Foreign Affairs
Volume 90, Issue 6, Nov. /Dec. 2011
1. Title: A Healthy Obsession/Abrams Replies
Authors:Oded Naaman, Mikhael Manekin, Elliott Abrams
Abstract: For Elliott Abrams, there can be no other end; all that politics can do is postpone this end or bring it about. Although it would be preferable to end the conflict as soon as possible, there is no immediate need to do so. Any sense of immediacy, Abrams writes, is overblown: he claims that non-governmental organizations and some in the international community unjustly point to a humanitarian crisis to create unwarranted urgency. Abrams attributes to the authors the claim that Israel's military presence and settlements are reducing the West Bank to misery. But they do not in fact suggest that humanitarian crises are the inevitable result of military occupation and settlements. Nor do they believe that military occupations are problematic only if they lead to humanitarian crises. Rather, they argue that as long as Israeli military rule remains in place, the Palestinians will live at Israel's mercy, with their well-being and very lives dependent on Israel's discretion. A response from Adams is presented.
2. Title: Can Europe's Divided House Stand? Separating Fiscal and Monetary Union
Authors: Hugo Dixon
Abstract:Conventional wisdom has it that the eurozone cannot have a monetary union without also having a fiscal union. However, a fiscal union would not come anytime soon, and certainly not soon enough to solve the current crisis. It would require a new treaty, and that would require unanimous approval. It is difficult to imagine how such an agreement could be reached quickly given the fierce opposition from politicians and the public in the eurozone's relatively healthy economies to repeated bailouts of their weaker brethren. There are more than just two ways forward: fiscal union or a breakup of the euro. There is a third and preferable option: a kind of market discipline combined with tough love. Under this approach, individual states would take as much responsibility as possible for their own finances, but they would also embrace the free market more vigorously. Governments that borrowed too much money would have to be free to default.
3. Title: Changing the Rules/Ikenberry Replies
Authors: Amitai Etzioni, G John Ikenberry
Abstract: G. John Ikenberry asks whether China will buy into the prevailing liberal, rule-based international order, which has been promoted and underwritten by the US ("The Future of the Liberal World Order," May/June 2011). With regard to one key element of this order, however -- the Westphalian norm of sovereignty and nonintervention -- he might have inverted the premise. For here, the West has been seeking major modifications that weaken the norm, whereas China has championed the established rule and the international order based on it. Several leading Western progressives have sought to legitimize armed humanitarian intervention, under the rubric of "the responsibility to protect." If the Westphalian nonintervention norm is to be changed, the question arises as to who should decide when violations of national responsibilities have reached the level that justifies an armed intervention and on what criteria the decision will be made.
4. Title: Counterrevolution in Kiev: Hope Fades for Ukraine
Authors: Rajan Menon, Alexander J Motyl
Abstract:Ukraine, no stranger to crisis, is again in turmoil. Pres Viktor Yanukovych has failed to deliver on any of his campaign promises -- economic reform, increased prosperity, and an end to corruption -- and instead has rolled back democracy and the rule of law, deepening political, regional, and linguistic divisions in the country. Unless Yanukovych reverses course and engages the democratic opposition while making dramatic political and economic reforms that would be painful to both his party and the people, Ukraine's crisis will only deepen and the country will become increasingly authoritarian, impoverished, polarized, and unstable. Ukraine's instability could undermine the normalization of relations between the West and Russia, threaten Europe's ongoing efforts at economic stabilization, and encourage Moscow to consider some form of intervention, which would, almost inevitably, destabilize Russia itself -- all of which has policymakers in Brussels and Washington increasingly nervous.
5. Title: Humanitarian Intervention Comes of Age: Lessons From Somalia to Libya
Authors:Jon Western, Joshua S Goldstein
Abstract:No sooner had NATO launched its first air strike in Libya than the mission was thrown into controversy -- and with it, the more general notion of humanitarian intervention. Foreign policy realists and other critics likened the Libyan operation to the disastrous engagements of the early 1990s in Somalia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, arguing that humanitarian intervention is the wrong way to respond to intrastate violence and civil war, especially following the debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet such skepticism is unwarranted. Despite the early setbacks in Libya, NATO's success in protecting civilians and helping rebel forces remove a corrupt leader there has become more the rule of humanitarian intervention than the exception. The doctrine has become integrated into a growing tool kit of conflict management strategies that includes today's more robust peacekeeping operations and increasingly effective international criminal justice mechanisms.
6. Title: Is Indonesia Bound for the BRICs? How Stalling Reform Could Hold Jakarta Back
Authors: Karen Brooks
Abstract:A little over 10 years ago, during the height of the Asian financial crisis, Indonesia looked like a state on the brink of collapse. Today, Indonesia is hailed as a model democracy and is a darling of the international financial community. The Jakarta Stock Exchange has been among the world's top performers in recent years, and some analysts have even called for adding Indonesia to the ranks of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The country's economic turnaround has been no less dramatic. In 1998, Indonesia's economy suffered a contraction of more than 13%. Since then, it has grown at an average rate of more than 5% per year, including 4.5% in 2009. Indonesia has also made great strides in improving its security. In 2004, the government negotiated a peace settlement with Javanese separatists in the region of Aceh, ending a three-decade-long conflict that claimed thousands of lives. Also Indonesia has started to play a larger role on the international stage.
7. Title: Israel's Bunker Mentality: How the Occupation Is Destroying the Nation
Authors: Ronald R Krebs
Abstract:For the Israeli right and its allies around the world, the greatest danger to Israel's future is the unwillingness of Palestinians to make peace. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict does threaten Israel, but not, as the right would have it, because militant and even seemingly moderate Palestinians harbor plans to drive the Jews into the sea. Rather, the conflict threatens Israel because of the havoc it wreaks on the country's internal politics. Yet all is not lost. A centrist governing coalition could halt Israel's slide toward illiberalism, offers its Arab citizens hope for equality and justice, compel its burgeoning ultra-Orthodox population to earn their keep rather than live off the state, and give Israel's educated class a reason to stay. This is what must happen for Israel to keep its successful economy humming and ensure that its blemished but vibrant democracy can thrive. But such a coalition will remain a distant dream as long as the occupation continues to loom over Israeli politics.
8. Title: Productivity Is the Reason/Spence Replies
Authors: Robert Z Lawrence, Michael Spence
Abstract: Michael Spence faults globalization for rising unemployment and income inequality in the US over the past two decades. But he fails to prove that globalization is to blame and overlooks the true culprits responsible for the decline in US jobs. To make his case, Spence divides the economy into tradable and nontradable sectors. He finds that between 1990 and 2008, value added per employee in tradable products grew by 40% more than value added per employee in nontradables. A rise in wages in terms of what workers produce -- the measure that Spence uses -- does not necessarily translate into a rise in workers' purchasing power. For example, suppose that productivity rises rapidly in the computer industry and the improvement is passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. For the past 50 years, technological development has helped productivity grow more rapidly in manufacturing than in the rest of the economy.
9. Title: The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline
Authors: George Packer
Abstract: The Iraq war was a kind of stress test applied to the American body politic. And every major system and organ failed the test: the executive and legislative branches, the military, the intelligence world, the for-profits, the nonprofits, the media. It turned out that Americans were not in good shape at all -- without even realizing it. The same ailments that led to the disastrous occupation were on full display in Washington this past summer, during the debt-ceiling debacle: ideological rigidity bordering on fanaticism, an indifference to facts, an inability to think beyond the short term, the dissolution of national interest into partisan advantage. There is nothing today like the personal destruction of the McCarthy era or the street fights of the 1960s. But in those periods, institutional forces still existed in politics, business, and the media that could hold the center together. Solving fundamental problems with a can-do practicality now seems beyond America's reach.
10. Title: The Dying Bear: Russia's Demographic Disaster
Authors: Nicholas Eberstadt
Abstract: Over the past two decades, Russia has been caught in the grip of a devastating and highly anomalous peacetime population crisis. The country's population has been shrinking, its mortality levels are nothing short of catastrophic, and its human resources appear to be dangerously eroding. This peacetime population crisis threatens Russia's economic outlook, its ambitions to modernize and develop, and quite possibly its security. In other words, Russia's demographic travails have terrible and outsized implications, both for those inside the country's borders and for those beyond. The humanitarian toll has already been immense, and the continuing economic cost threatens to be huge; no less important, Russia's demographic decline portends ominously for the external behavior of the Kremlin, which will have to confront a far less favorable power balance than it had been banking on.
11. Title: The Problem Is Palestinian Rejectionism: Why the PA Must Recognize a Jewish State
Authors: Yosef Kuperwasser, Shalom Lipner
Abstract: Nearly two decades of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have failed miserably. The key reason for this failure is the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinians are fully aware that once they sit down at the negotiating table and agreement is reached on all other outstanding issues, they will need to answer whether they are ready to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Israel has maintained its independence and self-determination through its ability to defend itself. But prowess on the battlefield is not equivalent to true stability and peace. The Palestinian refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state stands at the root of the struggle and behind every so-called core issue, from determining borders to resolving the dispute over Palestinian refugees. Genuine reconciliation can be achieved, then, only once the Palestinians come to terms with Israel's existence as a Jewish state.
12. Title: The Sick Man of Asia: China's Health Crisis
Authors: Yanzhong Huang
Abstract: Although China has made remarkable economic progress over the past few decades, its citizens' health has not improved as much. Chinese official data suggest that average life expectancy in China rose by only about five years between 1981 and 2009, from roughly 68 years to 73 years. A look at China's disease burden also reveals a worrisome picture. Like many less developed countries, China still battles a legion of microbial and viral threats, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, and rabies. More Chinese are suffering from mental illness. Despite the seriousness of these issues, in their single-minded pursuit of economic growth, China's leaders have long overlooked public health. After the Maoist health-care system began to collapse in the early 1980s, government spending on health as a share of GDP declined, from about 1.1% in 1980 to about 0.8% in 2002.
13. Title: The True Costs of Humanitarian Intervention: The Hard Truth About a Noble Notion
Authors: Benjamin A Valentino
Abstract: In Libya, advocates of intervention argued, US Pres Barack Obama had found the formula for success: broad regional and international support, genuine burden sharing with allies, and a capable local fighting force to wage the war on the ground. Yet even if the intervention does ultimately give birth to a stable and prosperous democracy, this outcome will not prove that intervention was the right choice in Libya or that similar interventions should be attempted elsewhere. To establish that requires comparing the full costs of intervention with its benefits and asking whether those benefits could be achieved at a lower cost. Washington should replace its focus on military intervention with a humanitarian foreign policy centered on saving lives by funding public health programs in the developing world, aiding victims of natural disasters, and assisting refugees fleeing violent conflict. Indeed, such a strategy could actually save far more people, at a far lower price.
14. Title: The Wisdom of Retrenchment: America Must Cut Back to Move Forward
Authors: Joseph M Parent, Paul K MacDonald
Abstract: In the wake of the Cold War, US foreign policy underwent a profound transformation. Unrestrained by superpower competition, the US ambitions spilled over their former limits. Today, however, US power has begun to wane. As other states rise in prominence, the US' undisciplined spending habits and open-ended foreign policy commitments are catching up with the country. If US policymakers have reduced the country's strategic commitments in response to a decline in its relative power, they have yet to fully embrace retrenchment as a policy and endorse deep spending cuts (especially to the military), redefine Washington's foreign policy priorities, and shift more of the US' defense burdens onto its allies. Far from auguring chaos abroad and division at home, a policy of prudent retrenchment would not only reduce the costs of US foreign policy but also result in a more coherent and sustainable strategy.
15. Title: Trouble on the Home Front
Authors: Richard Katz
Abstract: A decade ago, the great American jobs train fell off its tracks. Traditionally, boosts in private-sector employment have accompanied recoveries from economic downturns. In the first seven years after the beginning of the 1980 and 1990 recessions, for example, the number of private-sector jobs increased by 14%. Yet in January 2008, seven years after the previous pre-recession peak and before the most recent recession began, private-sector jobs were up only 4%. Today, for the first time in the postwar era, there are fewer of these jobs than there were ten years before. Ignoring the overall dearth of jobs, Michael Spence ("The Impact of Globalization on Income and Unemployment," July/August 2011) singles out the fraction of employment in sectors related to trade. He claims that China and other developing countries have taken US jobs and blames globalization for the substantial increase in income inequality across the country.
16. Title: Why We Still Need Nuclear Power: Making Clean Energy Safe and Affordable
Authors: Ernest Moniz
Abstract: Concerns about climate change and air pollution, as well as growing demand for electricity, led many governments to reconsider their aversion to nuclear power, which emits little carbon dioxide and had built up an impressive safety and reliability record. But the movement lost momentum in March, when a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the massive tsunami it triggered devastated Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant. It would be a mistake, however, to let Fukushima cause governments to abandon nuclear power and its benefits. Electricity generation emits more carbon dioxide in the US than does transportation or industry, and nuclear power is the largest source of carbon-free electricity in the country. Nuclear power generation is also relatively cheap, costing less than two cents per kilowatt-hour for operations, maintenance, and fuel. Still, nuclear power faces a number of challenges in terms of safety, construction costs, waste management, and weapons proliferation. If the benefits of nuclear power are to be realized in the US, each of these hurdles must be overcome.