American Foreign Policy in Regions of Conflict: A Global Perspective (American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century)

185 Pages·2011·1.63 MB·English

by  Howard J. Wiarda

American Foreign Policy in Regions of
Conflict
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Edited by Thomas H. Henriksen
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
American Foreign Policy in Regions of Conflict: A Global Perspective
By Howard J. Wiarda
American Foreign Policy in
Regions of Conflict
A Global Perspective
Howard J. Wiarda
AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY IN REGIONS OF CONFLICT
Copyright © Howard J. Wiarda, 2011.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a
division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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and other countries.
ISBN: 978–0–230–11502–6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wiarda, Howard J., 1939– American foreign policy in
regions of conflict : a global perspective / Howard J. Wiarda.
p. cm.—(American foreign policy in the 21st century) ISBN 978–0–230–11502–6 (hardback) 1.
United States—Foreign relations—2009–2. Conflict management—United States. I. Title.
JZ1480.W49 2011
327.73—dc22
2010048483
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Note from the Editor
Preface
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Western Europe
Chapter 3 Eastern Europe
Chapter 4 Russia
Chapter 5 Asia
Chapter 6 The Middle East
Chapter 7 Latin America
Chapter 8 Africa
Chapter 9 Conclusion
Index
Note from the Editor
America confronts an altered and still-unfolding international landscape since
the collapse of the Soviet Union. For over four decades, the United States
marshaled its military, economic, political, and ideological energies to contain
and defeat the USSR. The disintegration of the Soviet nemesis in 1991
transformed international relations and American foreign policy. The momentous
end of the bipolar stand-off has ushered in an increasingly complex, less safe,
and more unpredictable world with start of the twenty-first century.
The United States now faces a broad range of challenges. Among the
seemingly traditional international affairs, Washington contemplates the return
of great power rivalries with an ascendant China, resurgent Russia, and self-
reliant European Union. Rising regional powers, such as India, Iran, and Brazil,
complicate the global picture in ways unimagined during the Cold War.
Additionally, there are important and troubled bilateral relations with Pakistan,
Venezuela, North Korea, and Mexico, to cite a few countries that scarcely
registered on the State Department’s radar in the previous era. Prospects for a
Middle East peace and a stable region appear more elusive than ever despite
global changes, adding another dimension to the ongoing turbulence in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Our new era is also marked by new—or re-emerging—problems. Terrorism,
piracy, ethnic conflicts, climate change, environmental degradation, nuclear
proliferation, energy demands, economic globalization, and the role of
international law on a host of issues—all (as well as other topics) beg to be
addressed, navigated, or resolved.
This series recognizes that a page has turned in America’s global role. It also
takes into account that foreign policy cannot concentrate alone on state-to-state
negotiations in isolation from the intricacies of other burgeoning concerns. It
seeks to shed light on America’s responses to the new reality. How the United
States has responded—or should respond—to a wide variety of twenty-first
century issues worldwide forms the central theme of the series.
THOMAS H. HENRIKSEN
Senior Fellow
Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
Preface
I began my academic career in 1965 as a comparative politics scholar
specializing in Latin America. Our goal, that of my contemporaries and myself,
was to acquire specialized knowledge, or area studies expertise, in the Latin
America region. That meant a thorough immersion in both political science and
the history, geography, economics, sociology, languages, and culture of Latin
America. And the assumption was that we would use our specialized academic
knowledge to help enlighten and improve U.S. policy toward the area.
Foreign policy then, in those halcyon years of John F. Kennedy’s New
Frontier, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and such new and exciting foreign
policy initiatives as the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress, and the Agency
for International Development, would be based on a thorough, first-hand
knowledge of the countries and areas affected. These were the years, the 1960s,
of “the politics of the developing areas” and of a close connection between
academia and policymaking, as we all struggled to understand the phenomenon
of the new or emerging nations and their newfound importance on the world
stage.
Policymaking in those years often looked to academia for knowledge and
advice, while we in the academic world expected, perhaps naively, that our
research findings would be widely read and used by policymakers. There was a
close connection between analyzing development from an academic perspective
and a policy of bringing development to less-favored countries. The assumption
was that academic and specialized country or regional expertise would be used
to inform public policy; sometimes we academic scholars had real policy
influence.
But then, several large events transpired that made this close relationship
between academia and policy strained and acrimonious:
1. The Vietnam War produced a sharp division between academics, especially
those who studied Third World development, and the Johnson
administration.
2. President Richard Nixon, suspicious that most academics were Democrats,
cut many of the links and programs that had existed between academia and
policymakers.
3. The rise and expansion of the Washington-based and savvy think tanks—
the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Brookings Institution, the
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Heritage
Foundation, and other more specialized research cum policy groups—
meant policy-relevant advice would come mainly from these institutions
and no longer from the nation’s universities.
4. Because of the ongoing Vietnam War, Watergate, and Nixon’s disgrace,
academia became more radical, more politicized, and cut off from
policymaking.
5. Meanwhile, the field of political science, including its subfields of
international relations and comparative politics, became more quantitative,
mathematical, and “scientific,” concerned more, like economics, with
fashioning abstract mathematical modeling than proffering advice to
policymakers.
By 1980, after having spent the first fifteen years of my career in academia, I
was quite unhappy with the trends developing in political science and in
academia more generally. During 1979–1981, I had retooled at Harvard
University’s prestigious Center for International Affairs (CFIA, now the
Weatherhead Center) as a foreign policy specialist. And then in 1981 I was
called to Washington to begin a twenty-plus-year stint in the think tank/policy
spheres. I only returned full-time to academia in 2003 when I was offered an
endowed chair in international relations and the headship of a brand new
Department of International Affairs in a leading American university.
Going back to academia and to the field of international relations after a near-
quarter-century-long absence was a bit of a shock. I do not wish to exaggerate
the changes because much good and policy-relevant research and writing still
goes on within the nation’s universities. But the trends are clearly in some other
directions and we need to know what those are. First, the field of international
relations, like political science more generally, has become much more
“scientific,” to the exclusion of more qualitative and interpretive points of view.
Second, in its emphasis on rational choice, mathematical modeling, and research
methodology for its own sake, the field has largely abandoned the older idea of
informing policy. Third, culture, history, geography, and language and area
studies have all been denigrated in favor of developing measurable “data sets,”
often of dubious scientific merit. And fourth, the interconnections between the
policy worlds and academia have been definitively cut, with the two proceeding
in quite different directions and having few, if any, connections between them.