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World Policy Journal
Volume XIV, No 4, Winter 1997
Two former members of the Clinton administration, Roger C. Altman and Charles A. Kupchan are worried by what they view as a steady decline in the Atlantic Alliance, as Europe stagnates economically and politically, and Washington increasingly turns its attention from the Atlantic to the Pacific. "Global stability will be undermined if the Atlantic link withers," they argue. "For the foreseeable future no Asian coalition will replace America's European allies in constructing an international order based on liberal internationalism." The authors outline the structural reforms that Europe must undertake to restore its economic vitality and competitiveness, recommend ways in which the European Union can become a more coherent political actor, and stress the necessity of integrating Russia in NATO and the EU.
Robert Levine, a former deputy director of the Congressional Budget Office and now a senior economist at the RAND Corporation, sees a threat to the stability of Western Europe in its political economy, "particularly the superorthodox macroeconomicÑmonetary and fiscalÑpolicies required to meet the so-called Maastricht criteria for membership in the European Monetary Union." He suggests that Maastricht's exclusive focus on price stability and "fiscal responsibility" to the exclusion of employment and unemployment was wrong to begin with. "The crucial historical lesson is that the Maastricht constraints, based on the policy assumptions of the pre-Maastricht 1980s, which in turn stemmed from the experience of the oil-shocked 1970s, have perpetuated the constricting economic structure of the earlier era into the postÐCold War reconstruction era of the 1990s. If they continue to be applied as designed, they could perpetuate Western Europe's high unemployment economy into a fourth decade, but the pressures have piled up and the safety valves are beginning to blow."
In "The 'Velvet' Revolution in Military Affairs," John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, details the latest advances in information technology that are driving current U.S. defense policy. "Proponents of revolutionary change argue that the latest advances in information technology now enable militaries to know almost everything they need to know about an enemy's disposition and movements," he writes. Those pushing for the achievement of a "dominant awareness" through the marriage of very long-range guided munitions to advanced targeting and information management systems, believe that this will permit practitioners to "detect and destroy an opposing force very nearly at will . . . with minimal need to expose friendly forces to hostile fire." This is a risky, seductive business, Arquilla warns: "The most pernicious effect is that such an approach may lead to the neglect of important conceptual innovations in the areas of strategy, doctrine, and organization." Moreover, he argues, "American military power lies so far beyond its nearest competitors today that it seems senseless to pursue the latest technological advancesÑespecially as their introduction now will no doubt lead to the erosion of existing advantages through a process of diffusion to others."
The historian Diane Kunz, in her essay, "Remembering the Unexplainable," explores the current fixation in the United States and other Western countries on memorializing the Holocaust. Herself the child of Holocaust survivors, she concludes that "while the German people of today do not bear responsibility for the Holocaust, the fact remains that their parents and grandparents perpetrated it." Therefore, "it is better that there be no memorials in Germany than that Germans erect memorials that fail to come to terms with this fact."
In her profile of Alberto Fujimori, Peru's "obstinate, obsessively hands-on leader," Linda Robinson, the Latin America correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, limns a precipitate fall from grace. "Fujimori may end up in the history books as the Meiji reformer of Peru," she writes, "but the fortification of democracy will not be among his laurels."
"Che Guevara appears to be one of those rare individuals who is able to live up to his ideals," notes Gordon H. McCormick, in "The Legacy of a Revolutionary Man." Yet the basic tenets of Che's messageÑthat victory against the odds could be achieved by those with a pure heart and the courage of their convictionsÑhad its dark side. "Emboldened by this myth, scores of revolutionary projects were set in motion with high expectations, equipped with little more than the will to win. These struggles represented vain if sometimes valiant efforts to substitute a revolutionary spirit for a carefully conceived strategy of insurrectionÑone based on a dispassionate reading of the 'objective conditions' with which both sides would enter the game. Countless thousands have died in the ensuing contest, most of them innocent victims."
In his report from Congo, "The Dead Help No One Living," David Aronson, who is associated with the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, paints a stark portrait of a country "ransacked" by the 30-year rule of the American-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Now Washington is embracing Congo's new self-appointed leader, Laurent DesirŽ Kabila, "a former Marxist rebel and gold smuggler of dubious credentials." In the wake of his recent visit to the country, Aronson writes: "How dismal the situation must look to many Congolese. For 32 years they had suffered under a dictator whose malevolence was exceeded only by his greed; they had no sooner neared their goal of ridding themselves of him (if only through his death) than, like Sisyphus, they had tumbled with their burden to the bottom of the mountain. Their new government is beholden to outside powers, and stained with more innocent blood in its first six months than Mobutu may have spilled in his lifetime. It is also profoundly weak and hence likely to become increasingly authoritarian."
Benjamin Schwarz, executive editor of World Policy Journal, bemoans the decline in American intellectual journalism. "The dearth of outlets for serious and sustained essays on culture and public affairs," Schwarz writes, "has had a particularly unhappy effect on the intellectual discourse concerning foreign policy." The "public intellectuals" of the past, he notes, wrote and commented upon subjects with which they were not professionally involved. They brought to the subject of inquiry a breadth of knowledge and imagination unhampered by "professionalization." Today, however, the discussion of foreign affairs is left to the professionals. As these contributorsÑcurrent and former government officials, academics, and think tank analystsÑ"recirculate the same views and 'debates,' more often than not a stale consensus tends to take hold."
Richard Holbrooke, former assistant secretary of state for European affairs and the American negotiator of the Dayton Accords, and Mark Danner, the author of "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance, and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in the fall 1997 issue of World Policy Journal, offer contrasting views on the wisdom of NATO enlargement.