CIAO DATE: 03/05

World Policy Journal

 

Volume XXI, No 4, Winter 2004/05

• James Chace, 1931–2004 The Editors
  [Full Text PDF, 1 pg, 303.2 Kb]

• A New Outlook for the Atlantic Alliance Bob Kerrey
  [Full Text PDF, 6 pgs, 319.0 Kb]

• Europe: Paradise Found? Mark Gilbert*

  Last year, Europeans were from Venus, Americans were from Mars. Or so said the neoconservative commentator Robert Kagan, who published an influential pamphlet that depicted Europeans as lotus eaters in a Kantian paradise or, more accurately, an artificial Eden that only existed because eagle-eyed American sentries were manning the walls. At a time when France and Germany were vocal in their condemnation of the war against Iraq, the book struck a chord. What right had Europeans to predict that Iraq would descend into postwar chaos? Had they no faith in America’s can-do spirit? They should take off their philosophers’ robes and put on combat fatigues if they want to criticize.

  This year, everything is fine in paradise. Jeremy Rifkin, a prolific writer on contemporary social trends, argues in a recent book, The European Dream, that Europe’s vision of the future is “quietly eclipsing” the American dream and that the European Union (EU) is the prototype of a new form of governance ideally suited for a world of complex interdependency in which states are no longer the principal actors. Europe, not America, is the political model for the future. And besides, those guys really know how to live: “People still stroll in Europe.”

  Kagan and Rifkin’s books are at bottom an argument about history. For Kagan, Europe has opted to stay aloof from history, leaving to the United States the dirty work of dealing with the rogue states and power-hungry dictators of the world. Future textbooks will have pages and pages on the war on terrorism; the slim chapter on the European Union will gently sneer at the time and the effort Europe dedicated to negotiating the cod quota.

  For Rifkin, Europe is making history, may even be the end of history. The EU, he says, is the “first governing experiment in a world metamorphosing from geographic planes to planetary fields.” The phrase is opaque, but read in context it is perfectly clear. The EU is the shape of things to come. According to Rifkin, Europe has become nothing other than a “giant freewheeling experimental laboratory for rethinking the human condition and reconfiguring human institutions in the global era.”

  The United States, by contrast, with its gas-guzzling trucks and irrational attachment to sovereign rights, especially its own, appears in Rifkin’s book as one huge damaging hangover from the Enlightenment. The United States is a nation whose public mind is still conditioned by the property-obsessed doctrines of Hobbes and Locke. The American Dream is a dream of domination, and just as Americans have raped their natural environment in pursuit of material gain, so the United States imposes itself upon the international environment, with a foreign policy based upon the massive projection of brute force. The American Dream, nowadays, is “largely caught up in the death instinct.” Rifkin means by this “the frantic desire to live and prosper by killing and consuming everything around us.” One has to add, sic.

  The “European Dream,” Rifkin concludes, is “a beacon of hope in a troubled world.” The dream is that Europe will usher in a “second enlightenment,” based upon the values of ecological sustainability, community, social cohesion, and universal human rights. This, at any rate, is what the EU is inching toward, though, of course, even Europeans do not always live up to the values they espouse. The rest of the world is watching events in Europe closely to see if a postnational and “postmodern” community based upon these values will emerge. If Europe does succeed, Rifkin argues that the European Union will displace the United States as the world’s favored political and economic model and its influence will grow as a result. Its dream “will become an ideal for both West and East to aspire to.”

  The weight of expectation placed upon the EU in Rifkin’s book verges on the ridiculous. If the EU is a beacon for humanity, it is a distinctly smoky one, not a burning flame. Far from being a new Athens, the EU, which is now enlarged to 25 states, with Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and Turkey knocking at the door, is beset with organizational difficulties and with deep doubts over its scope and purpose.

  * Mark Gilbert is associate professor of contemporary history at the University of Trento (Italy). In 2005, he will be a professorial lecturer at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna.

• “Great Vote, Grisly Result”: Europe’s Reaction to the Reelection of George Bush Godfrey Hodgson*

  Doubtless there will be talk about a fresh start and the importance of olive branches on both sides of the Atlantic as George W. Bush begins his second four-year term. However, heading into 2005, the chill initially cast by his reelection has yet to thaw in much of Europe, nor are fears allayed of a deepening split between the United States and its estranged allies. For the most part, European newspapers and political commentators expressed in their very different styles both chagrin at the result and foreboding for the future. Given the ongoing turmoil in Iraq and the ongoing deadlock between stateless Palestinians and terror-traumatized Israelis, the path of least resistance in U.S.-Saudi relations would be to limit the agenda to rhetoric in return for empty promises of reform from the Saudis—thereby evading the tough questions in a troubled bilateral relationship. That would be a grave mistake.

  To take two striking examples: one of the British commentators most consistently sympathetic to the United States wrote a piece quite fairly headlined “Great Vote, Grisly Result.” A French historian who is a professor at Harvard predicts “inevitable divorce” between Europe and America.

  The European Union is an extremely diverse place, with 25 nations, more than 20 languages and 450 million people, not to mention sharp ideological divides from left to right. Other factors influence comment, for example religion: Catholic newspapers and political parties have very different responses to American politics than socialist, social democratic, and labor papers. There are, of course, widely divergent traditional attitudes toward the United States. Poles see the United States as the benevolent titan that first freed them from Czarist Russia, then saved them from communism. The French have a more negative tradition. Many factors have influenced this, from a memory that the United States abandoned France after the First World War to resentment of American criticism of French policy in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s, and a more general feeling that the United States wants to eliminate French individuality in politics, language, and culture.

  Attitudes in Britain and Germany cover a wide span in each case, but lie for the most part in both countries somewhere between Polish gratitude and French suspicion. There is also a wide range of difference in the degrees of expertise and sophistication in coverage of American politics. Readers will have their own opinion of the extent to which the various extracts I shall cite display understanding or otherwise of what was at issue in the election. In some cases, misapprehensions could hardly have been more elementary. One television network, in Croatia, referred throughout election night to Senator “Kennedy” as the Democratic candidate.

  Even so, what was striking on this occasion was precisely how far the Continent (and its offshore island, Britain) were broadly in agreement that it was too bad that Bush won, that it will make life more difficult, but that we will have to live with the fact that Americans are much less like us than we thought.

  * Godfrey Hodgson is an associate fellow of the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University. He has covered the United States for leading British newspapers since 1962 and is the author of several books on U.S. politics, including More Equal Than Others (Princeton, 2004). He is working on a biography of President Wilson’s adviser, Colonel House, for Yale University Press.

• Central America’s Free Trade Gamble Daniel P. Erikson *

  In 2005, the small, poverty-stricken countries of Central America will embark on a grand experiment in free trade with the rich and powerful “colossus of the north.” It is a wager of significant proportions that will reshape their economies and societies in the coming decades, and provide new fodder for the ongoing global debate on the advantages and drawbacks of trade integration among countries with vastly unequal levels of development. The catalyst is the Central American Free Trade Agreement, known as CAFTA, which will bind the economies of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua (as well as the Dominican Republic) to that of the United States. Over a period of 15*20 years, CAFTA will reduce barriers to investment, open state-owned monopolies to foreign competition, eliminate most agricultural tariffs, and deepen economic harmonization within the region.

  In this essay, I first examine the strategic implications of the Bush Doctrine to date, then analyze the PRC's response, and, finally, highlight key issues for the next four years.

  Understanding the Bush Doctrine
  From the presidential election campaign of 2000 through George W. Bush's first months in office before the attacks of 9/11, there were strong indications of what was to come. Bush had staffed his administration with conservative Republicans, who, especially on defense and security issues, had articulated a hard-line, unilateralist position. Their strategic priorities included missile defense, withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the creation of a high-tech, rapid-reaction military of overwhelming scope and power, and the revitalization of the U.S. nuclear weapons industry. Their Manichean worldview led them to view U.S. security in terms of the development of such overwhelming capabilities (military, economic, and technological) that no other state or coalition of states would dare confront the United States.

  To some people, it looked as though the Bush leadership did not understand what international relations theorists call the “security dilemma,” the idea that when one country builds up its military capability to enhance its defense, an adversary may see that buildup as an offensive threat and increase its own military capabilities, thereby igniting an arms race in which both countries become less secure.

  Other commentators thought that President Bush and his advisors understood the security dilemma only too well. The Chinese strategic analyst Yan Xuetong, in an interview in Beijing in April 2001, agreed that when the power capabilities of two states are roughly equal, the security dilemma is likely to have the expected outcome: namely, neither side benefits. But, he said, when one state is much stronger than other states it might deliberately create a security dilemma between itself and its perceived adversaries in order to intimidate and dominate them. That, Yan argued, is what the Bush administration was trying to do.

  * Daniel P. Erikson is the director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue, Washington, D.C.

• Globalization and Its Contents Peter Marber *

  Ask ten different people to define the term “globalization” and you are likely to receive ten different answers. For many, the meaning of globalization has been shaped largely by media coverage of an angry opposition: from right-wing nationalist xenophobes and left-wing labor leaders who fear rampant economic competition from low-wage countries to social activists who see a conspiracy on the part of multinational corporations to seek profits no matter what the cost to local cultures and economic equality to environmentalists who believe the earth is being systematically ravaged by capitalism run amok. “Globalization” *as if it were a machine that could be turned off* has been presented as fundamentally flawed and dangerous. But “globalization” is a term that encompasses all cross-border interactions, whether economic, political, or cultural. And behind the negative headlines lies a story of human progress and promise that should make even the most pessimistic analysts view globalization in an entirely different light.

  Two decades ago, globalization was hardly discussed. At the time, less than 15 percent of the world’s population participated in true global trade. Pessimism colored discussions of the Third World, of “lesser developed” or “backward” countries. Pawns in the Cold War’s global chess game, these countries conjured images of famine, overpopulation, military dictatorship, and general chaos. At the time, the prospect of the Soviet Union or Communist China integrating economically with the West, or of strongman regimes in Latin America or Asia abandoning central planning, seemed farfetched. The possibility of these countries making meaningful socioeconomic progress and attaining Western standards of living appeared utterly unrealistic. Yet the forces of globalization were already at work.

  On average, people are living twice as long as they did a century ago. Moreover, the world’s aggregate material infrastructure and productive capabilities are hundreds *if not thousands* of times greater than they were a hundred years ago. Much of this acceleration has occurred since 1950, with a powerful upsurge in the last 25 years. No matter how one measures wealth *whether by means of economic, bio-social, or financial indicators* there have been gains in virtually every meaningful aspect of life in the last two generations, and the trend should continue upward at least through the middle of the twenty-first century. Most people are living longer, healthier, fuller lives. This is most evident in poor parts of the world. For example, since 1950, life expectancy in emerging markets (countries with less than one-third the per capita income of the United States, or nearly 85 percent of the world’s population) has increased by more than 50 percent, reaching levels the West enjoyed only two generations ago. These longevity gains are linked to lower infant mortality, better nutrition (including an 85 percent increase in daily caloric intake), improved sanitation, immunizations, and other public health advances.

  Literacy rates in developing countries have also risen dramatically in the last 50 years. In 1950, only a third of the people living in these countries (roughly 800 million) could read or write; today nearly twothirds *more than 3.2 billion people* are literate. And while it took the United States and Great Britain more than 120 years to increase average formal education from 2 years in the early nineteenth century to 12 years by the mid-twentieth century, some fast-growing developing countries, like South Korea, have accomplished this feat in fewer than 40 years.

  These dramatic changes in traditional approaches to citizenship and political participation raise questions about the nature of democracy and national loyalty. Must one be a citizen of a nation in order to be a citizen of one’s community, that is, a good neighbor? And, conversely, how much say should citizens living abroad have in their native country’s affairs? How these questions are answered will reshape civil society around the world, determine who future generations of leaders will be, and influence policymaking.

  The world now has a far more educated population with greater intellectual capacity than at any other time in history. This is particularly clear in much of Asia, where mass public education has allowed billions of people to increase their productivity and integrate in the global economy as workers and consumers. Similar trends can be seen in Eastern Europe and in parts of Latin America. This increase in human capital has led to historic highs in economic output and financial assets per capita.

  * Peter Marber is an author, professional money manager, and faculty member at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

• China's Response to the Bush Doctrine Peter Van Ness *

  Peter Van Ness In December 2000, U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan was authorized by the General Assembly to prepare a “road map” for achieving the goals laid out in the Millennium Declaration. The Office of the Secretary General issued its consensual road map in September 2001. The road map included an eighth goal—to develop a global partnership for development—and outlined seven “mutual responsibilities and obligations” of the U.N. member states. In December 2001, the U.N. General Assembly formally adopted resolution 5695 approving the eighth goal, and at the U.N.’s inaugural International Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, in March 2002, 50 heads of state and over 200 ministers from developed and developing countries agreed on a new compact that stressed mutual responsibilities with respect to the initiative. The Monterrey Compact called on the developing countries to deepen their economic reform programs and improve governance, and on the developed countries to step up their support by providing more aid to developing countries and opening their markets.

  In accepting the eight mdgs, each country committed itself to attaining ambitious, measurable “targets” by the year 2015. There are some 48 indicators, each associated with a specific target, by which progress is to be gauged. U.N. “country teams” are to help integrate millennium goals into national development frameworks. The Office of the Secretary General is required to submit an annual report to the General Assembly on progress achieved toward implementing the Millennium Declaration.

  The postwar period has seen an array of grandiose plans and programs aimed at solving the problems of poverty, inequality, and economic underdevelopment. Despite the dedicated efforts of many people and the expenditure of huge sums of money, the results have been disappointing. In this “elusive quest for growth,” there have been a few unexpected achievements, and a great many failures. Will the millennium project be any different?

  * Peter Van Ness is a visiting fellow in the Contemporary China Centre and lectures on security in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University. His new book, Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific, edited with Melvin Gurtov and published by RoutledgeCurzon, is the basis for this essay.

• The Palestinian Intifada: An Effective Strategy? James F. Miskel *

  Talleyrand is reported to have said that when the Bonaparte government in France had an aristocratic critic kidnapped from a neighboring country and then summarily executed it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. That is to say, the official responses of neighboring governments and outrage among the educated classes in neighboring states were so pronounced that France lost ground with respect to its foreign policy objectives. Can the same point be made about the Palestinian leaders who promote violence against Israeli citizens? Has this strategy, which has defined the second intifada (uprising) that began in 2000, proven to have been a blunder? With the change in the leadership of the Palestinian movement following Yasir Arafat’s death, this is the moment for reassessing the Palestinian strategy.

  Acts of organized violence against civilians are considered to be crimes under national and international law. Under certain circumstances, they may also come under the heading of terrorism, which is generally defined as violence that purposely sows fear among the general public in order to achieve a political purpose. In the Middle East, the immediate purpose often appears to be tactical *to provoke Israeli retaliation and thereby undermine political support by moderates in both the Palestinian communities and Israel for negotiations* but the tactical objectives serve strategic goals, and it is against these goals that a strategy must be measured. For Israelis, the primary strategic goal is physical security. The various Palestinian factions have different goals, but all agree that the minimum set of strategic goals includes: a Palestinian state with standing in the international community, satisfaction of the claims of Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from their homes during the 1948 and 1967 wars between Israel and neighboring states, and a general improvement in personal security and economic opportunity for the residents of the Palestinian state.

  There are strong differences of opinion among U.N. member states about whether the definition of terrorism should include such acts of violence by Palestinian extremists as suicide bombings in Israeli shopping malls, the firing of small rockets into Israeli towns, and ambushes of settler families traveling in the West Bank. Many U.N. members believe that these particular acts by Palestinians do not fall under the heading of terrorism because they are the only form of resistance available to an oppressed people. According to this view, Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians is no different in moral terms than the violent acts carried out by the Jewish resistance against British mandate officials in the late 1940s. Or, for that matter, the guerrilla tactics of the American revolutionaries or Garibaldi’s Red Shirts.

  A variation of this view is that if Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens is to be classified as terrorism, Israeli violence against Palestinians should also be so classified. Thus, if Palestinian suicide bombers are to be considered terrorists, so too should the Israeli security service leaders who authorize attacks against alleged extremist leaders on the streets of Gaza or who commission the bulldozing of homes and other buildings in neighborhoods from which Palestinian extremists operate. The opposing view holds that Israeli incursions into West Bank communities and actions against violent extremists cannot be classified as terrorism because they are carried out by legitimate law enforcement and national security agencies.

  Two points are worth noting with respect to the debate in the United Nations about the definition of terrorism. One is that the debate will not end until there is peace in the Middle East, and maybe not even then. The other is that there is a consensus *even among those who argue against classifying Palestinian violence as terrorism* that Palestinian violence is indeed designed to sow fear among the citizenry of Israel, just as one of the objectives of Israeli attacks in the West Bank and Gaza is to make the Palestinian people fear future reprisals.

  For the purposes of evaluating the effectiveness of the strategy of fear-sowing violence, however, it is necessary to set aside the question of whether Palestinian suicide bombers are terrorists. The label attached to the perpetrators and their acts is not relevant to an evaluation of the strategy qua strategy. Questions about what to call Israeli reprisals and about the respective morality of both approaches are also irrelevant in this respect. The strategy of violence has undeniably created publicity for the Palestinian cause, but this publicity does not necessarily equal progress toward achieving Palestinian goals. What is relevant in evaluating the strategy is the amount of tangible progress that has been made toward achieving Palestinian statehood, satisfying Palestinian refugee claims, and improving economic and personal security conditions for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

  * James F. Miskel, a former associate dean of academics and professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, is vice president of Alidade, Inc., a defense consulting firm in Newport, Rhode Island.

  Reportage

• Hurting the World’s Poor in Morality’s Name Barbara Crossette
  [Full Text PDF, 6 pgs, 316.1 Kb]

  Reflections

• Expanding Our Moral Universe Donald W. Shriver, Jr. *

  Disentangling justified, unjustified, heroic, and atrocious actions on the American side of its wars remains a permanent challenge to this country’s historians, public leaders, and citizens. We Americans have scarcely begun a morally mature public debate on the assaults of terrorists on us on 9/11 nor on our assault on Iraq in 2003. But we are almost forty years into debate over the Vietnam War, which entered the presidential campaign debates of 2004.

  Civilians like myself must not forget that it was to the soldiers and veterans that we owe some of our most convincing persuasion that Vietnam was the wrong war for Americans to have undertaken. Whether or not we shall ever have public consensus on reasons for the war, soldiers know that much wrong was committed by all sides. Some explicit governmental testimony to that knowledge came on March 6, 1998, in a ceremony undertaken by the Pentagon in one of the quasi-sacred sites of our national capital: the Vietnam Memorial. There, in antithesis to the Medals of Honor granted members of the Seventh Cavalry for “heroism” at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Pentagon awarded its Soldier’s Medal to three helicopter crewmen who, in 1968, turned their guns against their fellow soldiers to halt the slaughter of My Lai villagers.

  Almost every critic of the war remembers My Lai as a symbol of American military power run amok in the heat of war. The West Point curriculum now includes analysis of this incident as a warning to future army officers against violating the “rules of engagement.” In May 2004, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a West Point instructor, said that the army now requires annual troop review of these rules, which include definitions of orders not to be obeyed. “It’s the first time in history when an army is instructed in disobedience of orders.” (Not true. The Bundeswehr of Germany has had such instruction for over forty years.) In retrospect,the killing of more than two hundred villagers in this assault was to many, inside and outside of the U.S. Army, a gross violation of the “just war” principle of discrimination between military and civilian targets. Long ago, the present government of Vietnam erected a monument in My Lai to memorialize these deaths and to serve the Communist view that Americans were the perpetrators of numerous such atrocities. To my knowledge there are no monuments in modern Vietnam to atrocities committed by its own soldiers. The Pentagon citations to three helicopter crew members read:

  For heroism above and beyond the call of duty on 16 March 1968, saving the lives of at least 10 Vietnamese civilians during the unlawful massacre of noncombatants by American forces at My Lai, Quang Ngai province, South Vietnam, Warrant Officer Thompson landed his helicopter in the line of fire between fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pursuing ground troops to prevent their murder. He then personally confronted the leader of the American ground troops [Lt. William Calley] and was prepared to open fire on those American troops should they fire upon the civilians.

  The tributes further describe how Thompson and his two fellows *Specialists Lawrence Colborn and Glenn U. Andreotta* coaxed villagers out of bunkers and assisted them to flee. In a pile of ditched dead bodies they found a wounded child, whom they flew to a hospital in Quang Ngai. Together, the citations concluded, the behavior of each exemplified “the highest standards of personal courage and ethical conduct, reflecting distinct credit on himself and the United States Army.” The restoration of “standards” to the instigation and conduct of war remains atop the fearsome agenda of modern global society.

  * Donald H. Shriver, Jr. is emeritus President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Practical Christianity (1975-96) of Union Theological Seminary, New York.Donald H. Shriver, Jr. is emeritus President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Practical Christianity (1975-96) of Union Theological Seminary, New York.

  Books

• Divining China’s Future Scott Kennedy *

  After several months of draining fieldwork investigating state-society relations in villages and towns across China, a friend of mine headed for the thriving coastal city of Xiamen for some much-needed rest. He walked down to the beach to feel the sand beneath his feet, put his toes in the water, and stare out at the horizon. However, his peace and quiet was soon interrupted. Two young women, having spotted a conspicuous foreigner, came up to him with camera in hand and asked to have their picture taken with him. Having been approached with the same request countless times before, he rose without uttering a word, smiled, and posed next to the two women until the shutter clicked. With a wave, they were off, and he went back to gazing out to sea. A few hours later, back at his hotel, he received a oneline email from the women, the message reading: “We hope the rest of your time in China goes well.” When my friend returned to his research institute in the north some weeks later, he found an envelope in his mailbox containing the photograph of him with the women. After puzzling for a moment over the picture, it dawned on him: Big Brother has two sisters. They were watching his every move and wanted him to keep that in mind as he contemplated the remainder of his fieldwork on a sensitive political issue.

  Later, in recounting his experience to me, my friend said that he thought he had come face to face with the menacing core of the Chinese Communist regime. My reaction to his story was to note all the complexities of modern China: Security agents are not always behind the curtains. He was not roughed up or kicked out of the country. His research, which paints the state in a negative light, was being published, and he had since gone back to China several times without incident. Therefore, it was a stretch to say that the activities of China’s state security apparatus are indicative of the regime as a whole. My friend thought I was being naive.

  Our different readings of this encounter capture the essence of a debate among China specialists about the “big story” coming out of that country of 1.3 billion people. Everyone recognizes that the People’s Republic of today differs dramatically from the China of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and even to an important extent, from the China of the Tiananmen spring of 1989. And China watchers of all stripes agree that the economic reforms initiated 25 years ago are remaking society. Beyond this point, however, specialists differ. Some focus on continuity and point out that although China is changing, the country is still a dictatorship. Believing that market reforms and political rigidity are incompatible, they discern a political trajectory in which the regime is losing legitimacy and will either hang on through brute force and intimidation or perish under pressure from the economically dispossessed or the newly economically empowered. Other China specialists, reversing the stress, contend that although China is still formally authoritarian, the political system has evolved in complex ways that escape simple characterization. Observers of the latter persuasion have no simple story to tell, however, and believe it is too soon to write the Chinese Communist Party’s obituary.

  While summing up China’s present and future as a simple moral tale *with all the complexities counted as part of a “transition” from evil to good* has a certain appeal, the China story is more fittingly told as a complex drama. To put this observation in other terms, observers who paint the China of today with a palette of white and black are less likely to capture a true likeness than those who employ a wide range of hues and tints.

  * Scott Kennedy is an assistant professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University. He is the author of The Business of Lobbying in China (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

  In Memoriam

• James Chace: A Lost Voice for Sanity Nicholas X. Rizopoulos *

  James Chace, editor of this journal from 1993 to 2000, and during the past decade a deservedly popular professor of international relations at Bard College, was best known to the wider reading public as a prolific writer on a wide range of topics dealing with American politics and, more particularly, with the history of U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. But Chace knew Europe *certainly Western Europe* almost as well as his own country, and much of his writing invariably dealt with issues relating to transatlantic affairs. In fact, when he died suddenly in Paris in early October at the age of 72, he had just embarked on a major research project that was to lead to a fresh reexamination of the life and times of the Marquis de Lafayette.

  Those of us who were his long-time friends and sometime colleagues admired Chace *not least during the past 15 years, when he did his best writing* as much for the sophistication of his thinking on America's foreign relations as for a writing style that, while reflecting his familiarity with the classics of Western literature, was unencumbered by orotundity or misplaced ideological fervor. There was no excess “fat” in any of his recent published work, least of all in his shorter pieces. A perfect example being the very last, and quite stunning, essay he wrote for the October 7, 2004, New York Review of Books, “Empire, Anyone?” which addressed with clarity and verve the ongoing debate over “preemption,” “prevention,” and the issue of unilateral U.S. military intervention.

  Perhaps, too, because he had been for many years a superb magazine editor *most notably at Foreign Affairs and the New York Times Book Review, as well as of World Policy Journal* Chace was an unusually good listener when it came to soliciting criticism about his own writing-in-progress. In that respect, he was the least thin-skinned writer I ever met, accepting even the most onerous suggestions not only with good grace but with genuine appreciation. Indeed, he was just a good listener, period, however much he himself loved to talk.

  * Nicholas X. Rizopoulos is academic director of the Honors College at Adelphi University and a consulting editor of World Policy Journal. He also chairs the Foreign Policy Roundtable at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs in New York City.

  Coda

• The Sack of Mesopotamia Karl E. Meyer
  [Full Text PDF, 3 pgs, 310.5 Kb]