Power

to wind back military spending LONDON – The world goes on, even as Al Gore and George W. Bush compete for the title of head honcho of the world’s only superpower. Powerful one of them will be, and mighty the U.S. will remain for the foreseeable future. Yet it is not the only well-built actor on the stage. Indeed, some argue, quite understandably after the missed opportunities of the Clinton years, that there is a lot to be said for trying to ignore the U.S. as much as possible or, at least go round it. Just let the U.S. pay as little as it wants to the UN and rely on the rest of the rich countries to make up the difference. This will clear the air in the UN, take its mind of the perennial struggle with Washington over arrears, and allow its energies to be better concentrated to how...

LONDON – Presumably President Vladimir Putin had prepared the disarmament statement he issued on Monday for delivery to the next president of the United States. In the event, he decided not to put it on ice but seized the moment, perhaps aware that for the first time in almost a decade the debate about nuclear disarmament in the American foreign policy community was beginning to open up after the Clinton-induced freeze ( or was it simply torpor?). It was Jonathan Schell’s long article two month’s ago in the establishment’s favourite foreign policy magazine, Foreign Affairs, that has brought a simmering debate to the boil. Schell did this once twenty years ago with an article in the New Yorker that was quoted the world over but, alas, to no lasting effect. On this occasion the magazine of publication is a better platform. Moreover the timing is perfect. For not only, as Putin...

worse or better after this election? LONDON – Will it be worse or better? Or is U.S. foreign policy so firmly set on a course that even with a new a president it can’t be changed significantly? Some foreign policy analysts are saying that under President Bill Clinton’s stewardship the U.S. became a “rogue state”, a term cooked up by the State Department to describe the likes of Iraq, Libya and North Korea. This sort of language is not just being deployed against America by those using it for effect, like those who described the impact of Western sanctions on innocent Iraqi children in a landmark article last year in Foreign Affairs magazine. It is being used by serious commentators such as Michael M. May who is quoted in a recent issue of Survival, the quarterly journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, as listing half a dozen damning developments...

U.S. presidential election LONDON – When a Mexican man was executed in Texas in 1997 there was a bit of a row because not only had he signed his “confession” in English, a language he didn’t understand, he was denied access to the Mexican consul. After his execution Governor George W. Bush issued a statement that since Texas had not signed the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations it was not bound by it. But the United States of America had and it was legally binding on all states. Is this a forewarning of how a President Bush would treat the rest of the world- with, putting it at its mildest, nothing less than arrogant contempt? As for a President Al Gore he shows every sign of walking in Bill Clinton’s footsteps, with perhaps an even heavier tread. He seems, too often, to regard the Pentagon as the arm of government that...

LONDON – Richard Nixon, contending to be president in 1968, wrote a sensational article in the magazine Foreign Affairs in which he anticipiated a more conciliatory U.S. policy towards China. Soon after Nixon’s election, the U.S. moved to recognise communist China, which it had refused to do for twenty two years , and ejected Taiwan from the Chinese seat at the UN. During his election campaign Jimmy Carter promised he wouldn’t “ass-kiss” the Chinese, but like Nixon he ended up turning his back on China’s human rights dissidents, intent on concluding the formal normalization of relations with China. When Bill Clinton campaigned for the presidency against George Bush Senior he charged that Bush was soft on China- Bush had been quick after the Tiananmen Square masacre to send to Beijing his National Security Advisor to reassure the Chinese leadership of Washington’s solid, enduring relationship. Clinton promised if elected that the age...

LONDON – It would be perhaps expecting too much for the world to learn one thing from the Yugoslavian imbroglio – that its ethnic wars were a figment of the political imagination. The Balkans is not, as Robert Kaplan famously put it, ” a region of pure memory” where “each individual sensation and memory affects the grand movement of clashing peoples” and where the processes of history were “kept on hold” by communism for forty-five years, “thereby creating a multiplier effect for violence.” If ethnic war is when “ancient hatreds” lead one ethnic group to become the ardent, murderous and dedicated opponent of everyone in another group this was not it. It was,as professor John Mueller of Ohio State University has written in the current issue of “International Security”, a situation in which “a mass of essentially mild, ordinary people unwillingly and in considerable bewilderment came under the vicious and arbitary...