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CIAO DATE: 04/03
Volume XIX, No 4, Winter 2002/03
Prevention, Not Intervention: Curbing the New Nuclear Threat by William D. Hartung
From the moment he took office, President George W. Bush has been preoccupied with the need to protect U.S. territory, forces, and allies from a nuclear attack. He has followed through on this concern in a variety of ways: abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, boosting missile defense funding, striking a deal to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and unveiling a new nuclear doctrine that seeks to increase U.S. capabilities to destroy underground nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons facilities. But his most passionate anti-nuclear sentiments have been reserved for his assertion that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's pursuit of nuclear weapons represents the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world today.
Bush's anti-nuclearism is a muscular affair, grounded in the unilateralist credo of "peace through strength." His administration is not putting its trust in treaties or the rule of law to diminish the nuclear danger, but in its ability to use force or the threat of force to preempt the development of these devastating weapons by hostile nations or terrorist groups. Yet, in the real world, as opposed to the world that exists in the imaginings of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney, overthrowing Saddam Hussein will have virtually no impact on the future ability of al-Qaeda or some other terrorist group to get its hands on a nuclear weapon. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is," a terror network intent on gaining access to nuclear weapons or the ingredients thereof is likely to go where the bombs are. Bribing an underpaid Russian security guard or infiltrating the Pakistani nuclear program are far more promising avenues for terrorists seeking a nuclear weapon than cutting a deal with Saddam Hussein's regime, which on present evi-dence does not possess nuclear weapons and would be extremely unlikely to share them with an Islamic fundamentalist group if it did.
Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of aggressive regimes and terrorist groups will require the use of a powerful foreign policy tool that the Bush administration has never been entirely comfortable with--concerted, consistent international diplomacy. Specifically, it will involve strengthening, rather than rejecting, the existing network of treaties and bilateral agreements that have kept nuclear weapons from becoming a far more pervasive problem. It will also require the systematic reduction of global stores of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials to the lowest possible levels. Preventive diplomatic efforts will be far more effective in stopping the new nuclear danger than provocative military strikes.
Russia’s Turn West: Sea Change or Opportunism? by Thomas M. Nichols
"We sail in the same boat," an aide to Russian president Vladimir Putin said in late 2002 of relations between NATO and Russia, adding the hope that greater cooperation and better relations between Moscow and the West will develop "dynamically." But do we, in fact, "sail in the same boat?" Should we? Those who object to a closer partnership typically point out that Russia, while democratic in certain political pro-cesses, is not a democracy; that the war in Chechnya is indicative of the true nature of the Russian regime; and that in any case Russia is serving only its own blunted imperial ambitions rather than any sense of the greater good, in effect coaxing the West to put its stamp of approval on Moscow's efforts to recapture the former Soviet empire and to reemerge as a force to be reckoned with in Europe and beyond. The fundamental concern is that Russia cannot (or will not) change, and that Moscow's turn to the West is insincere, motivated by opportunism rather than conviction.
Much of this concern is generated by the perception of President Putin himself, and understandably so. The idea that a former KGB agent, once sworn to the destruction of the Western system of government, has now seen the light and wishes to join the community of civilized nations is difficult for many to accept or comprehend. But this misses the continuity of Russian policy toward the West since 1991. While some of Putin's domestic policies have represented a shift away from those of his predecessor, his foreign policy is recognizable as a continuation and expansion of Boris Yeltsin's generally pro-Western line. Putin, even more than Yeltsin, has placed Russia squarely among the North Americans and Europeans as part of the "West." (Putin and Yeltsin have both shown a pro-Western orientation in their rhetoric, but because Putin almost certainly has more control over the decidedly anti-American Russian military and intelligence services than Yeltsin ever did, he has been more able to make it stick as a policy.)
The source of this decade-long shift toward the West is rooted in a change in the way Russians--and perhaps more important, their leaders--see themselves. This is not to say that Russia has made a dramatic conversion to all of the democratic West's values and norms, but rather that Russia since 1991 (and, some would argue, since about the seventeenth century) has been slowly coming to the realization that its destiny is as a Western power, rather than as an outcast or perpetual challenger to the Western international system.
Gas and Geopolitics in Northeast Asia: Pipelines, Regional Stability, and the Korean Nuclear Crisis by Selig S. Harrison
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The Winter of Germany’s Discontent by Martin Walker
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Searching for Argentina’s Silver Lining by Michele Wucker
Shortly after Argentina's presidency and banking system collapsed in December 2001, and shortly before its currency and payments to creditors followed suit, a diabetic strode into his Buenos Aires bank. Like the rest of the country's banks, it was under government orders not to allow depositors to withdraw more than $1,000 a month--not enough for the man to eat and buy his insulin. Wielding a hand grenade, he demanded his more than $20,000 in savings in U.S. dollars. When the police later arrested him at home, the grenade turned out to be a harmless World War II relic. The money was nowhere to be found, for the man had learned his lesson in 1990, during the last financial crisis, when the government confiscated bank accounts and converted Argentines' savings into bonds. When his crime--if demanding one's own money is a crime--hit the news, Argentines cheered him.
Why, they wanted to know, were middle-class workers once again being made to pay for the mistakes of the politicians and technocrats? How could it be that barely a decade after their country supposedly saved itself from hyperinflation and despair by pegging its peso to the dollar, it found itself in desperate straits once more? Had the loans it had taken from the International Monetary Fund--and the economic sacrifices Argentines had made to get the IMF to provide the funds--been for naught? Why had IMF officials praised their country's economic management so often over the last decade in view of the disastrous outcome?
After all, the resignation of Argentine president Fernando de la Rúa and the government's default on a record $155 billion in private-sector debt were only the most dramatic manifestations of a crisis that had long been building: four years of recession, skyrocketing interest rates, deflation, stead-ily rising double-digit unemployment, and, weeks before everything fell apart, the reviled freeze on the banking system. Their most important question of all--one that must be answered if the world is to avoid future Argentinas--was why had so many people seen disaster coming for so long and not done what was needed to avert it? A year later, Argentina is still mired in crisis, which is in and of itself an answer to the question: policymakers did not know how to fix the country then and they do not know how to fix it now.
The Rich Borrow and the Poor Repay: The Fatal Flaw in International Finance by Ross P. Buckley
No national legal system allows debtors to offload their debts onto others. Internationally, however, this happens frequently, with appalling consequences for the poor in developing countries. It happens when nations assume liability for the foreign debt of their corporations, as in International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailouts and other debt workouts, and when portions of national borrowings go directly into the pockets of politicians and senior civil servants. The socialization of private-sector debt will be examined within the context of the three most serious financial crises of the past 30 years: the African and Latin American debt crisis that commenced in 1982, the East Asian economic crisis that began in 1997, and Argentina's current economic crisis.
Advocacy
Lost in Purgatory: The Plight of Displaced Persons in the Caucasus by Kenneth H. Bacon and Maureen Lynch
All people forcibly uprooted by political violence are losers, but some are bigger losers than others. We refer to a growing category of refugees known in the chill jargon of humanitarian relief as "IDPs," or internally displaced persons. These are people driven from their homes and farms within their own homeland, unlike those forced to flee their country under threat of persecution. The difference is critical, since under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and its 1967 protocol, those qualifying as refugees receive greater recognition, rights, assistance, and protection than the internally displaced, even though both groups face similar hardships.
Moreover, there is a political as well as a legal catch. IDPs are frequently pawns in a slow-moving, inconclusive diplomatic chess game. Not only do adversaries in civil conflicts tend to prefer protracted deadlock to necessary compromise, but combatants often exploit displaced populations as visual reminders of victimization, even at the cost of prolonging their hardship. "Politics is keeping them victims to attract donors," we were informed by a relief worker in Azerbaijan, where many displaced communities rely on international aid.
Nowhere are the anomalies of this new purgatory more evident than in the South Caucasus, the rugged isthmus that separates the Black and Caspian Seas. Nearly 1.4 million people have been displaced by civil conflict in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, amounting to 8.7 percent of the population of the three countries. Most were displaced by ethnically based independence movements shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union--in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and by Abkhazia's attempt to break away from Georgia. Many IDPs have lived in squalor for upward of a decade, their plight either forgotten or known only to interested parties, notwithstanding the new media attention on the Caucasus as a seedbed of terrorism and instability. Our purpose is to describe the problem, and to put forward some reasonable proposals for salvaging the people trapped in this purgatory.
Reflections
Lula’s Big Win by Omar G. Encarnación
Latin American elections rarely attract attention in the United States, but the Brazilian presidential campaign that concluded last October 26 was an exception to the rule. This was to some degree expected given Brazil's increasing importance to global markets. Befitting its rank as the world's ninth largest economy, Brazil is the recipient of $420 billion in foreign investment, much it from American corporations. However, it was the cast of characters bidding to succeed President Fernando Henrique Cardoso that piqued American interest in the Brazilian elections. Holding everyone's attention was the front-runner and eventual winner, Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva of the left-wing Workers' Party, widely portrayed in the American media as hostile toward U.S. interests and a potential force for reshaping the Latin American political landscape. Unsurprisingly, the response of Wall Street and Washington to Lula's victory has been apprehensive. Indeed, the question of what to expect from the new Brazilian administration appeared to have been settled in some quarters of the U.S. foreign policy community even before Lula's formal inauguration on January 1.
The day after Brazilians gave Lula a resounding victory at the polls--with an unprecedented 61 percent of the vote--then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill sought to calm nervous investors by noting that "Lula was not a crazy person" and that he was confident of Lula's capacity "to implement sound economic policies." O'Neill's backhanded compliments could hardly have served to assuage fears about the impact on global markets of Brazil's turn to the left. Last August, in an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, O'Neill upset the usually polite world of international diplomacy by publicly questioning Brazil's capacity to manage its economic affairs and predicting economic chaos under a Lula regime. These comments, widely seen in Brazil as part of an effort by the international financial community to discredit Lula and revive the fortunes of his main opponent (José Serra, of the Social Democratic Party), sent the Brazilian currency into a free fall and prompted President Cardoso to de-mand an apology from the American ambassador.
More ominous still are the predictions for Brazil's political trajectory under a Lula administration, which range from the paranoid to the hysterical to the truly ridiculous. Surveying the range of scenarios being sketched by politicians and pundits, one observer posed the question: "Is Brazil in the final countdown to Armageddon?"
Books
The Forgotten George Kennan: From Cheerleader to Critic of Tsarist Russia by Frith Maier
It has been the posthumous misfortune of George Kennan (1845-1924), the American author and traveler, to share the name and even the same birthday (February 16) with his great-nephew, George Frost Kennan (born 1904), the distinguished diplomat and historian. By double misfortune, the two shared the same special association with Russia, its politics and culture, indeed the coincidence of birth helped incline the younger Kennan to take up Russian studies. As a result, few are aware that the elder and forgotten George Kennan did not simply chronicle Russian life, but became an assiduous campaigner for democracy and human rights in the tsarist realm, and that he contributed crucially to putting the issue on the American legislative agenda.
Beginning as an ardent Russophile who defended the tsars' expansionary policies, Kennan became that monarchy's severest American critic. Fresh light on how his thinking evolved can be found in his hitherto unpublished journals as the first American to visit the remote and rebellious Islamic North Caucasus, in 1870. Now that the Caucasus region is very much on Washington's policy screen, the forgotten George Kennan may deservedly be remembered afresh.
Coda
Slouching Down Xenophobe Alley by Karl E. Meyer
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