Cooperative threat reduction (CTR) programs have proven among the most effective tools of nonproliferation policy. These programs are designed to help other countries to enhance physical protection of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their components; dispose of or eliminate weapons and components; and transition scientists, engineers, and technicians away from weapons work, thus preventing "brain drain," or scientists and others with weapons knowledge from taking their skills to other countries or to terrorist groups. During the past decade, cooperative threat reduction programs, also known as Nunn-Lugar programs after Senators Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who cosponsored the program's original legislation in 1991, have helped lock up hundreds of tons of weapons-usable nuclear material and deactivate or eliminate thousands of nuclear weapons systems in Russia and the newly independent states (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. They have also helped nuclear scientists, engineers, and technicians in those countries transition into lines of work outside the weapons industry. In so doing, these programs have prevented both the transfer of nuclear weapons and know-how into terrorist hands, and the emergence of a dire, unpredictable threat to the United States.

• Reassessing Security Assurances in a Unipolar World (PDF, 12 pages, 79.8 KB)
  Joseph F. Pilat

  Security assurances are designed first to prevent states from becoming subject to nuclear threats or use (negative security assurances), and in cases where that occurs, they promise to provide victims of nuclear aggression with assistance (positive security assurances). So conceived, security assurances have been an element of the debate over the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since its inception. This debate has not centered around the legitimacy of these assurances. No one would argue that a state that forgoes nuclear weapons has the right to expect its security will not be undermined by this decision. Nuclear-weapon states have, in fact, offered both negative and positive assurances to nonnuclear states. Rather, the debate has been focused on the scope and conditions of the assurances offered, with the non-nuclear-weapon states demanding more, notably including unconditional and legally binding negative assurances.

• The Proliferation Security Initiative: The New Face of Interdiction (PDF, 16 pages, 87.4 KB)
  Andrew C. Winner

  It is the year 2007, and U.S. intelligence receives highly reliable information that an Al Qaeda affiliate is attempting to smuggle a crude nuclear weapon into the New York harbor on a merchant vessel. The president orders the Pentagon to intercept it at the edge of U.S. territorial waters, at which time a special operations team successfully boards the vessel, subdues several terrorists posing as crew members, seizes the bomb, and renders it safe. Would such an operation represent a success for the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI)? The answer is no. In fact, in such a scenario, the PSI may play no role at all. The United States would be acting unilaterally, as would any other country faced with a similar and imminent threat, under a legal and political justification of self-defense. If one rewinds the clock two years, however, and instead asks how to prevent that terrorist organization from acquiring the bomb or the materials to make it, the PSI's potential role becomes relevant. Such a successful scenario did take place in the fall of 2003 when Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States worked together under the PSI rubric to stop a seaborne shipment of centrifuge parts to Libya, thereby helping to stymie that country's nuclear ambitions.