Challenge and Response : Anticipating U. S. Military Security Concern

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Challenge and response: anticipating US military security concerns

/ Karl P. Magyar, editor-in-chief; associate editors, Maris

McCrabb, Albert Mitchum, Lewis B. Ware.

443p.

Includes bibliographical references. 1. Military planning-United States. 2. National SecurityUnited States. 3. World politics-1989- I. Magyar. K. P. (Karl P.) U153.C49 1994 355'.033073-dc20 94-18448 CIP ISBN: 1-58566-053-1 First Printing August 1994 Second Printing April 1999 Third Printing March 2001 Digitize Copy from Third Printing November 2002 NOTE: Pagination changed

DISCLAIMER This publication was produced in the Department of Defense school environment in the interest of academic freedom and the advancement of national defense-related concepts. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the United States government. This publication has been reviewed by security and policy review authorities and is cleared for public release.

Contents Page DISCLAIMER .................................................................... ii

PREFACE .......................................................................... ix

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW The Emerging Post-Cold-War International

Order and Changing Conflict Environment.........................3

PART I THE CHALLENGE Regional Study 1 Conflict and Confrontation in

the Post-Cold-War Middle East ........................................43

Regional Study 2 Security Issues in the Former

Warsaw Pact Region ..........................................................65

Arms Control and Proliferation .........................................91

The Changing Nature of Alliances ..................................117

The Military's Changing Sociological Concerns .............141

US National Security Strategy .........................................159

Conquest and Cohesion The Psychological

Nature of War ..................................................................195

PART II THE RESPONSE The Diplomacy of Regional Conflict

Management.....................................................................221

Forecasting Military Technological Needs......................239

Constituting US Military Manpower Needs ....................253

Military Responses in Nonpolitical Conflicts..................267

Supporting United Nations and Regional

Peacekeeping Efforts .......................................................293

Parallel Warfare Its Nature and Application....................313

Parallel Warfare Anticipating the Enemy’s

Response ..........................................................................335

Air Theory for the Twenty-first Century ........................351

Waging Wars with Nonlethal Weapons..........................377

Economic Warfare Targeting Financial Systems

As Centers of Gravity ......................................................391

Changing Status of Nuclear Forces..................................411

Developing Space Assets.................................................443

Conflict Termination Every War Must End.....................465

CONTRIBUTORS...........................................................483

Preface The formal dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the coalition war to oust Iraq from Kuwait occurred within months of each other. These events were of great significance to Western statesmen and strategic planners who recognized that a fundamental transformation of the international system was taking place. The decline of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as a cohesive unit raises the most fundamental question for the military planner: Who will be the likely enemies in the future for which they must prepare? This was not a dilemma during the cold war as all conflicts in the world were evaluated within the prevailing EastWest context. Having assessed the challenges posed by the enemy's capabilities, military planners worked on the assumption of the existence of a hierarchy of responses that could be used as required, with a massive strategic nuclear attack being reserved for the belligerent members of the Warsaw Pact-if necessary. Such a response is not envisioned for any conceivable enemy today. The 1991 Gulf War, however, affirmed very early the prevalence of war outside the cold war context and that military responses to future conflicts will have to be formulated in a wide sub-nuclear range. The United States-led coalition's response to Iraq's initiatives did just that. New weapon systems, supporting equipment, strategies, and tactics were implemented in the defeat of Iraq's armed forces. Influencing the prosecution and management of that war was the absence of the Soviet Union as a balancing variable. The lessons learned from that encounter will certainly influence future engagements-but against whom is not clear. The authors of this volume agree on one point: That conflicts will continue in the future and that the US will perhaps find it in its interest to become an active participant in some wars. This volume ix

attempts to bring together thoughts about the environmental context in which such, wars will take place and about possible US military reactions. The Introduction and Overview offers a broad review of the major determinants of international change. Part I follows with a current review of two regions, the Middle East and the area covered by the former Warsaw Pact, whose conflicts have the greater potential of expansion and negative consequence to the US and to our traditional allies than those conflicts in any other region. No attempt is made to systematically review other regions where conflict is not as globally threatening. This section also offers insight into other factors that portray the global conflict environment, war, changing US military concerns and US security perceptions. Together, these essays address what we perceive as the “Challenge.” Part II ranges over some specific security situations, the changing nature of warfare, and some anticipated avenues of responding to the emerging challenges, Conflicts and wars may be resolved by more than only violent means, and these are considered within the context of diplomatic or collective efforts. Responses to nonpolitical conflicts those in which the defeat of a regime or an insurgent force is not an objective-are examined. Peacekeeping operations, which have recently placed great demands on the US, are investigated. The new technological capabilities are reviewed. Air power, parallel warfare, and war termination theory are presented, And the utility of nuclear forces as well as space assets are updated. These topics and others address the “Response,” The authors of this volume are all affiliated with the US Air Force Air Command and Staff College at Air University. Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The book is to comprise one of the texts for our students, but it is expected that it will generate a wider interest among military and civilian audiences. The editors have not imposed methodological restrictions and indeed, we have

encouraged a diversity of opinions but within an academic context, Our own immediate challenge was to produce this wide-ranging review under great 'time constraints in order to make a very up-todate volume available to those contemplating future US military security concerns. It is important to stress that we all write in our personal capacities and that no portion of this volume necessarily reflects the official view of the US Air Force or any US government agency. We, the editors, wish to thank the authors for their timely response to our request for quality work under severe time constraints. At the Air University Press, we wish to thank Dr Elizabeth Bradley, director; Ms Debbie Banker; Ms Joan Hickey; Ms Linda Colson; Mr. Steve Garst; and our editors, Mr. Hugh Richardson and Dr Glenn Morton, for responding to the challenge of producing this volume on such notice. Karl P. Magyar, PhD

INTRODUCTION

AND

OVERVIEW

The Emerging Post-Cold-War International Order and Changing Conflict Environment Dr Karl P. Magyar We have recently experienced the rather sudden end of the cold war, an event that ranks among not only the top public events of this century, but in view of the projected consequences had a nuclear war occurred, may be judged as a seminal point in the history of our civilization. Mankind's highest level of technology had been impressed into the service of military security as two sizable alliances faced each other nervously as they contemplated the horrendous costs of implementing their war-making capabilities. For the great powers, a big war didn't make sense. But for many states, smaller wars may well remain attractive. This was made amply evident by Iraq's attempted absorption of Kuwait and refusal to back down in the face of poignant warnings by the US to do so. The ensuing war in 1991 ranked as a major engagement, yet not long thereafter it did not deter the loosely organized forces of Somalia's warlord Gen Mohamed Farah Aidid from shooting up UN peacekeeping forces and from inflicting heavy casualties on America's highly trained Ranger Force. And while US attention focused on Iraq and Somalia, Yugoslavia was undergoing a very bloody breakup; many countries, including parts of what had been the Soviet Union, experienced violent civil wars; and numerous prolonged conflicts raged throughout Mrica, scarcely affected by the demise of the cold war. We may deduce that civilization has been spared, but history's relentless onslaught on numerous societies and their warriors continue unabated. We are inundated by analyses that portray as revolutionary the changes taking place in the post-cold-war era, yet we must qualify such dramatic assessments to keep a sober view.1 A broad sweep of recorded history since Thucydides wrote The Peloponnesian War reveals the pervasiveness of the use of force as the final arbiter of unresolved disputes, and this method and tendency have not been

stilled. What does change over history is the nature of war-making tools and the methods of their implementation. The cold war demonstrated history's pervasive penchant for the use of force, but nuclear weapons had been created whose potential use made peaceful resolution of conflicts more advantageous. However, while that rationally derived decision not to employ these weapons should properly be celebrated, the resort to lesser levels of force remains as attractive as ever.2 It may indeed be argued that the use of force may increase in light of the global proliferation of information that has sensitized the masses about their relative deprivations and hence diminished respect for their traditional political structures.3 Anticipating future challenges, then, concerns the identification of several factors: Who will do the fighting? What will be their objectives? Which war-making tools will be implemented? How can we contain the wars and keep external intervenors at bay? How can we reduce their frequency as well as intensity? Which of those conflicts and battles will concern US security interests? Preparing responses to these conflicts entails, above all, sophisticated sociocultural analysis and the ability to constantly adjust the war machinery in terms of its tools as well as their methods of implementation. Changes have occurred and will continue to be experienced regarding which means are employed in addressing conflict and, to a lesser extent, what the objects of forcible acquisition will be. But a fundamental transformation in human nature, as depicted so well by Thucydides, is not to be anticipated, and hence the attraction for the use of force will most likely continue the prevalence of war. Security will be ensured for

those who most concisely anticipate the challenges-and prepare appropriate responses.

The Changing Structure of the International Order The end of the cold war marked an acceleration of change in the international order. This section examines changes in and the evolution of the international order, the transition to a two-worlds system, the proliferation of nonviable states, regional identification, and ideological developments. Change and Evolution History has experienced numerous eras of distinct international systems-which may be viewed as established patterns of relationships between states. The cold-war system, with its overarching characteristic of two predominant powers, the US and the Soviet Union, each leading its respective military alliancesNATO and the Warsaw Pact-has recently disintegrated as the Soviet Union fragmented along largely ethnic and historical lines. As with the disintegration of all such systems, the transition to a new order is fraught with uncertainty as a system in transition is not formulated by anyone's grand design.4 Indeed, no one power needs to predominate at all times although an international hierarchy inevitably emerges since power abhors a vacuum. The US is certainly poised to continue exercising its established global role, but we are uncertain of emerging military competitors. Whoever they will be, they will have to attain history's necessary mix: ambition matched by resources. An imbalance in these two variables leads to certain defeat-as was experienced by the Germans and Japanese in World War II, by the Soviets in the cold war, and by the Iraqis in the 1991 Gulf War. Change and transformation, then, are to be expected as they express the historical tendency of societies to predominate over others and to advance their interests. Even those without ambitions

for acquisition must take cognizance of those who embark on the path of aggrandizement, lest they be absorbed. Change offers fortuitous opportunity to some; others suffer its wrath. An examination of history also reveals a pervasive hierarchic order among states with virtually all states embarked on a course of evolution from weak, dependent quasi-states or colonies, to eventually great powers or imperial nations.5 After new states are formed, they enter what is, for most, a long period of internal consolidation in search of legitimate sociopolitical institutions. Thereafter, a state is prepared to export its influence or military controls into usually weak or vulnerable neighboring states or its subregion, often resulting in the enlargement of the state. Such states then may undertake imperial or global ventures to exercise direct controls for purposes of exploitation or the strategic pacification of territories far removed from the home base. However, at that level, when expanding ambitions are not matched by developed resources, and the domestic base becomes delegitimized, the compulsive phase sets in as the state declines, usually precipitously, losing its great power ranking. This is precisely what happened to the Soviet Union recently. This evolutionary model suggests that the historically pervasive competition among states will soon see new challengers to the US as the only truly global power, while for the US, the challenge remains to match our global interests with resources. The model also identifies fundamentally different types of wars that states fight at different stages of their evolutionary cycle. The bulk of the world's nations are presently in their consolidative stage with roughly half of them experiencing serious civil strife. Every region in the world contains expansionists; however, only the US may be properly characterized as a global power. Today, there are few remaining colonial dependencies fighting liberation wars for independence. The Western Sahara is one such example. Others in the formative stage are the breakaway territories from the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Bosnia is an

excellent example of a new state undergoing a formative war. Most of the conflicts in the world, however, are civil wars, which typically occur, in the early consolidative period of a nation's evolution. These proliferate largely in the states that have recently received their independence. America's own civil war was a classic example of a consolidative war. Civil wars traditionally tended not to attract significant direct foreign military intervention, but during the old-war days, such civil wars often incorporated the contest between the two superpowers. It is the expansive phase in the evolution of a nation that experiences the most disruptive wars as such conflicts are intenationalized, and they may upset the regional power balances. If the wars are not quickly halted or contained, they could expand to global proportions. Germany and the Soviet Union engaged in such an expansive-stage conflict when they carved up contiguous Poland on the eve of World War II. More recently, Iraq's attempted absorption of contiguous Kuwait demonstrated the tendency today of such a war of expansion to attract distant external involvement. Finally, global powers tend to be busy military interventionists-but rarely as blatant initiators of conflicts. Rather, they intervene in existing conflicts around the globe to redress a deteriorating balance or, during the cold-war days, to neutralize the perceived gains by the adversary. The popular image of such global powers depicts them as perennial aggressors, but more precisely, their frequent involvements in conflicts tend to be limited and geared towards halting conflicts before they develop into major confrontations. Great powers are interested in maintaining a balance of power rather than risk having a minor distant regional conflict escalate to the point where the home base may be threatened. The Soviets confronted such a prospect during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. States may be hierarchically organized according to their evolutionary phase, but another traditional classification system must also be addressed as it, too, reflects the waning cold-war structures. For several years we had referred to the “first world,” 7

meaning the democratic, free market, economically developed states. The “second world” included the authoritarian, command economy states of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The “third world” included everyone else, assumed to be the economically less developed. However, this latter group may be further delineated by further subgroups to acknowledge the great differences among this mixed collection of states. The Warsaw Pact has now been dissolved and the Soviet Union has fragmented, and therefore the second world is now but an historical expression. In effect we now have only two worlds-the first and third worlds. However, this two-worlds context may also express not only the division of the world between the “haves” and the “have nots,” but also within most states the division between the privileged minorities and the impoverished masses-which implies that all states reflect this two-worlds division. This is especially the case in traditional third world countries where such divisions are becoming evermore significant. Poverty does not drive a poor state to make war on a rich nation, but the acute class differences within states may engender civil wars, especially when evident, significant socioeconomic differences are also delineated along ethnic lines. Such civil wars in turn may often spill into neighboring states or invite external participants. A prime example of a civil conflict stemming from extreme social disparities is the vortex of conflict in Liberia since 1989, which spilled into neighboring countries within two years. Such factional discontent has been in great evidence during the last few years, and much of it may be ascribed to the impact of modem communications as they portray the possibilities of better lifestyles to restive populations around the globe. The enemy in such cases is seen by the masses to be not other countries but their own inept and corrupt governments. The Transition to a Two-Worlds System The world is steadily polarizing into two socioeconomic camps and the gulf between them is widening despite the programs of 8

structural reforms introduced by international agencies to rectify this situation. Vast parts of the third world are becoming marginalized. The ultimate characteristic that distinguishes the two camps is their economic competitiveness. Again, this criterion is as valid among states as within them. What fuels this competitive ability is of secondary consideration as it may be based on technological abilities, productive workers, access to financial resources, or commercially attractive geographic or natural resources. But what matters is the capability to convert such advantages into a competitive edge. The new global economic network increasingly connects the economies of the first world and the small developed sectors of the states in the third world-which is the effect of isolating further the world's noncompetitive people from the first world and from their own privileged elites the third world. Today, the members of the third world number about threefourths of the global population, and their plight as well as their numbers are increasing. Another problem with the two-worlds division is the placement of the members of the dissolved Warsaw Pact. Some, those states such as Hungary, Czechoslovak Republic, Poland, the Baltic states, and Russia may realistically expect join the first world, but their competitive abilities must for e most part first undergo a major transitlon.6 Should they succeed, some may aspire to join the European Union. Russia may strive to attain a renewed global rolepossibly more powerful than when she led the Soviet Union-now that Russia is socially somewhat more cohesive than before, while not having to be responsible for the poorer southern region. And the former southern republics of the Soviet Union such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, as well as Eastern Europe's Bulgaria and Rumania, will most likely qualify as third world states. This may also be the fate of certain areas of e former Yugoslavia. The key is competitiveness, the imbalance of which in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia contributed to their breakup and much of the subsequent violence. The result is that the frontiers of the third world have now shifted considerably

northwards, directly to Europe, and expanded the numbers of the Middle Eastern region's third world countries with the addition of the Soviet lion's southern republics. This may imply greater instability, the Middle East has already been a volatile area, to which e now added numerous conflicts in contiguous states. The Proliferation of Nonviable States The world has always known poor states but they had existed in isolation, removed from the mainstream of international affairs, or they were colonial territories of European empires whose traditional character was maintained if by virtuous design. In fact, only their rare commercial advantages were developed and then only to suit the requirements of the colonial power and not the subjects. As these colonies became independent, it was feared that most lacked the essential prerequisites for a meaningful independent existence. They would not be capable competitors. Analysts identified the “small state” problem with its focus on small size and population bases. Soon there were numerous “micro” and “mini” states in the United Nations whose populations were often less than those of modest-sized cities in the developed world. 7 Would these states be “viable”? Today there are two dimensions to this problem. First, what constitutes viability? Neither size nor population can be the sole criterion as small political entities such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Gulf Emirates, Singapore, and Hong Kong are doing well. By contrast, huge countries such as Mauritania, Niger, Sudan, Mongolia, or Afghanistan are barely able to function. Viability, then, has a qualitative aspect, which means that more than only quantifiable criteria must be considered. We may suggest that to be considered viable, a state should be able to convert its resources into socioeconomic progress for its inhabitants in accordance with the more advanced standards of the international community. We may also ask, if only a restricted elite profits from the little economic progress that is made, ought the state to be considered to be viable? This debate is heavily informed by the 10

character and successes of the first world. As the gulf widens between the two worlds, more states become nonviable and thus potential sources of instability. 8 The second dimension of the viability problem concerns the consequences of the proliferation of many such small states as well as large, but noncompetitive, nonviable states in the international system. It was feared, as in the case of Grenada, that small states would barter their scarce resources such as strategic location to the superpowers or to other regionally ambitious states. As a small state, Cuba had managed to be the most dangerous confrontation point of the cold war. Kuwait, with its population of less than 1 million, became the object of a major war due ultimately to its own nonviable defensive capability. Despite its size and population of some 8 million, Somalia's descent to anarchy may portend a possible flood of other third world states that will demonstrate the problems of nonviability. Yet another related problem surfaced in 1993 when the elected president of Haiti, the newly elected civilian president of Nigeria, and the elected government of Burundi were ousted by their militaries. They all called on the international community to help install them in power. 9 If done, would their rule be truly legitimate if it had relied on external force or influence? The end of the cold war will ensure that not all conflicts stemming from nonviable conditions will be the object of global interests; however, they may still be exploited by regional expansionists with far-reaching consequences. Regional Identification During the cold war the superpowers in effect developed the world community into an integrated global system. Conflicts anywhere in the world attracted the attention of one, then of the other, superpower; hence, even distant developments were examined for strategic advantage. However, the end of the cold war has influenced the regionalization of global affairs again as vast areas are now turning inward while some regions are becoming marginalized in relation to the major global players. 11

While certain positive developments may emerge from this tendency in terms of conflicts that will not engulf the globe, such regionalization may have adverse effects on certain members of the regions who possess only limited resources for their own defense and who may not be able to prevent becoming involved in local conflicts. And another problem concerns the consequences of marginalization of certain states and entire regions with its adverse economic implications that may engender civil strife. Prominent areas subject to such regionalist tendencies include Eastern Europe, the territories of the former Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, North America, North and Northeast Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.10 A review of these regions will quickly reveal the missing cold-war context as was amply illustrated by the absence of the Soviet Union as a factor in the Gulf War. Eastern Europe has largely been abandoned by the Soviet Union, and its countries are seeking their own separate links with the European Union, NATO, or with the external world community. The former republics of the Soviet Union are seeking their own new ties and redefining relations with Russia. Yugoslavia's breakup would scarcely have been tolerated by the Soviet Union during the cold-war days, but today, beyond the United Nations' peacekeeping role, Western Europe has been reluctant to intervene militarily, which in turn discouraged a greater role by the US. That conflict may yet spill into the rest of the Balkan region, but despite dire predictions, the war and atrocities of Yugoslavia have not spread beyond its borders. The Gulf War was the first major confrontation of the postcold-war days, the prosecution of which was enabled to a large extent by the nonavailability of the Soviet Union on Iraq's side. The allied coalition, which included several regional states, and the peace initiatives among Israel, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PW), and neighboring states in 1993 also bear the imprint of the new regionalization. However, as previously noted, the Middle Eastern region is not necessarily becoming more pacific as new forces are emerging and volatile new territories are 12

being appended to this region. More positive prospects for regionalization may be found in Southeast Asia. With the absence of the Soviet Union and the recent initiatives by Vietnam to invite foreign economic ties, regionalization is becoming identified' with intensified economic interaction which, if successful, should imply the stabilization of this previously volatile region, which had played such a major role in the cold war. Regionalization was also evident in the 1993 debate in the US regarding the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). And the US is recognizing the economic interest shift from its traditional European orientation to that of the Pacific rim region and to its own hemisphere. The US acknowledged the effectiveness of Europe's economic regionalization by participating in the formation of our own competitive trade structures. It is in Africa where the negative dimensions of regionalization are most in evidence. With the absence of the Soviet Union as an adversary on that continent, Africa has ceased to be an area of strategic global competition, while its generally declining economic performance has rendered Africa of marginal utility value as a global partner. North and Northeast Africa have become the objects of Islamist designs, which may aspire to incorporate both areas into a coherent Islamic fundamentalist (Islamist) region with the goal of eliminating all secular governments. Closer ties to the Middle East may be expected, and should Islamism there engulf Saudi Arabia and other states, a new Islamic bloc could emerge as a very formidable strategic region which would redefine traditional Western security interests stretching from Portugal to Pakistan. 11 Sub-Saharan Africa is undergoing another regionalist episode since its initial attempts to establish a meaningful united identity following independence. Much of the continent was divided along ideological lines with excolonial, Soviet, Cuban, Chinese, and US interests vying for strategic advantage and surrogate battlegrounds. Africa is presently forced to turn inward, as it has quickly lost its attraction to external powers. The peacekeeping effort in Somalia 13

started off as an enthusiastic international operation, but the ensuing frustration soon demonstrated the limited interests in that anarchic conflict which, despite a substantial investment in manpower and money, would not be resolved without a prolonged commitment. Recommendations for direct participation by the Organization for African Unity (OAU) or for the formation of a regional peacekeeping force to be constituted by neighboring countries were soon made. These proposals followed on the heels of the questionable effort by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOW AS) to bring peace in Liberia's civil war with the insertion of a well-armed, multinational military force from the region. After more than three years of massive efforts which included much aerial bombing, the fighting had not stopped; and it may be questioned if this regional effort did not in fact prolong the war and suffering. Certainly, much of the region became destabilized in the process. Regionalism bears close scrutiny as it may offer positive steps to resolve local problems, but regionalism may also contribute to tensions due to insufficient local resources. In such regions, we may expect the emergence of dominant actors whose hegemonial aspirations will naturally be resisted by potential victims. Regionalism may also lead to intensified cooperation in economic fora such as integrated communities. This would be a welcome development as it has been amply ascertained that such integration subsequently dissuades hostile relations. However, we need to guard that regionalization does not become a euphemism for marginalization as in the case of Africa. Ideological Developments Has history ended, and has Western-style liberal democracy won and will it sweep across the globe? This is a question asked by Francis f*ckuyama.12 Previously, Daniel Bell had asked if ideology had ended. 13 We may ask: is ideology dead or are global ideologies undergoing transformation-as they have done throughout history? Two major developments this century have 14

contributed to the skepticism regarding doctrinaire ideologies, those which express not only an historical mission and ethic of a society but also a dynamic action plan for the future. First, Adolf Hitler's extreme national socialist ideology led Germany on its path of unprecedented destruction. Second, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, as well as the fundamental changes taking place in China and other socialist states, has discredited communism as another extreme ideology. The result is that whether right or left, in their extreme forms, there has emerged widespread distrust about ideologies as they inevitably introduce authoritarianism and atrocities. Ideologies which are to be tolerated are those that are in the political center and demonstrate a social ethic but retain a good degree of flexibility, pragmatism, and vagueness. They also do not proselytize aggressively. In this sense, ideologies have gotten a bad reputation, but they have not been eliminated. It is not conceivable that mankind's sociopolitical development can advance in an ideological vacuum. Values and collective aspirations are universal cultural characteristics; what changes over time are only the specific contents. “Pragmatism” in the sense of “whatever works” may sound very nonideological, but identifying what works to attain a specific goal reveals an ideological orientation. Liberal democracy, the well-established ideology of the West, concerns near universal participation in determining the composition and direction of governments, protecting certain rights, and maintaining essentially private ownership and centralized market economies. This is the prevailing ideology the first world whose members exhibit mostly subtle differences on the issue of government intervention in socioeconomic policy. Because of the attainment of the advanced economic welfare levels of the members of the first world, liberal democracy is held in high esteem by that sector ld is gaining adherents in other parts of the world. Interestingly, while it is widely assumed that the socioeconomic success of the first world derives directly from its moderate ideology, this cause and effect relationship is subject 15

debate. China's economy has grown at an astounding rate well over a decade while maintaining largely centralized controls-although there is no question that recent liberalization measures over certain sectors have contributed these rapid advances. In a similar vein, Asia's newly industrializing countries (NIC) advanced impressively under less-than-democratic conditions and with the governments playing a heavy interventionist role. In essence, we must guard against making unwarranted assumptions about liberal democracy as a universal political ideal and as an economic panacea. Opposition to liberal democracy stems from two sources. Some argue that the inherent socioeconomic inequality, as is evident many liberal democracies, is a necessary feature in order for it to work. Those who are noncompetitive fall by the wayside and either exploited or neglected. The result is crime, slums, drugs, unemployment, and poverty-in essence, the prevailing third world component within first world societies. The other source of opposition stems from a variety of other ideological foundations that allude to the inappropriateness of liberal democracy for their societies, or they posit the superior ethic their own ideologies. In the former case, militant national socialists (fascists) saw liberal democracy as weak and likely to survive in a competitive and hostile world. A nation's human resources had to be melded into a militant productive machine to advance that nation's security. Communism, on the other hand, promised an egalitarian utopia to all, but it invariably stumbled into variations of Stalin's gulags. Liberal democracy won the contest for survival with the leading proponents of both National Socialism and communism, although there is in evidence an occasional revival of interest in fascistleaning sentiment as in Russia's 1993 election, and there exists considerable residual support for communism among its previous adherents and those who never abandoned all Marxist orthodoxy. The latter still comprise a quarter of the world's population. Others reject liberal democracy on the grounds of its inappropriateness to their conditions or because of the existence of 16

long-standing culturally based opposition. In the former case, many third world states may pay lip service to the tenets of liberal democracy, but the reality depicts oligarchic authoritarianism whose leaders defend their position by arguing that the standard features of liberal democracy are premature for their societies as they lack the essential institutional prerequisites. Their critics reply that this explanation conveniently assures the perpetuation of the oligarchies in power-whether military or civilian. These arguments need to be reconciled, especially for those states judged to be nonviable as even with the best of efforts, it is unrealistic to expect that liberal democracy will flourish long in a failing socioeconomic environment. Those who base their opposition on cultural considerations present more formidable challenges. Many argue that their cultural traditions ascribe a different context for human rights or for universal political participation. The Chinese ask if the US, with a mere 200-year political tradition, can teach a country with a tradition dating 4,000 years. Here, we should guard lest we underestimate the influence of the cultural environment that shapes the interpretation of ideologies. In other words, liberal democracy, socialism, capitalism, human rights, and so on, have gained wide respect as ideological concepts, but they will be manifested in different ways. This was demonstrated by Mao Tse Tung whose Communist Party adopted a Marxist ideology, which had been conceived within the context of Europe's industrial revolution, but which was steadily modified in China to suit the needs of a peasant movement striving to lift China from the feudal age into the twentieth century. Many of Marx's philosophical premises deriving from Europe's intellectual history were discarded as Mao gradually altered the imported ideology to suit the traditional Chinese context. Towards the end of Mao's rule, many age-old Confucian tenets were validated again-though they had been actively suppressed during his first decade in power. Certainly he used Marxist ideology as an operational doctrine to justify his assumption of power within China, but he did not accept the

assumptions of his Eastern European and Soviet counterparts whose claims to universalistic truths had been well grounded in Europe's philosophical traditions and periodic demonstrations of messianic proselytization. The consequence of this cultural difference was the Sino-Soviet split, which fueled the failures of Marxism in the West. China's more parochial cultural tradition enabled that country to survive-as it has for four millennia-while the more orthodox Soviet-style Marxist regimes all collapsed, as did Hitler's projected 1,OOO-year Reich, and in a previous age, Europe's globe-spanning empires-all after comparatively short life spans. There are several indicators pointing toward new ideological developments. The foremost force that is enjoying a resurgence is religion-which throughout history has rarely been far removed from political concems.14 The current episode was inspired by the 1979 ouster of the Shah of Iran by the Islamic fundamentalists, led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Soon, several other such Islamist movements swept the Middle East and North and Northeast Africa, gaining, if not outright power, much respect among the secular governments who were their targets. The enemies are not only the non-Muslim infidel, but also the degenerate and secular governments in Muslim societies that hold any governing doctrine other than those derived from the Koran. Western-style liberal democracy certainly cannot be compromised with such tenets. Should this political movement succeed in ousting all non-Islamic governments in the huge Muslim world stretching from Mauritania to Pakistan, by uniting, it could aspire to become a new superpower, fueled by the substantial resources of the Arabian peninsula-an area identified as a prime target. Other religious sources of political influence include a new wave of Hindu fundamentalism in India, while Christian fundamentalists have become a potent political force in the U.S. And the Russian Orthodox Church may emerge as another such political force as was evidenced by its mediative role in the turbulent days in Moscow in 1993.

In the third world, variations of socialism will survive but not for long in their militant or doctrinaire forms. Ideological flexibility will be conditioned by hard socioeconomic realities. Yesterday's liberation heroes have failed to produce, but unless the economic fortunes of their countries are reversed, the emergence of new controversial leaders is to be expected. Their doctrines will certainly call for a redefinition of relations with the first world, reparations to be paid by the first world to compensate for historical injustices, and a call for greater unity among themselves to maximize their bargaining power. Variations of democracy will be in evidence, but they will enjoy only a short life span in the absence of dramatic socioeconomic progress. Ultimately, the solutions to the third world's problems will probably be addressed more effectively by evolving ideological developments in the first world as they are modified for the third world context, than by the third world's own formulations. As economically marginalized territories, their own ideologies will also remain marginalized. Redefining the United Nations's Global Mission Like its predecessor the League of Nations, the United Nations (UN) was established to prevent the outbreak of another world war by implementing collective security measures. The emphasis in both cases was the prevention of wars between states, but today most conflicts are within states. Certainly many of these civil wars have the potential of spilling into their regions, and indeed, many have done so. However, as in the case of Somalia, emerging international humanitarian sentiment is demonstrating concern for lives lost regardless of the nature of the conflict. This new global vision is being developed rapidly as the United Nations is expanding its traditional concern with only international wars to include wars at the domestic level as well. A clear distinction between the two levels is becoming difficult to make as civil wars increasingly tend to become internationalized. During the cold war, the United Nations was the scene of the spirited diplomatic struggle between East and West for allegiance 19

of the “South”-the third world.15 When united, the South's voting strength in the General Assembly would invariably determine whose views would prevail. After the massive armed intervention by the United Nations in the Korean conflict in the early 1950s, the United Nations was subsequently excluded from participating militarily in most major cold war conflicts such as the war in Vietnam. Instead, the United Nations focused its attention on the vast social and humanitarian concerns of especially the numerous nations that had recently received their independence. It was reasoned that addressing the source of problems should reduce the likelihood of war's breaking out. In the security realm, the United Nations turned its attention to peaceful intervention in third world conflicts in the form of peacekeeping operations as a replacement for the much more ambitious designs of collective security. In that endeavor, the results are mixed. Lucia Mouat expressed the reason for the peacekeeping trend, “Often more by default than by design, UN peacekeepers have been taking on the role of world Cop.”16 In theory, the United Nations ought to be the ideal institution for addressing these regional conflicts, but the organizational structure of the United Nations has not been developed sufficiently to take on such a huge responsibility. In a speech to the United Nations in September 1993, President Clinton warned that the United Nations cannot become engaged in every one of the world's conflicts and that the United Nations must know when to say no.17 As of the date of that speech, the United Nations had 17 peacekeeping missions under way at an annual cost of $3.5 billion and with results far from universally positive. One hundred thousand United Nations-sponsored peacekeeping troops were deployed, one-fourth of them in the former Yugoslavia alone-yet the atrocities there had not ceased and peace remained elusive. The United Nations's operation in Somalia consumed over a third of its peacekeeping budget and, likewise, peace remained elusive. Addressing the evolving problem posed by renegade general Mohamed Farah Aidid in Somalia, the New York Times noted, “Arresting and trying criminals is completely uncharted territory

for the United Nations,”18 Other controversial involvements include Cambodia, where despite the expenditure of $2 billion, that country has not been pacified and could erupt in war again, In Angola, the United Nations's efforts came to naught as the insurgency against the government resumed after election results were rejected by the government's opponents. And in Cyprus, the internal standoff persists with the United Nations's peacekeeping mission in place 29 years. By contrast, the UN's operation in Sinai is judged to be a success. Besides the peacekeeping controversies, another notable debate concerns the work of the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, which convened in Vienna in mid-1993. A major ideological debate emerged as delegates debated and disagreed on certain aspects of human rights, Are human rights universal or culturally relative, it was asked.19 Beyond agreeing on the morality of the broad concept of human rights, can there be universal agreement on the specific contents? Not surprisingly, the Muslim world posited the necessarily superior position of sharia-Islamic law. China and other oriental countries insisted that the human rights issue couldn’t disregard economic factors. Indonesia argued that national development must take priority over human rights. Also, it was argued that the collective rights of society must supersede those of individuals who may threaten society's stability. And going beyond mere abstract rhetoric of human rights, 52 Islamic states demanded the condemnation of Serbian aggression against Muslim Bosnia. The US led the arguments for the universalistic view and for the rights of the individual. In this the US reflected the standard Western tendency towards exporting aggressively its universalistic ideological views-which others see as arrogant and intrusive. The debate has not been stilled, but the conference may indicate that the United Nations is becoming perhaps the major forum for ideological debate and that there may be emerging a United Nations-based global value system. Where ideology had traditionally developed in isolation and often spilled out of its 21

borders, the United Nations may provide an invaluable venue to sharpen such debates at the intellectual level and not on the battlefield. In these post-cold-war days, the United Nations may experience a renaissance, but its fortune lies not in its own hands. Rather, it will be the leaders of the global community who will define that organization's role as a security, social, humanitarian, or intellectual force. The US pays one-fourth of the UNs upkeep and hence will shape much of its agenda. The desire to provide the United Nations with a permanent crisis-response instrument has been expressed, but opposition may be expected from US sources harking back to similar opposition during the League of Nations's days. Now that global tensions at the superpower level have been reduced, is there a need for such an ambitious and costly undertaking, it is asked.

Global Challenges US Perspectives This section examines and discusses US understanding of and interaction with global challenges. Taken up in turn are US perspectives of global affairs; changing interests; emerging security interests; identifying the challenges; levels of response to them; managing those responses; and a discussion of history, leadership, and power. US Perceptions of Global Affairs The US is justified in viewing its future global role with some trepidation. We won the cold war contest for survival against the menacing Soviet adversary and have gained a reprieve from major threats of other credible enemies for a while. However, we are not certain of the future in terms of emerging challenges. History has not ended and, while it is not a comfortable prospect, history's own logic suggests that we are the next great power to decline. This is not necessarily imminent; in the meantime, much work remains to

be undertaken to improve the welfare of the land and to extend that welfare to the greater commonwealth of humanity. The demand for America's positive intervention is ever increasing, but as noted at the outset, the ultimate challenge is to match ambition with resources. This seems to be an evident formula, but in view of history's vicissitudes; managing successfully its implementation has proven to be mostly elusive. The US views a world in transition, characterized by two significant developments. First, despite data which depicts declining political rights and civil liberties, the Western notion of liberal democracy is becoming a widely accepted ideological framework governing the relations between rulers and the ruled.20 However, there are powerful exceptions, and we cannot rule out the emergence of new ideological extremists. Also, the operational forms of democracy are not always encouraging. The US also sees as positive the greater global acceptance of market-based economies-which the US believes is inherently tied to democracy and necessary for the real advancement of nations.21 However, concerning free market ideology, we may expect more opposition as, indeed, the US economy is itself taking some new directions. The US has also taken the leadership in spreading the seeds of human rights-but the manifestation of this is far from uniform. These are the forces, which support the stabilization of the world, and the US is widely credited with leadership in spreading these principles. The second development has been the tendency towards national fragmentation and ethnic polarization.22 The US generally attempts to discourage such fragmentation, fearing the likelihood of spreading violence that may accompany the process, the weakening of the economies, and the prospect for some of the resultant units to be nonviable. The international community is called upon with ever-increasing frequency to intervene in such conflicts, which can become expensive and can get bogged down. This fragmentationist tendency could proliferate widely and sweep Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, and parts of the Orient-possibly even 23

China. Its origins may usually be traced to the failure to develop nationally or to uneven development of ethnically delineated sub national units. Occasionally sociocultural reasons may be the source of dissent, and these too may become prevalent in the future. These fragmentationist states encounter violence as they disintegrate and subsequently as they enter new formative and consolidative stages. Numerous wars over minority populations and new borders such as those in the former Yugoslavia will proliferate. For the US, merely discouraging this development will not suffice; the problem will have to be addressed at the economic and strategic levels. If tractors don't bring the desired results, tanks will inevitably have to be called in. Other developments, which contribute to America’s current global outlook, include a more regionalist view of international affairs. By signing NAFTA, the US hedged its bet that its own region may be developed in competition with the European Union. Similarly, the notable inroads made at the US-hosted Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in 1993 signaled once again America's shift away from its historic Eurocentric view of the world, while also acknowledging the primacy of economic over strategic concerns-the latter, which had been the case during the cold war. Geographically and commercially, the US is well poised to intensify relations with the Pacific rim.23 Russia remains of commercial interest to the US private sector while the rest of the old Soviet Union's territories remain primarily of strategic concern due to the numerous wars in that region and the unsettled problem of the dispersal of nuclear weapons in several of the new states. Western Europe remains the most stable political partner with whom our long-standing commercial differences are addressed peacefully, primarily in General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) negotiations. As for the third world in general, its huge sector of marginalized states are advised by the US to adopt democratic structures and market economies, but their success or failure with them will hardly impact on the US except if certain ensuing conflicts become internationalized.

Changing Interests A nation's external interests may be classified as core, intermediate, and peripheral. Core interests concern strategic matters as they ensure the security of the state: intermediate interests are those that seek to maximize welfare; and peripheral interests are those that advance more abstract socioideological values. During the height of the cold-war days, the pursuit of core interests predominated in US foreign policy as all global events were scrutinized for their prospects of altering the tense power equation. Presently, this practice has been somewhat relaxed because the conflicts that do erupt will not wreak imminent global catastrophe nor will all conflicts, if isolated, affect US strategic interests adversely. There has now occurred a perceptible shift towards the pursuit of intermediate interest-level economic objectives. This direction has been inspired by widespread public awareness of structural economic problems-especially the long-term damage potential of the growing deficit. The international marketplace is where some solutions to economic growth are to be found. Accordingly, the US may be expected to increasingly engage in spirited debate and bargaining at international economic fora and to re-examine its competitive posture.24 In this regard, Europe and Japan have been good teachers but the widespread domestic resistance to signing the NAFI'A accord identified significant vestiges of traditional US isolationism. Having just disengaged from the global security stage, many are reluctant to transfer the battle to the world's economic arena. The US did well in the strategic competition with the Soviets, but the new competition is against capable adversaries who have long concentrated their energies in that arena out of opportunity as well as necessity. Except for occasional responses to moderate-size security threats to our core interests, most of our innovative international activities in the near future should be at this intermediate level.

At the peripheral level, little overt hostility is to be expected. Radical variations of socialism have rapidly lost influence, and the US State Department has been emphatic not to portray Islamism as a threatening ideology. Nor is there much opposition to America's basic ideological tenets. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake noted, “democracy and market economics, are more broadly accepted than ever before. We have arrived at neither the end of history nor a clash of civilizations, but a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity, and we must not waste it.”25 The first world's ideological cohesiveness and advanced socioeconomic status is a very powerful challenge to those who would decry the virtues of Western liberal democracy. More significant at the peripheral level are the humanitarian interventions undertaken in conflicts-such as those in Somalia and Bosnia-which do not pose direct or immediate threats to US core interests. Of the 6,000-some US troops engaged in peacekeeping operations as of October 1993, 5,000 were on the ground in Somalia alone.26 There exists substantial opposition within the US to such ventures, illustrating well the limited energies to be engaged in such peripheral pursuits. This is corroborated in US relations with China, whose human rights record has been identified as requiring much improvement, while at the same time the US is avidly seeking to expand the already-large trade ties.27 At a time of reduced great power tensions, it might be expected that concern with peripheral issues may intensify, but countervailing isolationist sentiment may depress any enthusiasm for such involvements. As is evident, US perceptions of global affairs certainly accept that a fundamental transition is taking place. Anthony Lake summarized its main features: the broad acceptance of democracy; the US is this new era's dominant power; there exists an explosion of ethnic conflicts; and the pulse of the planet, and the pace of change in human events, have changed dramatically.28 As a response, he counsels a “strategy of enlargement”-of the world's free community of market democracies. At the official level, there

is an upbeat tone about the new era and its promising prospects for market democracies, but the evidence suggests also a greater degree of pragmatism. This is illustrated by tolerance of regimes which either do not fully conform to such structures, providing they offer advantage to our intermediate-level economic interests, or, as in the case of Boris Yeltsin's Russia, such tolerance advances in the long run the desirable end product.29 Emerging US Security Interests Traditionally, “security interests” have implied narrow military concerns, but this concept has now been broadened to include other areas as well. The 1993 White House National Security Strategy of the United States notes, “Today's challenges are more complex, ambiguous, and diffuse than ever before. They are political, economic, and military; unilateral and multilateral; short and long-term.”30 Victory over the Soviets in the cold war is attributed to, among other factors, America's political, economic, and military strength. These all constitute part of the total security equation.31 Firm democracies ensure stability, and the document states the need to eliminate any perception that the US will turn inward and “renounce our mandate for global leadershlp.”32 In the economic realm, the US faces the “continuing challenge of protecting and broadening open markets and of formidable economic competitors such as Japan and Germany.”33 Militarily, the National Security Strategy of the United States observes: “While we no longer face the single defining threat which dominated our policy, budgets, force structures ... multiple threats to our security still remain.”34 Threats to global security emanate from regional instabilities, proliferation of advanced conventional arms, ballistic missiles, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the international drug trade. A concise statement of US security perceptions is offered: Our experience in the Gulf War demonstrated that we cannot be sure when or where the next conflict will arise; that regions critical to our interests must be defended; that the world must respond to

straightforward aggression; that international coalitions can be forged ...that the proliferation of advanced weaponry represents a clear, present, and widespread danger; and that the United States remains the nation whose strength and leadership are essential to a stable and democratic world order.35

This official statement of US security perceptions expresses the acceptance of the changing strategic environment, it acknowledges the cessation of the cold war, and it cautions us not to assume a reduced conflict environment. Aggression in the world will continue; it may even intensify. However, the warriors, their objectives, and their weapons and methods of implementing them will change. The challenge is now more nebulous-and multifarious-than during the cold war, and while we may have more time to engineer responses to threatening situations, in view of the proliferation of advanced weaponry and the frequent eruption of new conflicts, military vigilance will remain the order of the day. The National Security Strategy of the United States envisages an ambitious global leadership role for the US, but in view of the enormous burden that may have to be borne as in the projected response to “straightforward aggression,” the American public has offered early indications that there might be limits to such ventures. Responding to Iraq's aggression in Kuwait was palatable as there were severe implications for the first world's industrial viability. But the failure to respond to the commission of atrocities in Liberia, Rwanda, or Angola at the same time suggests a more selective degree of engagement. Indeed, our involvement in Somalia, whose damage in terms of human misery is not greater than that in Angola, suggests that more than only humanitarian concerns may be at stake. Core geopolitical considerations, rather than peripheral-level concerns, may still be the driving force in determining which conflicts shall receive our attention. In this regard, the US maintains its established realist proclivity and, despite frequent official-level pronouncements, the new era will not likely be shaped by idealist actions.

Having turned away from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as the focal point of military threats, the US now faces the third world as the source of conflicts and regional destabilization. This global sector has been enlarged with the addition of sizable territories from the old Soviet Union. Most conflicts in the third world will be primarily domestic affairs as they reflect the characteristics of states in the formative and early consolidative stages-in which civil wars are fought in the process of state formation and legitimation. Usually, such wars pose no global threats unless they spill into the region or they attract external support and intervention. However, some of the former Soviet territories may retain the nuclear weapons emplaced on their territories during the cold war. Also, their proximity to established Middle Eastern hot spots increases the likelihood of these civil wars having an adverse regional impact. The US may be expected to offer mediative and diplomatic services to those with nonthreatening civil wars but to offer financial inducements to those with a more menacing capability such as Ukraine or North Korea. Working through multilateral organizations such as NATO or the United Nations may also receive renewed impetus. However, the third world also contains states in their expansive phase and these, like Iraq, will pose the most likely challenges with potentially grave consequences. As they aspire to great-power status, their regional ambitions may be seen as a first step. Accumulating new resources will help in the realization of their goals in turn. As such, regional hegemons require special attention and only a global power can monitor and, if need be, contain such emerging powers. Most conceivable threats to global stability will emanate from these third world expansionists. In this regard, the US has not had a consistent policy with respect to expansionist states, as some had served useful purposes during the cold war. Certain expansionists such as Israel, South Africa, Morocco, Iran under the Shah, and India provided valuable regional balancing roles to offset Soviet, Chinese, or other locally generated designs. Some expansionists such as Cuba or North 29

Vietnam were seen as serving Soviet purposes; others, such as Iraq, threatened long-term global economic stability; while regionally active states such as Nicaragua or Libya pursued their own third world leadership agendas. Now, with the decline of the Soviet Union from the world power stage, there will be less reason for the US to respond to all such attempts at regional hegemony, and we may witness a host of second rank powers attempting to reorder their respective regions. Unless they threaten vital US interests, the US will not interfere with their efforts. The previous bipolar global system is giving way to a regionalbased multihegemonial system out of which should emerge the next great powers. The US shows little evidence of wishing to remain the only active superpower, but much apprehension is expressed about the uncertainty of the new candidates. Although the US would be most comfortable with the Europeans or the Japanese, as they are well-known quantities, neither harbors such ambitions. Global responsibilities are costly and entail risk. Russia could conceivably be favored for such a role due to that country's proximity to the volatile southern territories of the old Soviet Union, the Middle East, and China, and its traditional interests in the Balkans-an area which West Europeans are reluctant to sort out.36 However, Russia's own internal problems must first be resolved, which will most likely be a lengthy process. Barring these candidates, others will emerge from the third world. The foremost prospect is China-which has been history's grand master of regional hegemony but has previously avoided major global roles. The US was unsuccessful at dissuading China from testing a nuclear device in October 1993.37 For the US, monitoring the hegemonial intentions of such emerging regional powers will rank, alongside tracking nuclear capabilities, as our most important strategic planning responsibilities. Identifying the Challenges In times of war, identifying developments that will require responses is a relatively easy task because of the comparative 30

immediacy and clarity of the confrontational situation. In peacetime identifying challenges that require responses becomes a supreme challenge in itself. We have argued that, in the future, conflicts as well as deteriorating environments that may lead to conflicts are to be expected. If not identified in time, wars may quickly ensue and spread beyond the borders of the combatants and engulf entire regions. As a global power, the US must monitor all such developments if we are to exercise control over international order. Not all wars can be stopped nor can they all be ignored. Certain wars will bear more serious consequences than others and distinguishing in a timely manner between them will challenge the global statesmen.38 However, correctly anticipating those developments that will shape future conflicts will constitute a more vital service. Deciding which wars to enter requires the calculation of one's own interest and risk, but anticipating which deteriorating situations will lead to conflict requires sophisticated sociopolitical analysis and an appreciation of the subtleties of foreign cultures. It is to be expected that some will argue that the end of the cold war allows the US an opportunity to turn inward and focus on long-standing domestic issues. But the historical facts of international competition do not allow a global power the luxury of ignoring certain events before they have been properly assessed.

Response Options Appropriate responses to global challenges require careful selection from the options available. This section lists and discusses some of those options. Levels of Response The framework for anticipating such challenges and formulating responses is offered by the security interest model, which depicts core, intermediate, and peripheral interests. At the peripheral level, responses may be expected to be less certain, ad hoc, and reflective of changing political perceptions and ideologies of new administrations in charge of the decision-making apparatus. Those 31

traditionally identified, as idealists in foreign affairs will promote activist agendas aimed at ameliorating the antagonisms and disparities among global cultures. Peace, they argue, can be attained by addressing mankind's fundamental needs for dignity and welfare. This globalist view calls for positive programs for the advancement of human rights and democratic freedoms and is flexible on the question of economic structures. And global institutions and the rule of law are to be actively supported as they enhance the emergence of a global community of man. It is an admittedly long-term view requiring a substantial investment of resources in a moral venture which, however, is not supported by the evidence of man's continuing proclivity towards war. It is not only the poor who fight-as both world wars have shown. Those who insist on concentrating the nation's external energies almost exclusively on core issues tend to be identified traditionally as realists. They argue that the Soviets were offered ample opportunity to integrate themselves and the Warsaw Pact members into a peaceful world community. What kept the peace, however, was not morality or the cooperative formulation of a global community but America's superior economic and military power, which, by the mid-1980s, the Soviets could not hope to challenge. This realist position holds that all nations seek power and preponderance over others and that this condition cannot be ignored. The correct assessment of the military strength of potential protagonists can contribute to peace-as it did between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war. Realists are reluctant to make assumptions about global values and hence they disdain grandiose international institutional designs. Pursuing peripheral interests aggressively is an exercise in frustration, as it requires more resources than anyone possesses while it also imposes cultural universalism on hesitant nations. What can be understood is immediate power and self-interest, which need to be unambiguously portrayed to reduce the likelihood of war breaking out. The Soviets understood what constituted our core interests, but

the range of our interests was not adequately portrayed to Saddam Hussein in advance of the Gulf War. Identifying problems according to this framework does not simply assume that idealists focus only on peripheral concerns and realists on core interests.39 Far from it. Both recognize the preeminent need for physical security as a core value. But realists are not comfortable at pursuing peripheral interests while idealists are uncomfortable if they ignore them. However, the gap between these perspectives may be narrowed by the focus on intermediate interests-those that involve a nation externally in the pursuit of welfare maximization. Certainly, the unprincipled pursuit of exploitative economic advantage may easily be disdained, but the peacefully negotiated intensification of international economic relations may be mutually advantageous to all involved in accordance with the classic theories of international trade. And in view of the peace that prevails, among members of the first world who enjoy very complex economic ties, it is postulated that extending this net to a wider array of nations should add to global stability. In this regard, with major and immediate threats to America's core security interests having receded, but with the overextension of scarce resources being a likely consequence of pursuing avidly peripheral objectives, the US may find that its prime diplomatic interest and method will lie in this intermediate-level economic realm. For the US such a response to global affairs is logical in view of ours being comfortably the world's largest economy, but it will not be without problems as we face formidable competitors for whom economic survival forms part of their core interests and because the US finds it difficult to shirk isolationist sentiments. Responding at this level will require rapid adjustment, away from our military means with which we are more familiar. As greater success accrues in economic diplomacy, it may be expected that the calls for military intervention will decline-but also, that when military means are implemented, it will probably be in substantial confrontations on the order of the Gulf War. 33

Managing Responses Identifying correctly the challenges will test our statesmen' but formulating appropriate responses will, of course, be equally important. Once the decision has been made to intervene in a deteriorating situation, and the level of required response has been assessed, another option will have to be considered: should the response be unilateral, multilateral, or through global organizations. Responding to Soviet-centered threats during the cold war required, for the most part, unilateral initiatives as challenges were posed to our core interests. Certainly the US worked closely with allies, especially NATO, but the threat perception, leadership, and the decisive troop and weapons commitment were dominated by the US. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, US decision makers formulated the response and then secured the approval of our allies. Allies played only marginal roles in the Vietnam War and in Operation EI Dorado Canyon against Libya in 1986, and the US acted alone in the 1989 Operation Just Cause in Panama. During the cold war the Soviet enemy was formidable and nuclear equipped, which meant that US perceptions of threats to core interests would predominate as the US would bear the ultimate brunt of a full attack. But the proclivity towards unilateral action is well grounded in America's isolationist tradition, which also extends into the economic realm. The US has engaged in multilateral efforts, but such allied cooperation is often operationally only nominal although it serves a useful political purpose. This was the case in the operation against the Dominican Republic in 1965, against Grenada in 1983, and in the Vietnam War.40 Against Iraq in 1991 the US assembled a significant alliance that included several major Arab states, but again the US initiated and managed the operation while also supplying most (not all) of the firepower. Certainly allied participation was not on the order of World War II. Generally, since 1945 US multilateral operations involved allies more for

political than for vital military supportive purposes, often to satisfy US domestic constituencies. The absence of such militarily active allies would hardly have halted America's determination to prosecute those engagements. The US has also been a major supporter and participant in efforts undertaken by the UN's, starting with the support extended by President Harry S Truman to the UN's police action in Korea in 1953. Various degrees of participation in United Nations-managed operations followed over the years as that organization came to be identified with global peacekeeping responsibilities. In 1993, the US had military troops stationed in Somalia, the Sinai, Macedonia, and small contingents in Western Sahara, Cambodia. Iraq-Kuwait DMZ, and Lebanon-all in support of the UN peacekeeping operations.41 However, US troop commitments to UN operations are not without controversy, much of it reflecting our penchant for unilateral actions. America's major questions about the revitalized United Nations role concern the overextension of UN operations, paying for their costs, corruption, and inept military leadership, and there is very serious opposition to having any US troops under UN command.42 Several US war deaths in the Somali intervention occurred while under UN-commanded operations.43 Others argue that the United Nations is about to embark on a global nationbuilding offensive-for which the US military is not designed or trained.44 Having the United Nations assume greater responsibilities for keeping the peace was an integral feature of the originally envisioned new world order, but this option needs considerable refinement. Several factors will determine the choice among the options of unilateral, multilateral, and global cooperative responses. With the demise of the Soviet Union, major nuclear threats to the US have greatly diminished, which implies that more time is available to meet potential conventional challenges. This development also offers opportunity for building regional or global multilateral institutional capabilities with our established allies or with new ones. Some conflicts such as Just Cause or antinarcotics operations 35

will be of little concern to others as their interests will not be at stake. But if the tranquil relations extant among the members of the first world are to be extended to a wider community, there may be advantage in greater security cooperation and multilateral approaches to conflict resolution. Wars may become depersonalized in the sense that they will not be viewed as disputes between only two parties, and instead they may assume a universalistic character: a crime against humanity-for which all nations have responsibility. Was not the welfare of the world jeopardized when, towards the end of the Gulf War, Iraq torched Kuwait's oil fields and that scarce resource was wasted and permanently removed from serving mankind? Today the absence of an aggressive Soviet Union offers the opportunity to build such institutional links. Working with close allies will remain an attractive proposition, but the efforts to do so in Bosnia and Somalia have demonstrated lingering limits of such cooperative ventures. It is the further refinement of the United Nations's capability that still offers promising opportunities. That organization has been overtasked and is subjected to too many clashing perceptions, but we may argue that its full potential has not yet been tapped. The US may find great advantage in utilizing the UN's resources once they have been further developed. Until then, the US may be expected to retain its essentially unilateralist proclivities.

History, Leadership, and Power In her influential 1976 article, “War and the Clash of Ideas,” Professor Adda B. Bozeman observed: “It is much harder for Americans than for other peoples to accept [such] a world view because the United States, almost by definition, stands for the denial of cultural differences and the neglect or irrelevancy of the past.”45 And a celebrated article by Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” appeared in 1993. He predicted: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of

conflict will be cultural. ...The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.”46 Huntington exemplifies Bozeman's contention. She notes that the clash of ideas has prevailed since it was “inaugurated by Herodotus when he explained the Persian Wars as a confrontation between the rival civilizations of Europe and Asia.”47 Huntington presents his thesis as if it were a new development-a new phase of sorts-but Bozeman argues that this is what war has been about throughout history. We may argue the merits of specific momentary strategic, economic, or political objectives being the motives for wars but ultimately, war is about ideas-the building blocks of civilizations. In this regard, Huntington offers little that is fundamentally new. Huntington elaborates on the concept of civilization and identifies seven major ones, along whose cultural fault lines, which separate these civilizations, will occur the most important conflicts. Civilizations differ from each other on views concerning the relations between God and man; the individual and the group; citizen and state; and on matters of rights, responsibilities, liberty, authority, equality, and hierarchy.48 He agrees with Bozeman that the nation-state is weakening as a source of identity. Huntington writes that the West is at the peak of its power and that this in turn may be responsible for the non-Western civilizations turning inward again. And Huntington also offers an interesting conclusion that other civilizations are attempting to modernize without becoming Western, however; they wish to acquire the physical accouterments of Western societies.49 Huntington introduced a welcome-if controversial-element in the current studies of international relations, but he also encountered substantial criticism from several perspectives. 50 Realists argue that the nation-state still remains the focal point of war as entire civilizations don't fight, but nation-states do. And, they contend, the fight is for some sensible interests which all cultures value. In other words, all states operate within the context

of core, intermediate, and peripheral interests, but they differ with respect to the specific content of these categories. But idealists, or globalists, maintain that there is a common bond that cuts across all civilizations and that its ideological expression is evolving in the United Nations. This view underlies the debate on the universalization of human rights, which is also represented by the work of organizations such as Amnesty International. In the same vein, Seyom Brown notes: “. ..the increasing mobility of persons and information assures that, like it or not, human rights conditions in all countries will be globally monitored. “51 Neither Bozeman nor Huntington, nor realists and idealists, have pronounced the final word on this fascinating debate, which is important because the debate has forced the US to go beyond its traditional ethnocentric concerns. Such xenophobia may be tolerated in the case of marginal states but certainly not for a global power. The cold war served to “deisolate” the world's civilizations as the US and the Soviet Union explored every obscure conflict for its strategic impact. Today, with only the US having such interests and capabilities, leadership requires more than only the pursuit of national advantage but also the willingness and the ability to ameliorate clashing views of civilizations. A lesser power may pursue only parochial interests, but a global power must go beyond mere realist policies lest the evolving community of civilizations steers an undesirable course. It remains to identify the nature of the leadership that is required. The US learned in the cold war that military leadership costs money-and does not necessarily guarantee preferred results. Yet the investment cannot be avoided. Military leadership required the outlay of huge expenditures on arms and forces and it also made the US the prime target of war should a global war have broken out. The goal of global military leadership must ultimately be global stability by ensuring that the inevitable wars that will break out will remain contained and not spiral out of control.

Similarly, economic leadership also requires sacrifices. A global power cannot simply approach the global economy from only the perspective of profit maximization, for soon it will be calculated that its preponderant military might can be impressed in pursuit of economic objectives. A global economy could not survive on such an exploitative foundation. Global economic leadership requires the creation of appropriate institutions that will further the maximum welfare levels for the greatest number by positively incorporating all states into the great international division of labor. Also, the use of economic instruments as preferred alternatives to force has not yet realized its full potential. And again, leadership in developing this instrument is likewise the preserve of responsible global powers. Leadership must also concern the formulation of ideas, appropriate to the evolving relations between global cultures. Inevitably this will mean leading the historical synthesis of civilizations. In this regard the US has not been inactive and has proffered models of liberal democracy and human rights. However, much more remains to be developed. Specifically, it must not be assumed that the ideological structure of the leader's own domestic context is necessarily appropriate for all states-regardless of their developmental level. Sensitivity to historical differences among cultures and civilizations must also be demonstrated. The US must accept that most other cultures see the US as but the most recent ambitious Western power, dressing age-old economic interests in the garb of universal moral precepts. It is not the formulation of moral precepts that they find objectionable, but the inconsistent policies implemented in their pursuit-which may be driven by economic criteria. Some conflicts are addressed while others-often much more grave-are ignored. No one power will soon preside over the formal synthesis of the world's great civilizations, but global leadership today ought to offer the base of moral commonalty to diminish the clashes between them. Finally, power has been transformed. Throughout history, power has been evaluated in its military context and more recently; 39

power has come to signify economic capacity. Yet these bases of power are ephemeral as we observe the rise and fall of history's great empires. Much more lasting and far more influential have been ideas-the very foundations of civilizations. We need to remember that empires, like nation-states, have short life spans compared to civilizations, which in human culture remain eternal. Whether Confucius or Plato, Christ or Mohammed, Kautilya or Machiavelli, we today debate their ideas and we will continue to do so long after their and our nation-states have given way to new political configurations. Their ideas emerged out of civilization contexts, which give them their respectability. Hence the power of ideas is ultimately the greatest power if the criterion is building lasting cultures and civilizations, rather than the possession of material capacity to influence events.

Notes 1. Such views tend to inspire skepticism. See Adam Roberts. “A new age in international relations?” International Affairs 67, no. 3 (1991): 509. Similarly. Richard Falk suggests that there might have been a new world order, but it was short lived. “In Search of a New World Model.” Current History 92, no. 573 (April 1993): 145. 2. Writing about the new world order. Douglas Simon notes: “...it was a little naïve, built more on hope than reality.” USA Today, 11 October 1993. Also, Michael T. Klare, “The New Challenges to Global Security,” Current History 92, no. 573 (April 1993): 155. 3. Although there has been a significant reduction in global arms expenditures, there were more war-related fatalities globally in 1992 than since the height of the Vietnam War. Christian Science Monitor, 14 December 1993. 4. The attributes of the new world order are summarized well by Mahmood Monshipouri and Thaddeus C. Zolty, “Shaping the New World Order: America's Post-Gulf War Agenda in the Middle East,” Amled Forces and Society 12. no. 4 (Summer 1993). Of course not everyone agrees on the facts of a new world order. See C. G. Jacobsen. “Myths. Politics and the Not-Sa-New World Order,” Journal of Peace Research 30, no. 33 (1993). 5. This theory is based on my graduate studies with Professor George Liska. It is elaborated in Karl P. Magyar, “Low-Intensity Conflicts: The African Context,” in Responding to Low-Intensity Conflict Challenges (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1990), 172. 6. See “Toward a 1Wo-Tier Commonwealth,” Christian Science Monitor, 13 October 1992. 7. Wolfgang Ramonat. “Microstates in the United Nations,” Aussen Politik 32, no. 3 (1981); John C. Caldwell, Graham E. Harrison and Pat Quiggin, “The Demography of Micro-States.” World Development 8 (1980); and Michael Ward, “Dependent development: problems of economic planning in small developing countries.” in Percy Selwyn, ed., Development Policy in Small Countries (London: Croom Helm, 1975): 115. 8. S. N. Sangmpam distinguishes between empirical and juridical. or soft types of statehood. “Neither Soft nor Dead: The African State Is Alive and Well.” African Studies Review 36, no. 2 (1993): 74. 9. “ Talks to Restore Haiti's Democracy Proceed,” Christian Science Monitor, 29 June 1993. Also, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Repolt, Sub-Saharan Africa, 28 October 1993, 1. 10. See Kenichi Ohmae, “The Emergence of Regional States,” Vital Speeches of the Day 58, no. 16 (June 1992): 487. 11. Karl P. Magyar, “Northeastern Africa's Strategic Role in the Expanding Middle Eastern Conflict Zone,” unpublished manuscript (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education, 1992). 12. Francis f*ckuyama, “Have We Reached the End of History?” The National Interest (Summer 1989). 13. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960).

14. Adda B. Bozeman, “War and the Clash of Ideas,” Orbis 20, no. 1 (Spring 1976): 83-87. 15. Walter S. Jones and Steven J. Rosen, The Logic of International Relations, 4th ed. (Boston: Utile, Brown and Company, 1982): 515-17. 16. Christian Science Monitor, 6 October 1993. 17. Christian Science Monitor, 29 September 1993. 18. New York Times, 17 June 1993. 19. Christian Science Monitor, 18 and 25 June 1993. 20. The discouraging data is offered in the annual report by Freedom House, Montgomery Advertiser, 17 December 1993. 21. The myth of capitalism as the road to global prosperity is raised by Paul Kennedy, “The Forces Driving Global Change,” Christian Science Monitor, 9 April 1993. 22. Myron Weiner notes that traditionally scholars had been reluctant to list ethnicity as a major factor in international relations. “Peoples and states in a new ethnic order?” Third World Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1992): 317. 23. “Clinton Pushing Business With Asia,” New York Times, 11 November 1993. 24. “Clinton Team Shifts Toward Trade Activism,” Christian Science Monitor, 5 February 1993. 25. Christian Science Monitor, 29 September 1993. 26. USA Today, 11 October 1993. 27. “US and China T1y to End Bar to High-Tech Trade,” New York Times, 12 November 1993. 28. Christian Science Monitor, 29 September 1993. 29. “Some Question Legality of Yeltsin's Actions,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 September 1993. 30. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, D.C.: US Government Printing Office, 1993), 1. 31. A broadened concept of national security is also offered by Joseph J. Romm, Defining National Security: The Nonmilitary Aspects (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993), 1. 32. White House, National Security Strategy, 1. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 21. 35. Ibid., 1. 36. Robert Pegaro, “Help for Central Asia,” Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1993. 37. Sheila Teffi, “When China Speaks, Asia Listens,” Christian Science Monitor, 17 November 1993. 38. Stephen John Stedman elaborates on selective intervention in “The New Interventionists,” in Eugene R. Wittkopf, ed., The Future of American Foreign Policy, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 322.

39. The literature on the classic realism-idealism debate is voluminous. Introductory readings are offered in John A. Vasquez, ed., Classics of International Relations, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), chapters 1-2. 40. John M. Collins, America's Small Wars: Lessons for the Future (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's US, Inc., 1991). 41. USA Tociay, 11 October 1993. 42. “ Dial Emergency, “ The Economist, 14 August 1993. 43. Jeane Kirkpatrick, “'Multilateralism' Deadly in Somalia,” Montgomery, Advertiser, 14 October 1993; and “Multilateralism's Obituary Was Written in Mogadishu,” Christian Science Monitor, 27 October 1993. 44. Trent Lott, “UN Must Not Direct US Troops,” Christian Science Monitor, 16 November 1993. 45. Bozeman, 79. 46. Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993): 22. 47. Bozeman, 79. 48. Huntington, 25. 49. Ibid., 49. 50. “The Summoning,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 4 (1993): 2. 51. Seyom Brown, International Relations in a Changing Global System: Toward a Theory of the World Polity (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 137.

PART I

THE CHALLENGE

Regional Study 1

Conflict and Confrontation in the

Post-Cold-War Middle East

Dr Lewis B. Ware With the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the collapse of the Soviet Union, some observers thought that the Middle East would recede from public view, shrinking to a space in the national consciousness appropriate to our preoccupation with more pressing domestic issues. But the Middle East already reoccupies a commanding position in post-cold-war American policy deliberations. In fact, since the collapse of Saddam's ambitions in the Gulf, the region has exercised an even more tenacious grip on the attention of the American public. The reasons for the enduring presence of the Middle East in the American perception of global politics are not difficult to discern: 011 is still considered a strategic commodity; far from being formalized in a peace treaty, the unprecedented agreement in 1993 between Israelis and Palestinians to recognize each other has caused yet a new round of inter-communal violence; the demographic shift to Western Europe of large numbers of Middle Eastern laborers represents an unwelcome intrusion of the global suburbs into the inner cities of the industrialized West with all the social disequilibrium that accompanies the inequities of unequal development; and the region boasts new political actors who have access to arms in quantities large enough to challenge the Middle Eastern secular state system and to disturb the tenuous regional balance. In a word, everything in the Middle East is still geopolitically connected to everything else. For that reason the region will be a potentially volatile zone of conflict for the foreseeable future. We may therefore be certain that US security concerns will be enmeshed in the politics of this changeable part of the world. Taking that assertion as a given of the American strategic

perception of the region, I propose to analyze the extent to which, and under what circ*mstances, the nature of Middle Eastern regional conflicts has actually changed. I will examine a number of issues in the context of this analysis. First, this study looks at selected cases of the increasing trend toward religious and ethnic nationalism in the region. The impact of this trend on several Middle Eastern states will then be analyzed and while it is certainly too soon to make any definitive judgment about the future of the regional secular state system in general, readers may discern a pattern of political action in these movements that points to an acceleration in the fragmentation of other vulnerable regional regimes. Second, several examples of intergovernmental organizations (IGO) will be chosen and their value for the future integration of the region will be assessed. By so doing, this paper does not aim to establish the IGO as an antidote to the above trend but to indicate in what ways Arab cultures and political economies often conspire to make integration as risky a proposition for regional stability as is fragmentation of the secular system. Third, the study speaks to the need for a redefinition of the Middle East in terms of the realities that reflect a post-cold war regional security environment where fragmentation and integration play an increasingly important political role. In that context, this paper also examines a typology for conflicts, which may arise in the Middle East as a consequence.

The Process of Regional Fragmentation Some Observations on Hamas and the Kurds Since the beginning of the decolonization process and the extension to the region of the Soviet-American rivalry, the secular nation-state model in its various forms has been applied to the problem of Middle Eastern regional organization and development. These models assumed that the evolution of the secular state went 44

hand in hand with the theory and practice of political and economic modernization. The United States and the former Soviet Union promoted their respective versions of modernization under the rubric of the capitalist and Marxist-Leninist model of nation building. By so doing the US-Soviet competition complicated the already formidable problems of sociopolitical consolidation that the countries of the contemporary Middle East were undergoing in the 1960s following independence from colonial rule. These countries tended to exhibit the kinds of conflicts that pertained to this particular stage in their national growth; conflicts with neighbors over sovereignty, territory, natural resources; conflicts with the former colonizing powers over political autonomy; and conflicts with Israel, a country that the regional states assumed was the West's neocolonial proxy. While it deplored these regional Middle Eastern conflicts, the West dealt with them within the framework of a system of international law that the Middle Eastern states inherited from their colonial past. The cold-war superpower rivalry tried to accommodate these regional conflicts and tried to contain them within a pattern of alliances whose anticipated equilibrium was designed to preclude the domination of a single regional actor. In this way the regional countries were integrated, however imperfectly, into a global bipolar international political system. But it was the imposition of this system that masked the unfinished task of sociopolitical and economic integration within the Middle Eastern secular state itself. In the present post-cold-war Middle Eastern environment, the forces of religious and ethnic nationalism propose that only they can complete the process of integration at which the regional secular state has so manifestly failed. In making this claim, these nationalists are not only hostile to the secular state, but they have also rejected the principles upon which the regional political system of secular states was founded. These nonstate actors act in the name of eternal religious and/or ethnic “truths.” Some observers tend to think that the propagation of these “eternal truths” is an ideological phenomenon new to the 45

region. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Throughout its classical history, the Middle East has been susceptible to the challenge of religious and ethnic alternatives to the organizing principles of empire and state. When the Middle East was integrated into the contemporary bipolar global system in which modernization was the dominant socioeconomic ethos, it became axiomatic in the West that such traditional historical factors as religion and ethnicity could not function as elements of progress and, therefore, would be eliminated as categories of national consolidation. This unfortunate misperception blinded the West to the fact that underneath the political superstructure of modernization and development, enthusiastically embraced and promoted by the Middle Eastern secular state, a suppressed current of religious and ethnic nationalism has always been patiently waiting to reassert itself. Hence, when religious nationalism reappeared in Iran in 1979, it took the West entirely by surprise. Both ethnic and religious nationalisms reject the secular state for a number of reasons: religious nationalism-in this case, the various forms of the radical political ideology we call Islamism considers the secular state illegitimate because it has betrayed its obligation under Islamic law to protect, defend, and provide for the prosperity of God's chosen community, the ummah And yet at no time in Muslim history has the conflation of the temporal and the spiritual, in the form of the secular state acting as executor of God's plan for universal salvation, attained a satisfactory standard of practical application. Historically, the absence of integrated interests between Muslim states and societies has always existed and in times of increasing socioeconomic malaise has led to serious tensions. The Islamists' strike at the secular state from within is an effort to replace it with governments according to holy writ; the secular state responds vigorously in an attempt to end the Islamist challenge to its power. Present-day Islamists are leading a concerted attack against the Egyptian and the Algerian governments where the gap between state and society is still 46

ominously large; but this is not where the most ominous danger from Islamism lies. It lies in the Arab-Israeli arena where a struggle between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas (Organization of Islamic Resistance) for the right to dominate Palestinian independence politics portends serious future disequilibrium.l Hamas is the acronym in Arabic for “zeal,” and Hamas has shown considerable zeal in directing and sustaining the activities of the Palestinian revolt against Israeli occupation (the intifadah) that began in the winter of 1987. Active in Gaza because of the post-1948 Egyptian administration of the Strip, Hamas was initially an offshoot of the Egyptian al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin (the Muslim Brothers). Originally a group of Islamic reformists, the Brothers turned to a more active form of radical political protest after Gamal Abd al-Nasser's 1952 revolution when they challenged Nasser's Pan-Arab vision in the name of encouraging the Egyptian secular state to adopt a more Islamic character. Both Nasser and the Brothers claimed that Israel was the proxy of the West. But whereas Nasser raised the struggle against Israel to the pantheon of Pan-Arab political virtues to end the Western presence in the Middle East, the Brothers pursued their desire to free the Muslim personality from its dependence on neocolonial patterns of thought by mounting a sociocultural crusade against Zionist domination in Gaza where they were already well represented. Ironically. Israel cooperated in this crusade when, to impede the spread of PLO influence, Jerusalem encouraged countervailing Islamic tendencies by permitting the construction of new mosques in the occupied territories. As religious sanctuaries, the mosques were off-limits to Israeli authority. Consequently, the mosques became a focal point for the gradual creation of an Islamist movement as the Brothers began to turn gradually to the politics of radical religious nationalism. It was in the Gazan mosques that Hamas extremism was born. The catalyst for the subsequent growth and maturity of Hamas, however, was the spontaneous outbreak of the intifadah. The 47

intifadah took the PLO by surprise. The PLO had done nothing to precipitate the uprising and could do even less to control it. The natural beneficiary of this situation was Hamas, which, with the self-help institutions created by the Brothers already in place, offered a powerful alternative focus to the PLO for the mobilization of Palestinian political loyalty. To Hamas the PLO's declaration of a future secular and democratic Palestinian state was incompatible with their Islamist political worldview. But Hamas made a temporary truce with the PLO to ensure the success of the intifadah. Now that the PLO has been recognized by Israel as the political interlocutor for the Palestinian people, Hamas has moved further toward the rejectionist camp. It is quite likely then that this fragile truce will no longer hold and that a civil conflict will erupt among Palestinians for control of the statehood process. Should an Islamist Palestinian state come to share a contiguous border with Israel and Jordan, the situation would be inimical to Israeli and Jordanian security, to say nothing of the security of other neighboring secular Arab regimes. Because Hamas is antisecular is not to suggest that its antisecularism will be generalized to the entire region and that as a result the Middle Eastern secular state is doomed to extinction. It is only to assert that increasing internal fragmentation has sapped the secular state of its vigor to the extent that the threat may cause, under conducive circ*mstances, a number of the weaker states to disintegrate. The Islamic political worldview, one should remember, lacks a sense of sovereignty that coincides with defined territory. Wherever the believer is, the ummah is; hence, the ummah theoretically does not recognize the sanctity under law of national borders. This makes Islamism a transnational phenomenon par excellence with all that implies for the security of regional regimes. Despite its tendency to cause political fragmentation, Islamism is inclusivist. Islamism abhors anarchy because the unity of the ummah is the supreme social value in Islam. So Islamism seeks to reintegrate the fragmented secular system into a reconstituted 48

political community based on the broader, allegiance of faith. The exercise of brute power in its creation notwithstanding, Islamist inclusivism demonstrates a concern for social improvement. It is ethnic nationalism that is truly exclusivist. It is commonly assumed that ethnic nationalism is dependent on some visible, observable characteristics that separate peoples into national groupings-such as language, culture, history, territory, and so on. There is ample evidence that ethnic nationalism in fact may be grounded in the psychological perception of historical wrongs woven over time into the fabric of a community's social mythology.2 The anachronistic belief in historical wrong passed along atavistically from the culture of one generation to the culture of the next defines the enduring identity of a community vis-a-vis the outside. Once frozen into uncompromising political attitudes, this belief perpetuates the distinction between they and we. Whereas religious nationalism aspires to the largest possible political community because of its universalizing ideology, ethnic nationalism maintains an aloof position toward the outside because of its typical minority attitudes of distrust, fear, apprehension, secrecy, demonization of the “enemy,” and so on. For this reason, ethnic nationalism usually manifests itself in separatist and/or irredentist activities against the state. But this does not mean that ethnic nationalism necessarily considers the secular state illegitimate per se. Rather, the secular state is viewed as an emanation of historical oppression. Ethnic nationalism seeks therefore to shelter the “nation” from secular depredations by claiming sovereignty over parts of the secular state which it designates an ancestral “homeland.” And so it is clear, from the ethnonational point of view, that ethnicity provides the fundamental condition of nationhood upon which the nation bases its inalienable right to self-determintion in its territorial homeland. On the other hand, ethnic communities may also form national minorities within a state. While national minorities may possess the potential for a separate political identity, their designated status

as such satisfies the immediate communal need for sociocultural autonomy within a larger secular unit. And so ethnic nationalism may also exist within a state without necessarily demanding the attendant accoutrements of political power. The present tensions between the Kurds and the Turks over the question of Kurdistan illustrate one such case where the incompatibility of the concepts of nation and national minority has exacerbated an ancient historical conflict and may have serious repercussions for future regional stability.3 In the post-Gulf War period the Kurds appear to be taking two major political directions in the four-state border area (Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey) where they represent a demographic majority: they have either agreed to continue to live under Iraqi sovereignty as national minorities with guarantees to their clan leaders of communal autonomy; or they have agitated, through the quasi-Marxist PKK (Kurdish Workers' Party), for an independent Kurdistan to be carved out of Turkish territory. The separatist thrust of the PKK is particularly troubling to the Turks. The Turks do not recognize the Kurds as a national minority, because they do not recognize a distinct Kurdish ethnicity. Such is the heritage that modern Turkey owes to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic who, by disavowing all claims to former Ottoman possessions after World War I, took the first important step toward the establishment of a secular, civic nationalism; that is, he declared that republican Turkey comprised one nation-the Turks-within one territorial boundary. For this reason Atatürk was loath to recognize the special position of Turks living outside the Turkish republic lest a recrudescence of the “myth” of ethnic nationalism cause the new Turkish republic to be accused of neo-Ottoman imperialism. Historically, republican Turkey has considered the ethnic Turks of the post-WWI Balkans national minorities of the countries in which they resided, a status they were not willing to apply to the Kurds within their own borders.

For the past several decades, Turkey has been seeking full membership in the European Union (EU).4 Turkey believed that, by virtue of its participation in the 1991 Gulf War, it would finally obtain that goal. Instead Turkey earned yet another rebuff. Since that time Turkey has been actively courting compensatory markets among the Black Sea countries and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union. But more important than the commercial aspect of these demarches, Turkey believes these new relationships also serve politically to stabilize a potentially volatile region. To express the desire for closer political relations with Central Asia, Turkey emphasizes common Turkic affinities. In other words, by treating the Turkmen, Azeri, Kazakh, Kirghiz, and Uzbek peoples as “nations,” Turkey uses ethnopolitics for the purpose of stabilization, a policy not substantively different in intent from the one applied to the same region by late nineteenth-century Ottoman Pan-Turkists. In present times, however, this policy has created an internal debate in Turkey concerning the meaning of nationality, which the Kurds, who demand that the Turks also treat them politically as a nation, have begun successfully to exploit. Operation Provide Comfort-called irreverently Statehood by Stealth-certainly enhanced the Kurdish self-perception as a nation when Turkey let the Kurds from Iraq seek shelter in Turkey from Saddam Hussein. To put the predicament in more precise political terms, were Turkey to let the Kurds into the country as a national minority, and then it would be open to the same pressure from Balkan Turks. And, since in the Kurds' case, this admission could lead potentially to separatist demands, such a situation would surely compromise Atatürk concept of civic nationalism, which put the accent on the unitary nature of state and people. So Turkey has hardened its stance against Kurdish ethnonationalism. Moreover, the Kurdish border problem exacerbates the already tenuous conflict over water rights in the Tigris-Euphrates valley with Iraq and Syria, both of which have felt the impact on their foreign relations of a historically festering Kurdish minority problem. Hence, Turkey must face the possibility of conflict with a nonstate actor and/or with one or more contiguous states, two scenarios, 51

which threaten the regional stability, Turkey seek so avidly to construct. The Kurdish PKK aspires to create a state from adjoining Kurdish territories carved out of four contiguous states. Islamism is not interested, on the other hand, in political separatism nor in coexistence with the secular state. Islamism is totalistic. The secular state is an alien body in a purposeful universe, the introduction of chaos into order. The secular state cannot be allowed to exist if God's plan for the universe is to be realized. Whether the challenge emanates from religious or ethnic nationalism, the consequences for the secular state remain essentially the same. Deprived of its legitimacy by the former or of its sovereignty by the latter, the secular state would be unable to operate autonomously in the regional or international system. Under these conditions, the secular state is bound to defend itself against ethnic and religious nationalism, since no state voluntarily commits “politicide.” It is interesting to note that many sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists contend that both ethnic and religious nationalism make no essential distinction in the way they act in the world or view their relationships with those who do not share their ideas. One could argue from the psychosocial point of view that religious and ethnic nationalisms have both adopted a similar Manichaean, conspiratorial, and reactionary approach to secular political society. And yet, any similarities between ethnic and religious nationalism in the Middle East are in the long run superficial. Inasmuch as Islamism recognizes no higher form of sociopolitical organization than the ummah, it considers all ethnic identification a form of degraded tribalism that submission to the higher values of Islam is supposed to supersede and destroy. Ethnic nationalism of any kind and Islamism therefore cannot coexist because they are mutually exclusive on the ideological level. This signifies that, practically speaking, if ethnic nationalism and Islamism give the impression of sometimes making common

cause against a secular enemy, they will end up, in the final analysis, competitors for political power.

The Process of Integration

Some Observations on the Gulf Cooperation Council

and the Arab Maghrib Union

The very same states whose integrity is presently being threatened by the process of fragmentation are vigorously pursuing the antidote of regional socioeconomic integration. The Arabs have traditionally conceived of the process of socioeconomic integration both as an instrument of mutual benefit and as a way to attain some of the political goals of Pan-Arab unity. And yet socioeconomic integration, like the process of fragmentation, may lead to unexpected stress on the Middle Eastern secular state system and could, under propitious circ*mstances, lead also to conflict. Integration has come to have a definite and rather restricted meaning in the contemporary Middle East. It has always been a tenet of Pan-Arabism, and in particular its Baathist variant, that the independent Arab states should endeavor to merge politically by yielding their individual sovereignties in the service of forming a union of Arab nations. The notion that the Arabs are one people, one society, and one body politic, upon which this tenet is based, draws its special force and direction from the vision of the Muslim universe in which the Arabs' place as messengers of the Islamic revelation was a privileged one. Yet, apart from the fictive unity of the classical Arabo-Islamic empire, there is no historical precedent for the integration of the Arabs into a superstate. The most prominent Pan-Arab unionists, of whom Gamal Abd al-Nasser represented the zenith and Muammar Qadhafi the nadir, desacralized the Islamic content of this vision to put it at the service of the reconstitution of the postcolonial Arab political order. Throughout its checkered history, Pan-Arab unionism has been subjected to a competition among its most powerful advocates to determine which would have the honor of organizing political integration under the aegis of its own one-state 53

nationalism. The winner temporarily enjoyed the privilege of directing the Arab politico-military effort against the former colonial powers and Israel, their imputed surrogate. Romantic and negative, Pan-Arab unionism served, in secular terms, the same purpose Islamism served in religious terms: it protected the ummah, however narrowly conceived in the secular sense, from its enemies and defended it from further disintegration, rather than providing the foundation for progressive, forward-looking sociopolitical policies; thus, it has furnished the basis for a regional political culture around which Arab regional aspirations as well as frustrations have rallied at the expense of the nation-building enterprise. In the final analysis, the weight of the Pan-Arab cultural baggage and the internecine struggle between the major Arab players (Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya) for the right to control the Arab destiny did more to impede Arab progress than to promote it. Political unionism has certainly failed to meet its objectives despite random attempts to revive it. As a result, the last decade has witnessed a decided turn toward maximizing the power of Arab economic resources in the interest of unity. This shift of emphasis was presaged by the initial success of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) when in 1973 it used petroleum as a weapon of coercion against the West for its perennial support of Israel. The resulting wealth that began to accumulate presented a number of unforeseen problems to the oilrich Arab nations, particularly in the realm of migratory labor practices, internal and Gulf security, regional and international aid, territorial disputes, and so on, and required coordination on levels previously deemed inappropriate to countries usually highly suspicious of each other. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) was created in 1981 to satisfy this need for coordination. But once again, the impulse of this initial integrative effort was directed inward rather than outward and was more an effort to redefine the status of each individual country vis-a-vis the other in a regional arrangement than it was to establish the grounds for a definition of

new relationships with the industrialized world. Still, the GCC was the start of a new and important direction for the Middle East. Since the creation of the GCC the Middle East has undergone some very important transformations. The glut of oil on the global market after 1985 brought the price of petroleum products to an all-time low from which the region has not yet recovered. The weakness of prices forced a severe curtailment of Saudi internal development plans, which in turn affected the economies of those countries most dependent on exporting labor to the Saudi market. In addition to these factors, the Saudi political decision to furlough Arab workers from countries that took a pro-Iraqi position during the Gulf War further exacerbated already critically high levels of regional and global unemployment. The loss of revenues from repatriated workers, accelerating unemployment, the depression of prices for domestic oil production, and a failure politically and economically to react positively to these challenges have threatened the stability of many regional countries, especially Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria because of their particular vulnerabilities to outside economic conditions. In Arab North Africa (the Maghrib) the immediate response to the dilemma of the oil-rich Gulf Arabs was increased waves of emigration toward the EO countries and especially France, an emigration which the North African governments endeavored to control since emigration represented for the North African Arab countries a further deterioration in their hard currency balances and a strain on their fragile European economic and political relationships. These governments turned belatedly to liberal economic reforms. An important reform was put into effect in 1989 when Morocco. Algeria, Tunisia. Libya, and Mauritania agreed to an integration scheme called the Arab Maghrib Union (UMA).5 Like the GCC, the UMA fulfilled primarily a need to defend the North African regimes collectively from internal dissension and to bargain in strength with the resurgent forces of European unity

through a coordination of their foreign policies. The UMA proposed that as an institution only, it could make North Africa more attractive for European trade and investment once the Maastricht Treaty went into effect, lest the EU deny North Africa access altogether to the potentially huge European market. The UMA also proposed that only together could its member nations be in the best position to negotiate emigration policies with the European Union. Furthermore, expanded access to outside markets could be complemented by the creation of an internal market for goods and services in which North African know-how, labor, and manufactures would move unimpeded across national frontiers. Thus, the UMA was meant both to imitate the EU and to protect North Africa from its competition. Superficially, such movements toward integration appear to be mutually advantageous for their partners. But imbedded in these schemes are some problems which could lead to just the opposite effect. The UMA process implied that the political process be opened to plural political interests for the purpose of national mobilization, not the least of which were the inimical interests of the Islamists, whose charge that the secular state could no longer protect the ummah immediately gained a receptive audience. From their unique perspective the Islamists make no distinction between such integrative schemes and the neocolonial conspiracy of the secular West to dominate the Muslim world. To the Islamists, the West uses integrative economic schemes to spearhead further penetration of Arab political structures and to degrade Muslim society under the guise of economic improvement and aid. The Islamists point out that secular regional regimes consent to this conspiracy because they believe that by enhancing the waning political power of their secular, Western-trained and -oriented elites, these integrative schemes will ultimately forestall the inevitable Islamic revolution. Everything to the mind of the Islamist is a sinister emanation of this collusion. According to the Islamists, secular regimes are reluctant to Arabize their educational curricula completely, for example, not because Arabic does not

meet the need for technical training in an economically interdependent world dominated by the EU, but rather because it would advance the Islamization of society. By the same token, the commercial codes that governments must amend to encourage the uniformity of economic exchange are evidence to the Islamists of the regimes' desperate attempts to promote secular law over Islamic law and therefore to cast aspersions on Islam's ability to deal with issues of modernization and socioeconomic progress. If these problems of domestic stability were not enough to give secular regimes pause for reflection, there exist other issues that beggar the endeavors of these regimes to integrate. Often, the accommodation of vastly different political economies is a daunting task both in terms of the scale of commercial exchange and the compatibility of institutions. Tunisia, for example, has an economy caught up in the throes of privatization but constrained by limited political pluralism under a dominant single party; Algeria, once a guided economy classified as a single-party Arab social democracy, is today also trying to liberalize as the single party withdraws from the public economic domain in the face of strong Islamist pressure; Morocco has a laissez-faire economy as an aspect of the flexible relationship between king, urban bourgeoisie, and a multiparty system; and Libya still flounders under the effect of the anarchy engendered by Colonel Qadhafi when he imposed an extreme decentralization of the economy in the name of the people's “Jamahiriyyan” democracy. It is unfortunate that such countries cannot afford the luxury of permitting market forces to determine the evolution of a direction and of a pace to their cooperative economic enterprise. Although there are pressing reasons of economic health why these regimes should liberalize by withdrawing from the public domain and thereby make the state more attractive to Western capital, such action is neither congruent with their political cultures nor with the structure of their political economies.

Nor is there much hope that the reforms associated with liberalization will actually take hold. The state will continue to define the necessities of economic restructuring. And the Middle Eastern state, like present-day China, will do so in the belief that economic restructuring can be accomplished without significant political change. This restructuring will oblige the state to push its “internal” boundaries further and further out toward its actual “territorial” borders by means of an even more strenuous mobilization of the population for these new economic structures. And such mobilization has always meant an increase, politically speaking, in the imposition of the state over society. And so the state, through the means of a dominant party, will surely impinge more rather than less on national economic activity. If the Middle Eastern state succeeds in its mobilizing effort-and there is no guarantee that it will-its success will translate immediately into greater legitimacy at a time when the state needs legitimacy the most. The Islamists, who themselves have an alternative Islamic economic program to promote, will contest this legitimacy because they cannot fail to interpret any return of the state to vigorous economic intervention as a new form of internal colonialization, a sinister way to exploit the people in the name of rationalizing the process of extracting national resources. Hence, it is not difficult to appreciate the wide range of possibilities for conflict that the process of economic integration might some day pose.

Conclusions To say that the issues presented in this study are being posed in a new and radically different political context is to understate the gravity of the problem, especially with respect to the Middle East. During the past 150 years, the Middle East has been progressively organized under a system that reflected none of its territorial, cultural, social, economic, religious, ethnic, or political realities. The imposition of a Western concept of territoriality, law, and political organization and demeanor on the Middle East was meant 58

to serve the imperial requirements abroad of the colonial powers for stability at home. It was not meant to serve the needs of the colonized peoples for sound government and administration. The result was that even after decolonization, inasmuch as the structures put in place by the West have been largely left intact but not politically and culturally internalized, the problems of the Middle East continue to be analyzed within a frame of reference that pertains solely to the Western nation-state. Hence, it remains both alien to the region and to its political culture. For the West this signifies that our Eurocentric concept of the Middle East is no longer valid. Where once we viewed the Middle East as an extension of our own political worldview, we are now obliged to view the Middle East in its own terms and to rethink its meaning accordingly. Where once the Middle East was defined solely in terms of the relationship between the nation-state and the alliance systems of the two global superpowers, today the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the resurgence of ethnic and religious nationalism have restored a degree of autonomy to regional politics. Ethnic and religious nationalism has weakened the hold of the nation-state on Middle Eastern society, given Middle Eastern boundaries a new functional and psychological equivalence, and has thus enlarged those boundaries to include areas such as Central Asia, which hitherto had been subsumed under other definitional rubrics. The cases of fragmentation that this study has analyzed represent only the most salient examples of a trend that appears to be growing progressively more disruptive since the Soviet Union collapsed. Fragmentation is today proliferating with particular vehemence in such areas on the periphery of the contemporary Middle East as in the Caucasus, where Abkhazians are fighting Georgians, in Nagorno-Karabakh, where Azeris and Armenians continue to murder each other, and in the former Soviet Central Asian republics, where tensions are high between the local Turkic peoples and the minority Slavs. In these selfsame areas, we not only find that the imposition of Soviet rule has masked older, more

historically entrenched rivalries, but also that Islamist movements are making a bid to playa predominant role in the political disposition of the now newly independent ex-Soviet republics. Yet, anybody who has studied Islamic history cannot find this phenomenon particularly odd. The student of Islamic history knows that these areas were once frontier provinces of the classical Arabo-Islamic empire. And, he knows also that no matter which imperial power happened, by dint of circ*mstance, to impose its power on the peoples of these areas, these people nevertheless underwent the same continuous cycle of ethnoreligious revivalism that has marked the political and cultural history of the traditional Middle Eastern heartland. If then, in the post-cold-war era, we propose, as this study implies, to redefine a region geopolitically according to the specificity of its historical political culture and to the problems particular to that culture rather than to the specificity of contemporary superpower politics, we will have good reason to suggest that the Middle East is in actuality geopolitically expanding. But the issues of ethnic and religious conflict are not simply problematic for the Middle East; Western Europe will have to face the potential for confrontation among its own ethnic minorities that Serb, Croat, and Muslim ethnic nationalisms today portend, to say nothing of the impact that Muslim religiocultural issues are now presently having on the concept of pluralism in France and Germany, where the concentration of Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants is the highest on the European continent. Moreover, we would do well to assess in the light of its global impact the most recent instance of religious nationalism in Asia, where pressures between Muslims and Hindus over the political disposition of Kashmir has been building ever since the retreat of the British from the subcontinent. In a word, the entire global system is presently being shaken-and more vigorously than in times of superpower competition-by the continuation of instability in peripheral areas. And such instability can have important repercussions for the understanding of future US security

requirements in a political environment that has yet to be satisfactorily defined. Neither is the hope by any means assured that the integrative process will lead to a lessening of tensions. For if the fragmentation of the Middle East poses imponderable quandaries, the same Call be said for the process of integration since we cannot be certain that the inevitable relinquishing of national sovereignty necessary to make supranational, nongovernmental organizations of economic unification function efficiently will actually produce the stability we anticipate. The consolidation of European unity through the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty will certainly be a formidable task. Can such a task be any less formidable for the North American Free Trade Agreement or for other nascent organizations of economic union in less advantaged parts of the world? The simultaneous fragmentation and integration of the Middle Eastern environment point to a substantially different typology of regional conflict. The chances are extremely slim that the US military may have to fight future classical conventional actions of limited duration against Middle Eastern rogue states such as Iraq. It is much more probable that US forces will be engaged in protracted operations against nonstate actors whose religious or ethnic nationalism threatens to destroy states such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt, the survival of which is a core interest of the United States. Such operations will present the same kind of problems that the US military had to face in Somalia-operations that will be conducted without the benefit of front lines, clearly identifiable enemies, or a well-defined end-state. There is no doubt that such nonstate actors are prepared to make maximum efforts to obtain their ends. Under these conditions, it is axiomatic that US responses be predicated on appropriate and accurate analyses and that these analyses be free of the kind of thinking that depicts Middle Eastern conflict in monolithic, civilizational terms.6 Monolithic thinking fits well the paradigm of

a Jominian military that seeks to concentrate its force against the enemy in the belief that the existence of a single center of strategic gravity presupposes a single node of tactical pressure and therefore the possibility of a decisive engagement. But it will not suffice as an answer to the requirement that the United States military adjust itself to the new political environment in this volatile part of the world. The Middle Eastern conflictual environment is simply too complex and too rich in contradiction to be managed by reducing conflict to monocausal factors. Each manifestation of conflict in the Middle East must be dealt with on its own merits. And before any successful response to conflict can be made, flexible examination of the issues must be renewed with vigor and paired to an appropriate configuration of military force.

Notes 1. For an analysis of the Hamas organization in the context of the ArabIsraeli political arena, see Lewis Ware, “LIC in the Middle East,” in Stephen Blank et al., Responding to Low-Intensity Conflict Challenges (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 19 December 1990), 5-22. 2. An excellent discussion of these points may be found in D. B. Vought, “Ethnic Conflict: The Invariable in the Human Condition” (Unpublished paper. International Studies Association-South, Maxwell AFB, Ala., October 1993). 3. The consequences of Turkish ethnopolitics toward the Kurds and other Balkan peoples are well documented in Gareth M. Winrow, “Turkey and the Balkans: Regional Security and Ethnic Identity” (Unpublished paper. 27th Middle East Studies Association annual meeting, Research Triangle Park, N.C., 11-14 November 1993). My discussion of this issue is based on Professor Winrow's analysis. 4. For purposes of this paper, I will use “EU” to include members of the European Economic Community, the European Community, and the newly named European Union. 5. For a general introduction and appraisal of the UMA, see Oussama Romdhani, “The Arab Maghrib Union,” American-Arab Affairs, no. 28 (Spring 1989): 42-49. An excellent analysis of attempts at regional unification prior to the creation of the UMA may be found in Mary-Jane Deeb, “Inter-Maghribi Relations Since 1969: A Study of the Modalities of Unions and Mergers,” The Middle East Journal 43, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 20-34. 6. See the article by the distinguished political scientist Samuel P. Huntingdon, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993. Lauded by some as “the 'X' article of the post-Cold War era” and condemned by others, Huntingdon's views were the subject of a collective response by a number of well-known scholars. See Jeane Kirkpatrick et al., “The Modernizing Imperative,” in Foreign Affairs, September/October 1993, 22-26.

Regional Study 2

Security Issues in the

Former Warsaw Pact Region

Dr Paul Hacker Few events of our time have caught the imagination and had such profound significance as the collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe and the USSR. The democratic revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in early 1991, and the breakup of the USSR later that year were developments that profoundly altered the security picture in Europe. This essay considers some of the most significant problems faced in the former Warsaw Pact region. Considered broadly, these include the following: (1) most crucially, how to consolidate democracy in Russia and to promote a new set of relations with the former Soviet republics in conditions of internecine wars, perceived threats from Islamic extremists, and economic breakdown: (2) how to achieve the coexistence of different nationalities occupying the same territory in many countries in the region; and (3) how to overcome the legacy of over four decades of communist rule and subservience to the former USSR in Eastern Europe while developing a new set of ties to the West that will enhance security throughout the Continent.

Russia Developments in Russia will continue to exert significant influence not only in the former Soviet republics, but in Eastern Europe as well. Upheavals, marked most graphically by the military assault on the Russian White House on 4 October 1993, have yet to take their course. Russia faces all the problems of its former East European allies-including the need to develop stable democratic structures, transform to a market economy, clean up the environment, reorient and downsize its military, and correct other problems. While Russia's immediate postindependence orientation 65

seemed to be heavily slanted toward the West, subsequent developments suggest that a more nuanced and balanced policy has evolved. Russian president Boris Yeltsin has appropriated some of the rhetoric of his nationalist rivals in championing the interests of the 25 million Russians inhabiting the other republics, especially regarding such issues as citizenship in the Baltic states. Russia has also asserted a leadership role in preserving security in the republics. The foreign policy doctrine released in December 1992 calls for cooperation with the West but notes that Western states may have interests that diverge from those of Moscow.1 The document even suggests that the US might seek to replace Russia as the principal security guardian over the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) under the guise of “mediatory and peacekeeping efforts.”2 Russia's shying away from meaningful action against Serbia in the Bosnian conflict is also a sign of its reluctance to become too closely associated with Western views. Future Role for the Russian Military A major problem for the Russian military has been to restructure for a world of peace and to find a new mission. The prospect of fighting a war in Western Europe or of using military force to keep control of Eastern Europe has been superseded by the need to protect Russian interests in the former Soviet republics. Rapidly deployable airborne troops and peacekeeping units, rather than the vast tank armies assembled in the past, are the order of the day. This section looks at some of the major issues involving Russia's armed forces.3 Under Soviet rule, Russia's armed forces had a proud tradition. As one analysis described it, the Soviet Union, like Prussia before it, was not so much a country with an army as an army that used the entire country as its own billeting area. 4 With its good pay, prestige, and perks the officer profession was highly sought after. Five million strong at its peak in 1988 (all Soviet forces), the Russian army has dwindled to an estimated 1.5 million members,

with another 770,000 now serving in the armed forces of the various republics. The Russian military today suffers from postempire hang-over. Its officer corps has been reduced to an impoverished, disunited, and often homeless mass. Some 595,000 troops have been pulled back from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states since 1989; of these, some 180,000 have no permanent housing. By the end of 1993, according to one estimate, the number of officers (630,000) will actually exceed the number of enlisted (544,000) because of difficulties in meeting draft requirements.5 The military industry that supported the Soviet military has been confronted with the need to massively restructure for civilian use. Military spending, in real terms, has fallen 78 percent since 1989; arms procurement fell 68 percent between 1991 and 1992 alone, while military research and development (R&D) was reduced by half. One of the most important problems that Russia must face is the lack of real civilian control over the military. The army has been drawn into politics by the unsettled circ*mstances of the country, especially its weak institutions. A kind of praetorianism has developed in which the military acts on its own rather than as an agent of civilian authority. The army is also affected by the fact that it has been stripped of its mission-it is no longer the “defender of socialism against world imperialism,” it is distrusted by its own people, and it lacks political guidance. Senior military officers, feeling that the Russia they are sworn to defend has been debased to a second-rate power and, maintaining a residual fear of the capabilities of the US and its allies, have demanded an end to certain concessions that have included hasty withdrawals from the Baltic states, the idea that the East European states could easily join NATO, and especially, surrender to Japanese demands to surrender the four Kurile islands occupied by Soviet troops in 1945. New Military Doctrine

Russia has revised its military doctrine, but in a way that is consistent with the military's view of the world and its needs therein.6 The new doctrine abandons the first use of nuclear weapons, which had been a declared Soviet policy for decades and is a bow to the fact that Russian conventional forces are not as overwhelmingly superior to those of potential adversaries as they once were. The doctrine denies that Russia is faced with any specific threats or enemies and redirects military efforts to dealing with local wars and regional conflicts (i.e., those on Russia's borders) through smaller, mobile units. Significantly, among the threats to Russian security that the doctrine foresees are not only such traditional ones as territorial claims on Russia, local wars, attacks using weapons of mass destruction, and the proliferation of such weapons but also the “suppression of the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of the citizens of the Russian Federation in foreign states. “7 Monroesky Doctrine

Blueprint for Future Intervention?

There is ample evidence that current Russian officials persist in thinking about their country and its security situation in classical terms of spheres of influence-a notion that has been referred to as a Russian “Monroesky Doctrine.” No less an authority than Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev, writing in the Washington Post just a week after the bloody events in Moscow that nearly toppled his president, argued that the West must accept the legitimacy of a Russian role in the “near abroad” countries of the CIS: Protection of legitimate rights of the millions of Russian-speaking minorities in the former Soviet republics, the economic reintegration of the republics and peacemaking activities in conflict areas: All of these are an objective necessity. Just as a relapse into imperial politics would lead to a repetition of the Yugoslavia scenario in the former Soviet Union, so too would renunciation by Russia of its proper role .....[A]ssistance to Russia in implementing its peacekeeping mission in the post-Soviet space-is precisely the formula for partnership with Russia.8

A more forthright view was voiced by Professor Andranik Migranyan, Russian foreign affairs expert and Yeltsin advisor, who argued that in view of the Russian presence in the new republics and the arbitrary nature of borders and questionable legitimacy of some of the regimes. “Russia should declare to the world community that the whole geopolitical space of the former USSR is a sphere of its vital interests and should say openly that it is opposed to the formation of any closed military-political alliances by the former Union republics, either with one another or with those countries that have an anti-Russian orientation and that it would regard any steps in this direction as unfriendly.”9 Migranyan defended this concept against charges that it represented a form of great power chauvinism by recalling that the US itself has stated that many regions of the world constitute a zone of vital interests. Yeltsin himself also suggested that the UN should grant Russia special powers to protect peace and stability in the region of the former Soviet Union.10 One Russian military writer noted that the idea is widespread in the military that some sort of Russian-dominated union will be reconstituted in the near future and that it is unnecessary to withdraw behind Russian borders since the military will simply be moved back in the near future. He also quoted Defense Minister Pavel Grachev as having told his colleagues in an internal briefing that a decision had been made not to pull back to Russia's borders but to maintain forces outside them, especially in Central Asia and the northern Caucasus.11 Thus, the issue of whether Russian forces are truly engaged in peacekeeping-a function that is acceptable to the West-or in finding a thin veneer to reconstitute Russian domination over the former Soviet republics remains an open question. As one journalist summed it up, “Russian forces are regarded as saviors in Tajikistan, revanchists in Moldova, occupiers in the Baltic nations, and interventionists and liars in Georgia.”12

The Former Soviet Republics 69

In his own country, Gorbachev's reforms released forces he was unable to control, resulting in the aborted coup against him in August 1991, which was followed shortly thereafter by the breakup of the USSR into separate republics. While the coup was the immediate cause of the breakup of the USSR, that process was a long-term one made inevitable by conflicts among various nationalities that became more apparent as the lid was lifted and by resentment against Russian domination. The breakup of the USSR was sealed by the 1 December 1991 referendum in Ukraine in which voters overwhelmingly approved independence. Without Ukrainian participation, both Russian president Boris Yeltsin and Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that the continuation of the USSR would be impossible. On 8 December 1991, meeting in the Belarusian capital of Minsk, Yeltsin, Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk, and Belarusian president Stanislav Shushkevich agreed to form the new Commonwealth of Independent States as a loose coordinating body for the former Soviet republics. Later that month, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, a total of 11 of the original 15 republics (without Georgia and the Baltics) signed a protocol making all the 11 republics cofounders of the CIS. Collective Security in the Former USSR In Minsk, the issue of disposition of the Soviet armed forces was addressed. It was agreed that each republic could found its own army and that nuclear weapons would remain under unified command. It was agreed that the Russian president would maintain primary authority over nuclear weapons-then based in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, as well as Russia. The other three states, expressing their intention to become nonnuclear powers at a future unspecified date, would have veto power over Russian use of those weapons. Each of the republics, starting with Ukraine, then moved to build their own armies. The question of the security system encompassing the CIS is still an evolving one. Initial Russian attempts to retain control over unified armed forces failed by early 1992 (except for Russian

control over strategic nuclear forces belonging nominally to the CIS). By May of that year, a Treaty on Collective Security was signed in Tashkent by the republics of Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. This was followed up by the CIS charter signed January 1993, to which Belarus and Turkmenistan also acceded. The charter contains a number of obligations in the field of mutual assistance and cooperation in the field of defense and security, but could not be characterized as a new defense alliance.13 Ukraine remained “noticeably absent,” fearing that the arrangement might become a fig leaf for reimposition of Russian control. In October 1993, Georgia, under duress of civil war, also joined the collective security arrangement. The treaty provides for coordination of efforts in the defense field. Ukraine Ukratrie, with 54 million inhabitants, about a fifth of whom are ethnic Russians, and with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world after those of the US and Russia as well as substantial parts of the former Soviet military industrial complex, is a special case of postSoviet security. As described in the New York Times, the country has a total of 1,656 nuclear warheads and 176 strategic missilesmore than France, the United Kingdom (UK), and China combined. The newspaper also noted that Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk had decided to retain 46 SS-24 missiles left over from the Soviet arsenal (the republic also has 130 88-19 missiles and 41 nuclear bombers with about 600 warheads). Kravchuk had first agreed to dismantle all nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory, ratify the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), and become a nonnuclear state, then hedged on his promises and finally signed an agreement in Moscow with visiting US president Bill Clinton and Russian president Yeltsin on 12 January 1994 committing his country to dismantle its nuclear arsenal in return for economic compensation. Kravchuk has stated that he would try to convince the Ukrainian Parliament to take up the issue again, but the final outcome remains uncertain. 14

Another area of contention was the Crimea, which was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954. Under former vice president Aleksandr Rutskoi, the Russian Parliament passed a resolution demanding that the Crimea be returned to Russia. Adding to the tension is the fact that the majority of the area's population is Russian (the Crimea voted by a small majority in favor of Ukrainian independence in 1991). Closely related to the Crimea issue is dissonance over the disposition of the Black Sea fleet. In 1992, the Russian and Ukrainian presidents agreed to split the fleet, but this measure has proved difficult to implement in practice. Because of the lack of a suitable Russian harbor in the region, some have suggested that the Russians lease the Crimean port of Sevastopol, which is the fleet's home port. The Russians rejected the idea. There are also tensions with the Crimean Tatars, deported in 1944 by Stalin as “security risks,” over Russian failure to provide essential oil deliveries, and Russian fears over Ukrainization of the schools. The nuclear issue is a reflection of larger insecurities in Ukraine's relationship with Russia, as well as the feeling that possession of nuclear weapons (even without the codes necessary to launch them) makes Ukraine (which nominally has the third largest nuclear arsenal of any state in the world) a force to be reckoned with. Retention of nuclear weapons is seen as a bargaining chip that will not be given away cheaply. These insecurities include uncertainty over the loyalty of the 60,000 Russian officers (out of 100,000 officers in the Soviet army stationed in Ukraine) who remained with the new Ukrainian army and took a loyalty oath to it.15 While US officials, from President Clinton down, have urged the Ukrainians to proceed with earlierannounced intentions to give up the weapons (which some experts suggest are a wasting asset that is difficult to maintain and dangerous to store), some other observers have countered that only by keeping its own nuclear weapons can Ukraine provide an effective deterrent against a potential nuclear or conventional Russian attack. 16

Ukraine in early 1994 was also a country in difficult economic straits; inflation was running at a rate of up to 100 percent a month, energy production had nearly collapsed, and many factories were idle or operating at under 30 percent of capacity. Before independence, about 30 percent of Ukraine's gross domestic product (GDP) came from the defense industry. It is heavily dependent on Russian energy imports. Its exports (chiefly coal and steel) are collapsing under the weight of bureaucratic red tape, and it is therefore unable to pay the high prices demanded by Moscow for oil. 17 The Baltic States The Baltic states were incorporated into the Soviet empire in 1940 by brute force and remained there until the collapse of the attempted coup in August 1991 in Moscow allowed the r declaration of independence of all the republics of the USSR. Thus, it is not surprising that as Atis Lejins of the Latvian Institute of International Relations recently put it, “It must be clearly stated that the Baltics see the greatest threat to their security emanating from Moscow.”18 In his view, this threat is not simply historical but represents a continuation of previous policies adapted to new circ*mstances. Lejins noted that the official Russian foreign policy conception published in the Diplomatichesky Vestnik in February 1993 stated that while Russia seeks good relations with the Baltic states, it will need to retain strategic sites in the Baltics and must defend the rights of Russians living there. In negotiations in Jurmala, Latvia, for example, the Russians proposed in May 1993 that the Skrunda early warning site remain until the year 2003 (supposedly to allow time to build a replacement), the Ventspils Sigint station until 1997 (ostensibly for the same reason), 19 and the Liepaja naval base until 1999. This determination to keep the sites was reportedly repeated by Russian defense minister Grachev in an internal briefing to officers on 14 September 1993.20 Russian leaders depict the Latvians and Estonians as violators of human rights because they are trying to restrict the political rights of the

Russian-speaking population, most of which moved in after the 1940 annexations. Lejins also quoted with some trepidation the paper of Dr Karaganov, deputy director of the European Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences at a seminar in Moscow on 6 October 1992. Karaganov set out the thesis that Russia must protect not only Russians living in the republics but also those members of the indigenous population who are eastern rather than western oriented. Russians should not be allowed to immigrate to Russia from the republics, an investment program should be instituted that would create Russian political and economic enclaves in the new states, the Russian language should be actively promoted in schools and media, and the Baltic states should immediately grant Russians full citizenship rights.21 He argued that Russia should have the right to intervene to restore order in the ex-Soviet republics.22 One legacy of the half-century of Soviet occupation of the Baltic states is the influx of Russian settlers and their offspring. While in Lithuania the percentage of Russians in the local populace has been held to about 10 percent, the figure goes to some 30 percent in Estonia and over a third of the population in Latvia. Attempts of the indigenous governments to limit the voting rights of mainly Russian outsiders, while understandable from the historical viewpoint, have been harshly criticized not only by Russian officials but also by Western human rights organizations. An estimated 25.000 Russian troops remain in Estonia and Latvia; those in Lithuania were withdrawn at the end of August 1993.23 Moldova and the “Trans-Dniestr Republic” When elections were held in December 1991 in Moldova (much of which was the Romanian province of Bessarabia until annexed by the USSR in 1940), they had no effect in the areas of Dniestr Moldova (on the left bank of the Dniestr River abutting Ukraine) and Gagauzia, between Ukraine and Romania in the south. Separate elections were held in these areas and a breakaway 74

republic in Dniestr Moldova declared its independence. A major concern of the Russians who form the basis for the separatist movement is fear that Moldova will rejoin with Romania and that Russians will face second-class status. Clashes erupted in March and June 1992 when Moldovan president Snegur attempted to reassert Moldovan authority in Trans-Dniestr. The Russian side received the support of the Russian Fourteenth Army stationed in the republic. While the Russian government publicly supports the territorial integrity of Moldova and has sent a separate peacekeeping force to the area, it has been unable or unwilling to control the activities of the popular Lt Gen Alexandr Lebedev, the Fourteenth Army's commander, who was previously praised by Russian president Boris Yeltsin but who fiercely criticized Yeltsin's decision to use force against his political opponents in Moscow in October 1993. Lebedev would like to see the Moldovans recognize the independence of the breakaway TransDniestr republic. That he has been able to maintain himself despite his opposition to Yeltsin's policies suggests that there are definite limits to Moscow's control over some of its more assertive military leaders in the field.24 When Snegur visited Moscow a few days after Yeltsin crushed the hard-liners in Moscow, he was snubbed by the Russian president, one of whose aides added salt to the wounds by announcing that Trans-Dniestr had received about $30 million in cheap energy and raw material imports from Russia during the first nine months of 1993.25 Georgia Georgia declared its independence as early as April 1991, even before the breakup of the USSR. An outspoken nationalist, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was elected president the following month, but he soon lost support when he began to use dictatorial methods to deal with opponents. He also attempted to tamper with the political autonomy granted the Moslems of South Ossetia in the north. When tensions rose, riots, shootings, and demonstrations took place, ending with the president's departure from the country in

January 1992. He subsequently returned, however, to his power base in western Georgia and attempted to stage a comeback. When Eduard Shevardnadze took over as Georgia's head of state later that year, he was faced with insurrections by forces loyal to Gamsakhurdia and separatists who took over South Ossetia (wanting to join it with North Ossetia in Russia) and the Abhkazia region that abuts it on the Black Sea. Shevardnadze reluctantly appealed to Russia for military assistance. The assistance was granted, but the price Shevardnadze reluctantly paid-bringing Georgia into the CIS on 8 October 1993-was too much for many of the 5.5 million Georgians to bear. Some, such as Defense and National Security Parliamentary Committee chairman Nodar Natadze, called the action “treason.” Many other Georgians regard their country's independence as strictly limited, with foreign and especially defense policy under strong Russian influence. Agreements on mutual defense that were signed with Russia will allow Russian troops to remain in Georgia indefinitely, despite the fact that the Georgian parliament had voted earlier in 1993 to send all Russian troops out of the country by 1995. The agreements allowed Russia the right to maintain bases in key areas, including the Black Sea port of Poti. There is strong suspicion that the Russians were aiding separatist elements in order to have their own say over events in Georgia. It is certain that some of the separatists involved were aided by Russian troops with manpower and equipment, but it is not entirely clear whether that aid was given at the direction or with the connivance of Moscow. One can also recall the fact that Russian defense minister Grachev, speaking in 1993, had said flatly that Russia could not risk leaving Abkhazia because this would mean, “losing the Black Sea.”26 Meanwhile, the fighting has been great in its economic and human toll, as hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the fighting (250,000 were driven out of Abkhazia). Armenia and Azerbaijan

Armenia and oil-rich Azerbaijan have been fighting over the disposition of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mostly Armenian enclave inside Azeri territory, since 1988. When riots in the area did not induce a demanded transfer of the territory to Armenian control, it was placed under direct rule by Moscow from July 1988 to December 1989. A drive then began to push Azeris out of both Armenia and Karabakh. In 1991 Armenia offered to give up claims to Nagomo-Karabakh in exchange for free elections in the enclave and additional autonomy. Fighting flared up again in early 1992; thousands of people from both sides have been made into refugees. At that time, Armenian forces fighting in the enclave not only extended control over areas formerly held by the Azeris but also carved out a corridor to Armenia allowing direct access between Armenia and the enclave. In late October 1993 Armenian forces seized the last strongholds of Azeri forces in southwestern Azerbaijan; some 20,000 Azeri refugees are estimated to have crossed into Iran. Azerbaijan's strongly nationalist and anti-Russian president, Abulfez Elcibey, was ousted in 1993 in a bloody coup and replaced by former Politburo member Heidar Aliev. Before he was ousted, Elcibey came under increasing pressure from Russia, which gave aid to Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh. Surprisingly enough, the Russians in this case helped engineer his ouster not through direct use of their r forces but by withdrawing them in May 1993. Their withdrawal emboldened the Armenians to resume the offensive and thus pave the way for Elcibey's replacement by a more pro-Russian leader. Aliev was formally elected president in October. Aliev, who expressed readiness to join the CIS in September 1993, has also tried to use economic inducements to Russia to intervene in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute with Armenia, including a reduction in the share of oil fields to be prospected by Western firms in order to give more of a share to Russian companies. Some reports suggest that Allev has also assured the Russians the right to base troops in his country,

including on the border with Iran, in return for support against Armenia.27 Tajikistan Situated as it is on the northern border of Afghanistan, Tajikistan represents the southern outpost for Russian security in stopping the influx of militant Islam. Since December 1992, Tajikistan has been controlled by a government led by former Communists.28 The government took over after a bloody civil war with tens of thousands being killed. The strife was motivated more by clan and regional loyalties than by interethnic disputes or a fight between Communism and Islamism. All parties were banned, including the Islamic Renaissance Party, a moderate partner in a previous coalition. More radical Islamic fundamentalists are continuing a guerrilla campaign against the government and receive support from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Pakistan, but especially from Afghan guerrillas wanting to avenge the Russian occupation of their country in the 1980s. Some 20,000 Russian troops of the 201st Motorized Rifle Division and a border guard unit are based in the republic of 5.7 million inhabitants. Russia pays 70 percent of the republic's budget (25 percent more than before 1991).29 Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev explained that the reason for the presence of Russian forces was to provide a “shield against the spread of regional and clannish Islamic extremism in Central Asia.” While Russian fears that Tajikistan will become the first domino to fall to Islamic extremism are not groundless, the larger issue is whether the cure is appropriate to the illness-in other words, whether the choice is simply to succumb to radical Islamic forces or to agree to a restoration of Russian military domination. Meanwhile, the pro-Communist forces have been ruthless in dealing with their opponents, jailing or executing many and closing opposition newspapers.30 Kazakhstan

While Kazakhstan president Nursultan Nazarbayev has said his country persists in its intention to go nuclear-free, he has expressed some misgivings afterwards, asking for US, Chinese, and Russian security guarantees. Kazakhstan, however, has signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) and nonproliferation treaties. The START I treaty was ratified overwhelmingly by the country's parliament during a December 1993 visit by Vice President Al Gore, who also gave Nazarbayev what he wanted-the promise of a summit meeting with President Bill Clinton in 1994 in Washington.

Relations with the Middle East Relations with Middle Eastern states at the end of 1993 seemed to be developing slowly, being driven primarily by basic economic interests, although with some special circ*mstances as well. The major players appeared to be Turkey and Iran. Due to the fact that both countries are neighbors, Iran and Azerbaijan have had what may be the most active contacts in the region between the central Asian republics and Middle Eastern states. Iranian interest stems from the fact that some 15 million of its citizens are of Azeri extraction. Remarks by former Azeri president Elcibey in speaking about a “southern Azerbaijan” in 1992 raised Iranian hackles. The Iranians have not tried to cultivate Azerbaijan as an ideological bridgehead, despite the fact that the republic is predominately Shiite Muslim as is Iran. Iranian interest now is predominately directed at finding a solution for the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, given the fact that the dispute has forced thousands of Azeri refugees to flee into Iran as Azeri territory is occupied by Armenian forces, and at promoting economic cooperation, as is the case with other states in the region. Thus, during a visit to Azerbaijan in late October 1993, Iranian president Heshemi-Rafsanjani condemned Armenian actions in the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh but in subdued tones, calling the “continued aggression regrettable and a source of anxiety.”31 In the economic field, the Iranian president concentrated on promoting 79

economic integration. He carried a similar message to the capitals of other states in the region. The Azeris, for their part, were interested in obtaining as much active support from Iran as possible to stop the Armenian offensive. While Turkey has a natural interest in promoting ties with the Turkophone countries of the trans-Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkish policy has also been low-key in this regard. Given Turkey's historical enmity to Armenia, it is understandable that the Turkish government has tilted toward Azerbaijan in its dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the Turks have rejected appeals for a more overt role that would involve committing military force.32 Cooperation with other states has developed more slowly. Israel, for example, has extended diplomatic ties to the Central Asian republics and is interested in promoting commercial ties. It has been suggested that if peace should develop in the Middle East, some joint ventures between Israeli and Saudi businessmen in such fields as agriculture and agricultural machinery are not out of the question.

East European States Beginning with Hungary in mid-1989, the East European states one by one overthrew the Communist regimes that had dominated every aspect of life in the area since the 1940s. The Hungarian case was unique inasmuch as the Communist regime itself began the process of liberalization that it hoped would allow it to return to power in a free election. In Poland, a series of roundtable discussions in early 1989 led to semifree elections later that year. Due to Communist miscalculations, the Communist-led coalition collapsed and non-Communist forces were able to establish Poland's first free government in a half century in the latter half of 1989. In October 1989, as a direct result of its inability to control the flow of its citizens beyond the borders of the Warsaw Pact (Hungary decided in the summer of 1989 not to turn back East

German citizens wanting to travel to Austria), the East German regime tried to prolong its vitality by forcing long-time Communist leader Erich Honecker to step down. However, on 9 November, it was forced to open the Berlin Wall and soon lost control of the situation, leading to further changes and the absorption of the country into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) on 3 October 1990. In Czechoslovakia, brutal police intervention against a student demonstration on 17 November 1989 commemorating the closing of Czech universities by the Nazis 50 years earlier was the spark that led to a massive outpouring against the regime and forced it to enter into discussions with opposition forces that resulted in the formation of a coalition government the following month, and soon afterward, the removal of all 'Communists from higher office. In Albania and Bulgaria, the process was similar as ruling Communist parties first replaced their leaders and then engaged in talks with opposition elements that led to the gradual replacement of former leaders by non-Communists. Only in Romania did the process end violently when President Nicolae Ceaucescu was overthrown in a bloody revolt that led to his and his wife's execution by reformist Communist elements constituting a National Salvation Front that remains in power. Problems of Transformation The East European states are beset with a number of problems in making the transition to a democratic market-oriented economy. Many voters in East Europe, accustomed as they are to a modicum of social welfare and guaranteed employment, have punished governments that have sought to introduce economic reforms that have placed hundreds of thousands out of work and caused sharp price rises and falls in the standard of living. Movements that piloted their countries from Communist dictatorship toward Western-style democracy have themselves fragmented. The need to restructure economically has been brought home especially in defense industries, whose products no longer find a market. Slovak sensitivities to decisions by the Czech-dominated federal

government in Prague to end arms production and exports was one of the factors that contributed to a sense of estrangement that led to the 1993 breakup. Security and Military Issues In the security sphere, the East Europeans face a new security equation, both because of the political and territorial changes that have taken place in the past four years as well as the direct impact of the mandate of the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty to reduce conventional armaments and the dictates of economic exigencies. In 1988, for example, Poland had 406,000 of its own troops, a secure eastern border, 58,000 Soviet troops on its own soil, and a western “buffer” comprised of 172,000 East German troops in 11 divisions and 380,000 Soviet troops in 19 divisions. Poland's forces are to be cut to 200,000, facing over a million troops in Russian Kaliningrad (some 400,000 by the end of 1992 and growing), Germany (370,000), Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus.33 The heavy concentration of Russian forces in the Kaliningrad salient causes headaches for the Poles. The area, in the words of one specialist, “has become a giant armed camp with greater combat power than the entire Polish armed forces.”34 While Poland is not even in potential conflict with any of its neighbors, sensitive issues do persist, which include protecting the Polish minority (200,000) in Lithuania and in Belarus (500,000), as well as finding middle ground between Ukraine and Russia. Czechoslovakia, before its January 1993 separation, had a 10division force of some 200,000 troops, which was in the process of being cut in half. In late 1993, the Czechs had an estimated 106,000 and the Slovaks 47,000 troops in their separate armies. Five Soviet divisions of 75,000 have now left the country. Hungary had 120,000 troops in 15 brigades in 1988 and four Soviet divisions of 64,000 troops. Hungarian strength is being cut to 75,000. The East European states have sought to deal with their new security situation through mutual consultation and discussions with the West through the European Community (EC)-known 82

since 1 November 1993 as the European Union (EU)-and the North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC), which was organized in 1991. They have to deal with the legacies of the past-domination by the USSR, government control of the economy, and closed societies while dealing with issues that have been buried for years. Bulgaria in 1992 signed a friendship treaty with Russia that provides for, among other things, consultations in the event of a crisis threatening their security and pledges not to support aggression against each other. Nationalities and Minorities One problem that is widespread throughout the region is that of treatment of minorities and nationalities.35 None of the states in the region has used the “Yugoslav approach” of civil war to deal with the issue, but it remains a sensitive one in several cases.36 The Hungarians are the largest minority in the region, with an estimated 3.5 million in Romania alone, including 2 million in Transylvania, 700,000 in former Czechoslovakia (most in Slovakia), 450,000 in former Yugoslavia (most in Serbian Vojvodina) , and Ukraine (about 200,000 in Transcarpathia). On the one hand, Hungarians are sensitive to the position of their brethren abroad; on the other hand, neighboring governments are suspicious of Hungarian motives, wondering whether they hide irredentist aims of restoring a greater Hungary that existed before the end of World War I. In Bulgaria, the Turkish minority of about 1 million (out of 8 million people) was subject to discrimination and repression by the Communist government of Todor Zhivkov from 1984 to 1989. Its right to use its native language was severely restricted, and its people were forced to change their names to Bulgarian ones. After the political turn in the country, the legislation was rescinded and a Turkish-based party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, for a time held the balance of power in Parliament. The Bulgarian Socialist Party (ex-Communist) has continued to use the Turkish issue to inflame the public. While the Bulgarian government has 83

tried to remove obstacles to good relations with Turkey, the fear of the former colonial master still exists just below the surface, currently aggravated by the feeling that there is a military imbalance between the two states in Turkey's favor, aggravated by Turkey's close ties to NATO. In Moldova, some 2.8 million persons of Romanian extraction are joined with 600,000 Russians and 562,000 Ukrainians in the Moldovan republic. Another 450,000 Romanians are living in a part of Ukraine that was originally the southern portion of the pre-1940 Romanian province of Bessarabia, then annexed to the USSR. There are also some 200,000 Romanians living in Hungary. Minorities are also scattered elsewhere in the region. In Estonia they amount to 38 percent and Latvia 47 percent of the population (predominately Russians). Some Germans remain in all the Central European countries. Attempts at Cooperation Visegrad The heads of state of Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1990 met in the Hungarian town of Visegrad to discuss a regime of informal collaboration among their countries later called the Visegrad cooperation.37 The Visegrad Group has established no formal structure or linkages but discussions have ranged over cooperation in economic, political, and security areas. One possible attraction of the Visegrad Group is that it would provide an umbrella under which its members could enter European security or economic cooperation institutions. To be sure, within the participating countries, there is no consensus as to the degree to which the Visegrad cooperation should be advanced. For example, Czech prime minister Vaclav Klaus has been a less-thanenthusiastic supporter, arguing that his Czech republic, independent since 1 January 1993, needs to look west, not east. On the other hand, one Polish observer suggested a number of areas for fruitful cooperation, including military production, and furthering links with Ukraine.38 Another area of collaboration, in

his view, is the increasing problem of illegal immigration; in Poland, for example, 32,292 illegal aliens were arrested in 1992, compared with 2,407 three years earlier. Poles and Slovaks, in general, place the greatest hopes in the Visegrad process, the Czechs the least, with the Hungarians somewhere in the middle.39 While the Czechs are looking west, the Slovaks have not settled a simmering problem with Hungary over the construction of the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam project on the Danube River. The issue has been mediated by the EC, and its legal aspects will be decided by the Hague Court.

Some Tentative Conclusions and Implications for the US The security situation in the former Warsaw act and ex-USSR region is in a state of transition. The former domination by the USSR of the international environment (as well as the domestic politics) of the East European states has been replaced by a highly uncertain landscape devoid of firm military, political, or economic alliances. The East Europeans are searching for new ways to promote their political and economic stability and to find new guarantees for their security. Throughout the region, there has been a rush to join Western institutions, and disappointment in finding that such organizations as NATO or the EC are not welcoming new members from the East with open arms. Quite obviously, the security situation in the former USSR is somewhat differentiated from that in Eastern Europe. Russia holds and will continue to hold a dominant position by its size and power. This reality will require a nuanced Western policy that recognizes legitimate Russian interests but seeks to warn Russian leaders away from the tried and tested path of using military force to maintain their sway over the newly independent states. While there has been strong sympathy for the people of the Baltic states, some have criticized the West for putting out of its collective mind less blatant examples of the use of force (or those further from the locus of Western attention) such as Georgia.40 85

As of now, it does not seem that the Russian maximum objective amounts to a full recovery of the strategic losses suffered by the breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Its aims in Eastern Europe appear to be more defensive than offensive at this juncture--ensuring that no states join a pact that could be directed against Russian interests rather than seeking to reimpose control over them. As for the ex-Soviet republics, Russia seems more determined to take unilateral measures that will reestablish a strategic presence, although again the desire to guard against destabilization from outside seems to be a strong motivating force, especially in the case of Tajikistan. The Russians, however, have not been reluctant to intervene in other situations where they feel some advantage will accrue-especially in such cases as Georgia. The victory of the protofascist Liberal Democratic party in the December 1993 elections has made prediction of developments even more obscure. The Western certainty that the country was headed toward democracy and a market economy now deserves rethinking. Indeed, as has happened more than once in the past in other states, Russian developments may also show that market reform and development do not automatically promote political stability, and indeed, may cause a contrary trend. There will be a fine line for US policy to walk in the future. On the one hand, the US recognizes that the former Soviet republics still constitute an area of important strategic interest for Russia, somewhat in the way Latin America does for the US. The US is by no means unsympathetic to concerns such as the seepage of militant Muslim fundamentalism through such portals as Tajikistan, where the Russian army is already heavily involved. Given the fact that the US public is reluctant to support a US peacekeeping role in Bosnia, in an area much closer to the consciousness of Americans, it is doubtful whether the US could become actively involved in peacekeeping operations in the former Soviet periphery. The obvious response is likely to be “let the Russians do it” and to try to circ*mscribe the rules of the game as far as possible to preclude a resurgence of imperialism under the

guise of peacekeeping. In this connection, however, US levers are likely to be limited, and more in the economic sphere than in the political or military sphere. While the US is not ready to respond to the plea of the East Europeans for full NATO membership, the security concerns of those states are very much in the minds of American policymakers. While there is no scenario on the horizon for a return to Communist rule of the past (which historically was initiated, by the march of Soviet military power), there is no certainty that these states will have a smooth transition to democracy and a market economy. An activist US policy in the region will be required to ensure that events do not overtake us and get out of hand.

Notes 1. See S. Neil McFarlane, “Russia, the West, and European Security,” Survival 53, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 14. 2. Ibid. 3. Michael Gordon, “As Its World View Narrows, Russia Seeks a New Mission,” New York Times, 29 November 1993, A1. 4. “Russia's Armed Forces: The Threat That Was,” The Economist, 28 August 1993, 17. 5. Serge Schmemann, “Russia's Army: Now a Shriveled and Volatile Legacy,” New York Times, 29 November 1993, sec. 1,7. 6. Serge Schmemann, “Moscow Outlines Doctrine for its Military of the Future,” New York Times. 3 November 1993. What is described as a “detailed account” of the new doctrine was published in Rossiskoye Vesti, which is translated in Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS)-SOV-93-222-S, 19 November 1993. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Andrei Kozyrev, “And Now: Partnership with Russia's Democrats,” Washington Post, 10 October 1993. 9. Quoted in Milton Kovner, “Russia in Search of a Foreign Policy,” Comparative Strategy 12, no. 3 (October 1993): 313. 10. Ibid., 314. For an excellent analysis of the evolution of the Russian view of the relationship with the former Soviet republics stressing integration and a “first among equals” role in security matters see John Lough, “Defining Russia's Relations with Neighboring States,” RFE/RL Research Report 2, no. 2 (14 May 1993): 53-60. 11. Gordon, A6. 12. Steven Erlander, “Troops in Ex-Soviet Lands: Occupiers or Needed Allies?” New York Times, 30 November 1993, A6. For a Russian view critical of “neo-Clausewitzian thinking” on the use of military force, see Pavel K. Baev, “Peace-keeping as a Challenge to European Borders,” Security Dialogue 24, no. 2 (1993): 137-50. 13. See “Russia's Security Concerns to be Met in Cooperation with NewlyIndependent States in the Territory of the Former USSR, a Generalized Overview,” by Ambassador Shustov (Unpublished paper prepared for the Conference on Europe's Security Futures (subsequently COESFJ, Garmisch, Germany, 3-5 June 1993). Shustov depicts the collective security mechanism evolving in the CIS as one which is compatible with cooperation with “EuroAtlantic security mechanisms” (page 6). See also Ronald M. Bonesteel, “The CIS Security System: Stagnating, in Transition, or on the Way Out?” European Security 2, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 115-38. 14. For a discussion of this issue, see “Ukraine President Now Plans to Keep Some Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, 20 October 1993; and Peter Greier, “U.S. Anxiously Eyes Ukraine Atomic Arsenal,” Christian Science Monitor, 2 December 1993, 3; also Mary Kaldor, “Everyone Needs Good Neighbors,” The Statesman and Society, 6 August 1993, 14-15; and Sergi Kiselyov, “Ukraine: Stuck with the Goods,” Bulletin oj the Atomic Scientists 49, no. 2 (1993): 30-33.

15. See Raymond Bonner, “Ukraine: A Nuclear Power but Not an Army of Untested Loyalties,” New York Times, 2 December 1993, AI. 16. Greier, 3. 17. See Jane Perlez, “Economic Collapse Leaves Ukraine with Little to Trade but Its Weapons,” New York Times, 13 January 1994. A4. 18. Atis Lej ins , “The Baltic Security Dilemma: How to Secure Restored Independence?” (Unpublished paper prepared for the COESF), 2. 19. Ibid., 3. 20. “In Ex-Soviet Lands, Troops Now Find a Mixed Reception,” New York Times, 30 November 1993, A6. 21. Lejins, 12. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Michael Gordon, “To Latvians a Single Russian Soldier is Still One Too Many,” New York Times, 30 November 1993, A6. 24. See discussion in Stuart Kaufman, “The Politics of Russian Military Policy: Continuities and Contrasts from Brezhnev to Yeltsin” (Unpublished paper delivered at the ISAS/South Conference, October 1993), 21-22. 25. See “Bessarabian Homesick Blues,” The Economist, 30 October 1993, 62. 26. See “Tricked and Abandoned,” The Economist, 2 October 1993. 56; Daniel Sneider, “Georgia on the Brink as Shevardnadze Turns to Russia,” Cluistian Science Monitor, 1 November 1993, 3; and Raymond Bonner, “Pact with Russia Bedevils Georgian,” New York Times, 9 December 1993. 27. See “The Bear Pauses,” The Economist, 11 December 1993, 62. 28. See Raymond Bonner, “Why All Eyes Are on a Place Called Tajikistan,” New York Times, 7 November 1993, sec. 4, 5. 29. See Bonner, “Ukraine,” A1. 30. See Raymond Bonner, “Asian Republic Still Caught in a Web of Communism,” New York Times, 13 October 1993. 31. “Iranian president Heshemi-Rafsanjani Visits; Holds Talks with Allev,” quoted in FBIS-SOV-93-207, 28 October 1993, 57. A Russian analysis of Rafsanjani's visit was that “Tehran appears to have decided not to strive to spread its thinking in the Central Asian region, but to forge reciprocally beneficial economic cooperation...The Central Asian governments...are very cautious about any efforts to import any ideological influence or thinking from abroad.” See “Iranian President's Visit to Central Asia Viewed,” quoted in FBISSOV, 20 October 1993. 90. For a Turkish view of the region, see Seyfi Tashan, “Caucasus and Central Asia: Strategic Implications” (Unpublished paper prepared for COESF), 32. For an overview of the Azeri-Armenian connection with the Middle East, see William Ward Magos, “Armenia and Azerbaijan, Looking toward the Middle East,” Current History, January 1993, 6-11. Magos points out that Armenia has been isolated internationally over the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, but notes that established Armenian communities throughout the Middle East act as an important source of influence in these states.

33. See Jeffrey Simon, “Central Europe: 'Return to Europe' or Descent to Chaos?” Strategic Review, Winter 1993, 18-25. 34. Ibid., 20. 35. For a broad overview of the problem of East European minorities, see “That Other Europe: The Economist, 25 December 1993, 17-20. 36. See Georg Brunner, “Minority Problems and Policies in East-Central Europe,” in John R. Lampe, ed., East European Security Reconsidered (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Press, 1993), 145-54. 37. For a fuller discussion of East European attempts at cooperation, see David Shumaker, “The Origins and Development of Central European Cooperation,” East European Quarterly 27, no. 2 (September 1993): 351-73. 38. Henryk Szlajfer, “Central and East European Security Perspectives: Polish View” (Unpublished paper prepared for the COESF), 15. 39. See Miroslav Polreich, “Central European Security Perspectives,” (Unpublished paper prepared for the COESF), 9. 40. See Melor Sturua, “Yeltsin's Newest Proconsul” and John R. Hannah, “The (Russian) Empire Strikes Back,” both in New York Times, 27 October 1993, A13. Quite typically, this fear of Russian intentions extends to Eastern Europe as well. In a 10 December 1993 interview, Polish foreign minister Andzej Olechowski sought a clearer commitment from the US and the West on Poland's request for NATO membership, arguing that the West is “playing into Russia's hands by not seeing the signals of imperial thinking.” See Jane Perlez, “NATO Commitment Sought by Poland,” New York Times, 12 December 1993, A3.

Arms Control and Proliferation Bradley S. Davis Over the centuries there have many sincere attempts by mankind to stop, or at least to erect some boundary, to the horrors and lunacy of war. Nations, governments, and religions have built ethical and religious barriers against war; they have outlawed it and set up councils to arbitrate settlements through international law. Countries have tried to withdraw from the threat of war behind the walls of neutrality, or to escape it by practicing isolationism. When these stratagems did not work, they joined with other nations for the collective defense of their peace and security. The rare attempts to control the manufacture, distribution, and use of weapons were seldom successful or lasting. Arms control in its infancy was chiefly the imposition of the will of the victor over the loser of a conflict. In today's world the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, referred to as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), presents a national security challenge of unprecedented proportions for the United States. This challenge is especially true today since the demise of the former Soviet Union and the resulting birth of numerous, independent republics, each searching for its unique identity and an equal place among the world of nations. Without the former Communist government's tight security and positive controls over their WMD, the black market in those weapons is flourishing as third world countries and terrorist organizations around the world acquire them or their components. What possible reason could be advanced to justify a country's pursuing the acquisition or development of WMD, especially newly emerging countries with such fragile economies? Some of the reasons seen from the point of view of the states acquiring these weapons are to counter a perceived threat to their homeland security, to respond to a lack of positive security guarantees, to gain world status and prestige, to heighten a power projection capability within a 1 certain regional area, or to counter a greater power's influence. 91

The security challenge facing the United States today is twofold. How do we attempt to reduce and eventually eliminate through arms control treaties the number of WMD currently held or being developed by nations around the globe and at the same time strengthen the nonproliferation regimes for arms of all types? This essay briefly reviews the history and the current activity of arms control treaties and agreements and then moves on to a discussion of nonproliferation regimes today. Possible solutions to the problem of WMD proliferation are offered. While WMD include nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the emphasis during this discussion, unless noted, is on nuclear weapons.

Arms Control The activity of arms control can be traced at least as far back as 1817 when the United States and Great Britain concluded one of the most distinguished examples of a voluntarily negotiated and highly successful agreement to control armaments. The RushBagot agreement limited the naval forces each side could have stationed and patrolling on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain.l The International Peace Conferences at The Hague in 1899 and 1907 were the first attempts to approach the problem of war and peace on a worldwide scale. The participating nations recognized that the interests of all nations required their collective action to control modern weapons of war and their ever-increasing and devastating consequences. The stupendous power unleashed by the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II shattered all the old concepts of war and weaponry and imposed a new urgency and demanded new perspectives on international efforts to control nuclear armaments. Since that time there has been a nearly continuous attempt on the part of the United States to limit nuclear armaments. The cold war's superpowers have had an adversarial relationship ripe for arms control agreements since the time the Soviets detonated their first atomic device in 1949. However, a combination of factors has recently brought the problem of arms control to the top of the 92

international priority list. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and subsequent reorganization into new, independent republics frantically searching for recognition and respect in the commonwealth of nations have drastically increased the membership in the infamous "Nuclear Club" (fig. 1). NUCLEAR CLUB 1994 Acknowledged Members:

United States, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, United Kingdom, France, and China

Suspected Members:

India, Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa

Past/Present Suspected Aspiring Members:

Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea

Figure 1 By June 1982 both the United States and the Soviet Union had initiated talks on further agreements beyond the old Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to limit offensive strategic nuclear weapons. Although the early negotiations were somewhat tumultuous, especially after President Reagan's "the Soviet Union is an evil empire" pronouncement, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was finally signed by President Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev in July 1991. Once implemented, START will be the first treaty to actually reduce operational strategic offensive arms and will lead to stabilizing changes to the composition of, and reductions to, the deployed 93

strategic armed forces of each party. The overall strategic nuclear forces in both countries will be reduced 30 to 40 percent, with an accompanying reduction of 50 percent in the most threatening and destabilizing weapon systems. In his letter of transmittal to the Senate for its advice and consent on the newly signed treaty, President Bush commented, The START Treaty represents a nearly decade-long effort by the United States and the Soviet Union to address the nature and magnitude of the threat that strategic nuclear weapons pose to both countries and to the world in general. The fundamental premise of START is that, despite significant political differences, the United States and Soviet Union have a common interest in reducing the risk of nuclear war and enhancing strategic stability.2

The United States had several objectives in pursuing this treaty. First, the agreement was intended not simply to limit or cap the number of strategic offensive weapons but to significantly reduce them below current levels. Second, the treaty was designed to allow equality of American forces relative to those of the Soviet Union. Essentially, this meant that equality of military numbers did not require identical force structures; rather, it demanded limits that allowed each party equivalent capabilities. Finally, and perhaps a cornerstone to the entire agreement, was the exacting verification regime specified in the treaty. This verification regime includes exchanges of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test-launch telemetry tapes, permanent on-site monitoring of mobile missile ICBM assembly facilities, 12 separate types of onsite inspections, cooperative measures, and data exchanges to complement our national technical means of veriflcation.3 This system of safeguards, confirmed through the use of an extensive list of inspections to intrusively verify Soviet treaty compliance, was absolutely critical to ensure that American national security was not jeopardized. The Soviets, too, would have the right to conduct these inspections to ensure the "wicked" Americans were not cheating. Unfortunately, the road to peace is very rocky and never easy to accomplish. In August 1991 General Secretary Gorbachev barely 94

survived the abortive coup attempt by Communist party traditionalists, but it did spell the death knell to their crumbling empire. By early 1992 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a part of history. A hope the Americans had held dear for nearly 50 years had unbelievably come true, almost before the nation could react to it. The United States was politically ill prepared for the aftermath of the Soviet Union's demise and for the mad scramble by the newly independent republics to assert their newfound identity. The situation also caused the proverbial wrench to be thrown into the works of the treaty process because the freshly signed START treaty was a bilateral agreement between the United States and a country that now no longer existed! International law permitted the new republics to repudiate and not accept the treaty, something the US government desperately wanted to avoid. Somehow the Bush administration needed to engender a solution to the problem of salvaging the treaty. The first step was actually taken by the new "nuclear republics" Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. During a 23 May 1992 meeting in Lisbon, the four leaders of the new states, along with the United States, signed a protocol to the START treaty, committing the four states to "make such arrangements among themselves as required to implement the treaty's limits and restrictions, to allow functioning of the verification provisions of the treaty, and to allocate costs."4 The final part of the protocol stipulated that Russia would accede as the successor of the former Soviet Union to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear state, while the other three republics would sign and ratify the NPT as nonnuclear states in the "shortest possible time." (This last point will be very important as the discussion unfolds concerning proliferation.) In separate, legally binding letters to President Bush, the leaders of the three nonnuclear countries further guaranteed the total elimination of nuclear weapons from their soil within the sevenyear implementation period of START. This meant all tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan would be returned to Russia for decommissioning, and these three republics would also assist in dismantling and removing to Russia all 95

strategic offensive weapon systems and weapons. To complement these steps, the United States signed with each of the new republics individual protocols, which effectively altered the previous bilateral START treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union into a multilateral agreement between the United States, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. There will be extremely difficult times ahead as the newly independent republics of the former Soviet Union begin the process of START treaty implementation. The division into republics of all that was the Soviet Union for 70 years will be stressful to the new national identities, to emotional ties to the old ways, to each economy, to the new republics' infrastructures and natural resources, and to their cultural values. The most harrowing problem these states will deal with is the disposition of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal and its support and production infrastructure. All of the tactical nuclear weapons are supposed to have been withdrawn to Russia in accordance with the Lisbon Protocol. Of the close to 11,000 strategic nuclear warheads in the old Soviet arsenal, less than 1 percent is located in Belarus, 14 percent in Ukraine, 13 percent in Kazakhstan, and 73 percent in Russia.5 Ukraine and Kazakhstan could respectively become the third and fourth largest nuclear powers in the world, each superior to Britain, France, and China combined, if they chose to repudiate the Lisbon Protocol. The prospective failure to maintain centralized control over these forces during the dismantlement and removal makes the rest of the world break out into a cold sweat and not without reason. The new republics are experiencing the wrenching internal economic and social calamities of any new nation. Violent collisions of national minorities with the predominant ethnic population in the republics and the potential rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and Kazakhstan could lead to a change of leadership in some republics. A change to an unknown leadership could greatly affect relations among the republics and with outside states and lead to a revision of their

commitments with unpredictable consequences for their previously stated position on nuclear weapons. All is not bleak though since the further arms control initiatives, going beyond those of START I announced by President Bush and General Secretary Gorbachev and then by Russian President Yeltsin, were ultimately codified into the START II treaty and signed by the United States and Russia on 3 January 1993. During the two-phase draw down, both sides will reduce their present-day arsenals by approximately two-thirds. After completing these reductions, projected for the year 2003, the aggregate ceilings for nuclear weapons allowed to be operationally deployed by either side will be a maximum of 3,000 to 3,500. Of particular note for the United States was the article in the treaty banning all multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRV) on ICBMs. The ban on MIRVed ICBMs has been a centerpiece of American arms control initiatives because these weapon systems were the very strength of the Soviet Union's nuclear might. This treaty achieves a major breakthrough in the scale and scope of nuclear reductions, but it still focuses on the means of weapon delivery, not the dismantlement of warheads. A clarification should be interjected at this point concerning the intent of the two START treaties. They were designed and negotiated to emphasize the reduction of deployed delivery vehicles (missiles and bombers) in place of the reduction of the actual nuclear weapons themselves. START I and II limit the number of deployed weapons and delivery vehicles, but not the total number of weapons allowed in each party's arsenal. Once removed from their associated delivery vehicles, an unlimited number of warheads can be stored indefinitely by either country. The underpinning logic to this approach is that if the delivery vehicles with the corresponding weapon(s) were not operationally deployed (and this would be confirmed under the verification regime using on-site inspections and national technical means [satellite imagery]), then the nuclear weapons themselves could not be used against the other party. 97

There is a corresponding negative impact to this process of reducing the US and Russian nuclear arsenals to drastically lower levels since it inevitably brings the problem of third nuclear powers to the forefront of strategic policies. Nuclear third parties clearly have to join as equal partners in future arms control talks at some point in time. This is not necessarily the biggest problem facing the United States and Russia now, but it definitely will complicate any further negotiations on additional reductions. Continued nuclear proliferation around the world will continue its impact on the future of multilateral arms control. A direct consequence will be the raising of the perception level for strategic requirements of the other nuclear powers, and perchance those of Russia and the United States. New, inexpensive, extremely accurate strategic and tactical delivery systems, increasing targeting flexibility, and the development of subkiloton munitions may force decisions by these nations away from force structures of minimal deterrence. Indirectly, proliferation could encourage the development and deployment of antiballistic missile systems by the nuclear powers; a culmination that would inadvertently affect their own strategic relations and force postures. With the emerging Russian-US friendship, the codevelopment of a more effective policy of nuclear proliferation prevention must take priority, and it must be joined by the other nuclear powers. Failure in this regard will greatly jeopardize nuclear weapons reduction beyond START II. Eventually, other nuclear powers should not only be invited to join this regime, but they should be strongly compelled through whatever incentives the United Nations, the United States, and Russia can enforce to ensure full participation. The new and friendly political relations between Russia and the United States allow an expanding regime such as this, and should not be mistaken by the other nuclear powers for a lack of trust, as in the past, but as an effort to promote greater transparency and predictability in their strategic relationship. The purpose of the regime would be to gradually transform the strategic relationship

of all parties from the balancing of the present-day retaliatory capabilities against one another to the joint management of a strategic stability based on decreasing weapons numbers and alert levels.

Chemical and Biological Weapons The Rest of the Story Chemical and biological weapons are just as damaging and capable of inflicting horrible pain and suffering as are nuclear weapons, and their control and eventual elimination have also been a priority goal of the United States. The extensive use of poison gas during World War I (over one million casualties and over 100,000 deaths) led to the Geneva Protocol of 1925 prohibiting the use of both poison gas and bacteriological methods in warfare. During World War II even though new and more toxic nerve gases were developed, President Roosevelt's stern warning against their use may have persuaded the Axis powers not to employ them. Use of such weapons has been outlawed by the opinion of civilized mankind. This country has not used them, and I hope we never will be compelled to use them. I state categorically that we shall under no circ*mstances resort to the use of such weapons unless they are first used by our enemies.6

After the war the United States tried unsuccessfully for years to complete separate agreements banning the use, production, and stockpiling of these weapons, but the Soviet Union repeatedly blocked each proposal because they demanded these agreements must be linked together. In late 1969 President Nixon declared that the United States unilaterally renounced the first use of lethal and incapacitating chemical agents and weapons and unconditionally renounced all methods of biological warfare. This diplomatic "kick in the pants" forced the Soviet Union finally to alter its position and support the separate agreements approach. An agreement banning biological weapons was signed in 1972 and ratified by the United States in

1975. The terms of the convention mandated the signatories not to undertake the development, production, stockpiling, or acquisition of biological agents or toxins, to include the weapons and their means of delivery. Within nine months after the entry-into-force date, all parties to the agreement were to have completed the total destruction of all material. On 26 December 1975 all executive branch departments and agencies certified to the president that they were in full compliance with the convention. It took almost 20 years from that date for the world to agree to a comprehensive agreement concerning chemical weapons. The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was signed in Paris in January 1993 by 130 states and by 17 others since then. This convention is the first truly global disarmament treaty with extensive verification provisions. Unlike the NPT, the CWC reflects a post-cold-war era of improved, enlightened north-south relations providing equal rights and obligations among all parties, clearly defined procedures for cooperation and assistance among member states, and strict export controls aimed at states that are not parties to the convention. The CWC is the first experience for many signatories with an arms control treaty with such extensive reporting requirements and intrusive verification provisions. CWC's ratification and implementation during the next several years will affect in a major way how the signatories of the NonProliferation Treaty feel about arms control in the future. Their analysis on whether to rely on cooperative international on unilateral arms races will be greatly influenced by their experience with the CWC. To delay for any appreciable length of time the implementation of the treaty within their territories may jolt their confidence in multilateral disarmament agreements, and this loss of confidence could have very detrimental consequences at the crucial NPT Review and Extension Conference in April 1995 and at the Fourth Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1996. The CWC's credibility will be strengthened immeasurably when the United States and Russia, the two states

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possessing the largest chemical weapons stockpiles, ratify the conventions. When one considers that the objective of the CWC is to eliminate a major weapon of mass destruction and to lay the groundwork for new global security relationships, the resources required to implement the CWC are comparatively small indeed. While it is not without flaws, and while important issues that must be resolved quickly remain unresolved, the work under way in The Hague has nonetheless provided generally auspicious signs that chemical disarmament can soon be transformed from dream to reality. Perhaps the biggest challenge and potential stumbling block Just ahead is that the power and responsibility to make that happen has now passed from an elite group of negotiators to a much broader group of lawmakers, technical experts, industry officials, and public organizations throughout the world and across the political spectrum. 7

Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Britain, France, and China are likely reassessing their nuclear postures and arms control attitudes because of the continuing hesitancy of Ukraine to remove all strategic nuclear weapons from its territory in accordance with the START I treaty and Lisbon Protocol. Despite the January 1994 signing of an accord by presidents Clinton, Kravchuk (Ukraine), and Yeltsin (Russia) in Moscow outlining the agreement to dismantle and remove all the strategic nuclear weapons from Ukraine and return them to Russia, the reaction by the British, French, and Chinese to the potential sudden refusal by Ukraine to adhere to this agreement and to its emergence as the world's third greatest nuclear power might very well be a rapid buildup of their forces and rejection of further limitations. However, the heaviest blow would be struck upon the process of nonproliferation for nuclear weapons. The chances of extending the term of the NPT at the Review and Extension Conference scheduled for 1995 would be close to zero. If Ukraine 101

can have them, then why not India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Israel, let alone Germany, Japan, and North Korea? President Kennedy warned in 1962 that "fifteen or twenty or twenty-five nations may have these [nuclear] weapons by the middle of the 1970s."8 The world is very lucky that President Kennedy was wrong in his prediction. Although nuclear proliferation has not kept pace with his schedule, there seems no reasonable means to impede the proliferation of these weapons and technology. Today there are nearly 500 civil nuclear power plants in operation or under construction in 32 countries.9 The world is recognizing that the spread of the technology and comprehension required to build nuclear weapons is running far ahead of any international control. The stories of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program have rejuvenated world fears that the nuclear club membership is growing, resulting in a correspondingly decreasing confidence in traditional nonproliferation procedures. President Bush announced in his 1992 State of the Union message, "We must have this protection [reference to the Strategic Defense Initiative] because too many people in too many countries have access to nuclear arms." 10 From the technical standpoint the only stumbling block to fashioning a nuclear weapon is procuring the fissile material to create the chain reaction of a nuclear explosion. It takes a minimum of 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of highly enriched uranium or eight kilograms (17.6 pounds) of, plutonium to make a weapon. Weapons-grade fissile material is produced by enriching the concentration of U-235 in natural uranium to 90 percent or higher. Plutonium, on the other hand, is gleaned by chemically separating (reprocessing) spent (irradiated) reactor fuel. The world's concern over nuclear proliferation has caused most countries not to build plutonium-fed "breeder reactors," but when the world's finite supply of natural uranium reserves is exhausted, these same countries have no current alternative but to go to these reactors for additional fuel. By one estimate there could be 300 tons of weapons-grade plutonium by the year 2000.11 New British and 102

French reprocessing plants may account for the production of over 200 tons in the next decade. Japan wants to acquire 100 tons of that amount, which equals the total sum in the entire United States nuclear arsenal. Japanese plans for the acquisition of so much plutonium has alarmed the world, North Korea being very vocal in its concern over a possible Japanese weapons program. There is no doubt the Japanese could build a nuclear weapon quickly with their technical expertise and that much material. The list of countries having nuclear weapons, those probablyhave, and those want-to-have countries is clearly growing. "Club Nuke" has nearly doubled its numbers with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The original members coincidentally are the same permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The new members are the newly independent republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, as well as India. The most obvious way to show one's nuclear weapons capability is to detonate a nuclear device. Six countries have accomplished this feat since the nuclear age began: the United States (960 explosions since 1945), the former Soviet Union (715 since 1949), Britain (44 since 1952), France (192 since 1960), China (36 since 1964), and India (1 in 1974).12 The first five countries have "declared" nuclear arsenals, while India's 1974 explosion was described by the government for peaceful demonstration purposes only to aid in the civilian nuclear program. Along with India, the additional probable Club Nuke members include Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa, all widely feared either to have clandestinely assembled an undisclosed number of nuclear weapons or to have the ability to build them quickly once the decision is made. Other nations have displayed dubious intentions of trying to join the ranks of nuclear ownership. These nations include Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. An encouraging note though is a recent Reuters news report from Algeria which states, Algerian Foreign Minister Salah Dembri said, "I formally announce today in the name of the country's ruling authorities Algeria's intention to adhere to the nuclear Non-Proliferation 103

Treaty. Algeria is against military uses of the atom," Dembri said while inaugurating the country's second nuclear reactor, built with Chinese assistance 90 miles south of Algiers. 13 The ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan in South Central Asia has triggered simultaneous nuclear programs capable of producing weapons by both countries. By one official estimate India has the components with which to assemble 40 to 60 weapons on short notice, while Pakistan could produce five to 10 weapons. 14 Why would countries who could redirect the enormous resources required for a nuclear program into other sorely needed programs want to pursue these WMD? India almost assuredly wants to increase its prestige in the international arena and to be seen as the dominant state in the area. This is more true today as its once major political and military ally, the Soviet Union, broke up into a number of separate republics, and its biggest and potentially most aggressive foe, China, has been expanding its influence into the region. Pakistan probably pursues its nuclear program not for world prestige, but from a regional standpoint. It is the first Islamic country with a nuclear capability anywhere in the region of the Islamic Crescent. To Pakistan's credit and the world's relief, it has requested that the United States mediate at regional nuclear disarmament talks and has jointly pledged to sign the NPT along with India. India has objected to this proposal since it is of the opinion the NPT is discriminatory and believes nuclear weapons proliferation should be addressed on a global versus regional basis. Progress is occurring though, because both countries agreed to lessen the risk of nuclear war by pledging not to attack each other's nuclear facilities. Israel allegedly manufactures up to 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of weapons grade plutonium annually in addition to other necessary components for thermonuclear weapons. One hundred to 200 nuclear weapons, with a high estimate of more than 300 weapons may be currently in the Israeli arsenal, even though officially Israel pretends to have no weapons, and the United States supports this charade with a "see no evil, hear no evil" attitude. Even the most 104

conservative potential number of weapons in the region should cause the world to recoil in horror. South Africa's program (probably with extensive Israeli assistance) was shrouded in as much secrecy as Israel's until the summer of 1993. At that time South African president F. W. de Klerk announced to the world that South Africa had indeed established a nuclear program. However, the political bombshell of his announcement was that South Africa had actually assembled a small number of complete weapons. President de Klerk declared these weapons would be dismantled and the South African nuclear program would subject itself to the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) safeguards and inspections to verify that no nuclear material, equipment, or facilities in its possession would be misused for military purposes in the future.15 Iran, Iraq, and North Korea lead the list of nuclear weapon "want-to-haves" and are attempting through various means to acquire them. Iran is a signatory of the NPT, but Iranian leaders have nonetheless reiterated Iran's right to possess nuclear weapons and believe Muslim nations should balance Israel's suspected capabilities. Before the Gulf War in 1991 Iraq was believed to be five to 10 years away from constructing a nuclear weapon. In postwar IAEA inspections estimates have Iraq less than two years away from having the bomb. Iraq, as an NPT signatory, had as early as 1972 concluded a full-scope safeguards agreement with the IAEA. Yet, while openly participating in the international nonproliferation system, Iraq was able to clandestinely violate the system, as we have witnessed during the post-Gulf War United Nations-mandated inspections of their nuclear facilities. Recent intelligence disclosures of North Korea's nuclear program and its assumed ability to produce nuclear weapons have dampened the recent warming trend in North Korean relations with South Korea and Japan. The prospect of an uncontrolled North Korean nuclear weapons program leading to an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons early in the next century would have profound impact on the strategic stability in

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Northeast Asia. South Korea and Japan might reassess their nuclear futures and China would be much less likely to consider reducing its own nuclear forces. Any retreat from the IAEA'S newly established authority for special inspections would drastically weaken the agency's future effectiveness.16

Threats by North Korea of abrogating its NPT membership unless South Korea and the United States make concessions have done nothing to stabilize this region of the world. Hopefully, recent indicators are that a solution may be in the offing, ...in what amounted to a diplomatic breakthrough. North Korea said it was willing in principle to allow full access to its reactor and reprocessing plant. Given the right package of incentives, like diplomatic recognition, security assurances and economic ties. Pyongyang might be persuaded to trade away its nuclear program, just as South Africa and Belarus already have. 17

The world will look to the United States for continued leadership in settling this tricky situation, and its solution may be an example of how the NPT treaty can and should work in the years to come. It must be strongly noted though that the finger of world condemnation for pursuing weapons of mass destruction cannot be pointed solely at the above countries. The economic laws of supply and demand force us to backtrack to the ultimate suppliers of nuclear knowledge as well as fissionable material. Assistance from profit-minded governments, businesses, and individuals around the industrialized world share in the blame. France has provided nuclear assistance to India, Iraq, Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa. Germany has supplied nuclear technology to Argentina, Brazil, India, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan. The United States is also to blame. Israel supposedly acquired 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of American weapons-grade uranium in the 1960s and followed this coup with further smuggling of krypton triggering devices in the early 1980s. Nuclear test data from the United States also mysteriously showed up in Israel. The situation most alarming the world right now is the suspected brain drain of Soviet nuclear scientists and weapons technicians who are finding employment

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opportunities in the third world. An estimated 1 million Soviets are working in various third world countries, 1,000 to 2,000 having the knowledge to design and manufacture nuclear weapons and their components. It is gravely evident that immediate action is required to plug the holes in this leaking ship of proliferation. The cornerstone to the world's nonproliferation activities today is the treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. As early as the 1960s the use of nuclear reactors to generate electricity was becoming a vast source of reactor by-product: plutonium. Enough plutonium is being produced now to produce 15 to 20 nuclear weapons daily. 18 An organized international system is required to prevent diversion of these nuclear materials as well as to lessen the risks of nuclear war, accidental detonation, unauthorized use, and regional conflict escalation. The United Nations has sponsored various proposals from the United States, the Soviet Union, and a variety of nonnuclear states. The biggest stumbling block was the Soviet insistence that collective security organizations (like NATO) should not have access to any member's weapons. An agreement was eventually finalized after intense negotiations. The treaty entered into force in 1970, and since then it has been signed by more than 140 countries. The NPT is essentially a bargain between the nuclear weapons haves and the have-nots. For their pledge not to acquire nuclear weapons, the have-nots received a reciprocal pledge from the haves to provide nuclear assistance suitable to the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy and for the haves to slow and reduce vertical proliferation or growth in the sizes and capabilities of the existing nuclear arsenals. Other blocks in the international wall of nonproliferation include the International Atomic Energy Agency established in 1957. It serves as the primary verification tool for the NPT, monitoring compliance with the treaty's legal obligations and norms and as a facilitator for the transfer of peaceful nuclear materials and technology. The IAEA safeguards are designed to provide timely warning of proliferation problems by detecting any 107

diversion or misuse for military purposes of significant quantities of declared peaceful nuclear materials, equipment, and facilities. The Zangger Committee is a voluntary group of nuclear materials major suppliers, who developed a list of dual-use items whose export is designed to trigger the application of IAEA safeguards. The list includes nuclear reactors, reactor components, and certain nuclear materials such as heavy water. The Nuclear Suppliers Group, or London Club, developed guidelines adhered to by more than 25 countries and includes provisions of physical security for transferred nuclear facilities and materials, the acceptance of safeguards, and the prohibition of third-party retransfer of nuclear exports. It also established Nuclear Weapon Free Zones (NWFZ) where certain regions of the world have been declared through treaties to be off-limits to nuclear weapons (further discussion on NWFZ later). One of the NPT's stipulations is that review conferences must be held every five years. The past conferences (1975, 1980, 1985, 1990) all reaffirmed the treaty's arms control success, but there are problems still to be hammered out. The planned conference in April 1995 is considered extremely important by most countries because there is a required vote on whether to continue the treaty for an indefinite period, while at the same time there have been grumblings by more than a few of the nuclear have-nots that the treaty is discriminating against them. There is a prevailing sense in the world community that time is running short to stem the tide of nuclear proliferation. Failure by the United States, Russia, and the world community to persuade Ukraine to abide by its political commitment to join the NPT and ratify START I makes it impossible to speculate on any development that will further imperil the indefinite extension of the NPT. The January 1994 agreement signed between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine to remove the strategic nuclear weapons from Ukraine's territory is now only a promise to be fulfilled, with no substance as yet. A majority vote on the indefinite extension will be defined by the two issues of how well 108

the NPT has worked up to the date of the conference and whether a reduction of the nuclear arsenals, required under Article VI, has been faithfully pursued. If Ukraine still is maintaining nuclear weapons, the foundation of the NPT will be shaken, forcing the major countries to reanalyze their strategic and security concerns. Additionally, without entry-into-force of the START I and II treaties, Article VI of the NPT will not have been honored by the United States and Russia since not one formal, internationally recognized agreement would exist between the two countries limiting their nuclear armaments. With that in mind other nations may decide for only a short extension of the treaty pending further developments. This argument also leads to the belief that the START I treaty implementation and signing of the NPT by Ukraine would be a giant leap forward, cementing the spirit of NPT as an effective nonproliferation tool requiring indefinite extension. 19 If the unthinkable situation occurs in which one of the successor nuclear republics decides to commit a deliberate act of proliferation and maintain its nuclear weapons, this decision would cause severe repercussions around the world. Widespread possession of nuclear weapons in various regions of the world would decrease the relative military and political power of the United States and other nuclear powers. It could frustrate United Nations peacemaking/peacekeeping operations and slow the emergence of a world security system capable of keeping organized violence to a minimum. Tragically, it could also convince some nonnuclear industrial states that the time is not right to trust their individual security to multilateral security systems perceived to be weak and ineffectual. Countries like Italy, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all have strong military potential that includes a rapid nuclear weapons production capability. Their perception that the nonproliferation regime is untrustworthy and unable to provide basic security against proliferation may force them to begin their own nuclear development programs in self-defense.

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Solutions The Zangger Committee, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and most importantly the IAEA and the NPT have done a better-thanaverage job of slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but they have not stopped or even reduced the development, manufacture, or stockpiling of these weapons. What else can be done? What other actions can individual countries, regions, the superpowers, the United Nations, or the entire world do to stop the flow of nuclear arms? First and foremost, the will to do something further must be stronger, and the participants in any further nonproliferation actions must be disposed to transform their collective will into positive action. One solution would be to strengthen current peaceful nonproliferation norms, specifically the detailed inspection regime or safeguards used by the IAEA. Any country that owns nuclear weapons and is serious about stemming continued proliferation must take the lead by lessening its reliance on such weapons. By maintaining huge arsenals of these weapons such countries are attesting to the rest of the world their importance, and it should come as no surprise that other countries may also want them. Once this giant political hurdle has been crossed, there are a variety of actions that can be taken in addition to the current nonproliferation regime. These steps are of varying magnitude and will present difficult political, economic, and military obstacles to those nations willing to find a solution. One enhancement to the strengthened IAEA safeguards would be to include all nuclear installations of all UN member states. If the five declared nuclear powers agreed and were backed by a Security Council resolution requiring all other United Nations members to do likewise, this action could freeze both the declared and undeclared nuclear arsenals. Concurrently, the United States and Russia could dismantle the reduced warheads resulting from current and future arms control agreements, transferring the fissile material to monitored storage areas under IAEA safeguards. The reductions in the US-Russian nuclear arsenals should be made

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permanent for long-term effectiveness, and they should agree not to continue the current treaty-allowable practice of withdrawing nuclear warheads from the field and storing them. The current START I and II treaties allow retaining the capability to produce new warheads without limit. Both countries, therefore, must negotiate a verified, bilateral agreement to dismantle all strategic warheads reduced under START and subsequent agreements or negotiations and include a provision prohibiting reuse of fissile material mined from old warheads for the production of newer weapons. The United Nations Security Council would, at the same time, start a program to entice the handful of states not currently NPT members to join the NPT or any similar regime of multilateral controls which would end their capability, present or future, to produce weapons-grade fissile materials, as long as IAEA safeguards could be implemented. The bilateral agreement between Brazil and Argentina, who are not current signatories of the NPT, outlines an agreement to adhere to the safeguards of the IAEA and to terminate their individual nuclear programs. The pending START treaties between the United States and Russia cover only a portion of the nuclear club membership. The full implementation of the proposed US-Russian actions should be contingent upon the agreement of the other declared nuclear weapon states-Britain, France, and China-to voluntarily follow the stated limits by freezing the numeric level of their warheads, restricting missile production to a bare minimum, phasing out nuclear warhead testing, stopping all fissile material production, and allowing all their nuclear facilities to come under IAEA supervision. A Security Council decision would enjoin the council to take any necessary joint action against states or terrorist groups initiating the use of nuclear weapons. Such joint action decided upon by the Security Council is authorized under chapter 7 of the United Nations Charter and could include features like economic sanctions against any United Nations member state refusing to submit all nuclear installations under their control to IAEA safeguards, or some other multilateral equivalent.

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The reductions and restrictions upon the nuclear capabilities of the five declared nuclear powers, who are also the permanent members of the Security Council, would assure continued tough council supervision of this broader system for control over nuclear weapons. For example, the council could "decide to obligate supplier countries to report to the IAEA sales and transfers of all components and items on a list prepared by the suppliers group.20 This action is now carried out on a voluntary and incomplete basis. Another nonproliferation concept, which currently' has two shining examples of success in Latin America and the South Pacific region is the establishment of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones. NWFZs are internationally recognized regions of the world that have been created by formal treaties that include verification provisions to stop the migration of nuclear weapons and assist in efforts to roll back proliferation where it has already occurred. NWFZs also could help defuse regional tensions and instability that increase the incentive for countries to opt for nuclear weapons, and they offer an attractive alternative to states that have rejected the NPT membership because of its perceived discriminatory nature. Both existing NWFZ treaties, Tlatelolco in Latin America and the Treaty of Rarotonga in the South Pacific, express a desire to remove the threat of nuclear war from their respective regions, to contribute to global elimination of nuclear weapons through regional measures, and to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Both agreements highlight the value of NWFZs in building regional confidence and security .21 The current NPT embodies a double standard legitimizing nuclear weapons in possession of some but not by others. This is the crux of the claim by many countries without a nuclear capability that there is no equality in the treaty. The NPT's nonproliferation tenets should be applied equally both to nuclear weapon nation haves and have-nots. Members of the nuclear club, to maintain their credibility and effectiveness on nonproliferation matters, must practice what they preach. De-emphasizing and devaluing the possession of nuclear weapons by agreement of all 112

the nuclear states, along with permanent reductions in their arsenals, will show the resolve these countries have to ensure the safety of the world. The constraints of the NPT, linked with sufficient authority, resources, and backing, plus the IAEA safeguards system are the best hope for preventing the continuing proliferation of nuclear weapons. All the aforementioned ideas are proposed to prevent the acquisition of nuclear materials and weapons or the production of them from current civilian-use programs. What happens after a country or other actor is already in possession of weapons and begins to rattle its nuclear sabers? Until now nonproliferation efforts have encompassed only political and economic activities and sanctions in an attempt to stop the proliferation or at least stop the intent to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons. Political and economic sanctions mayor may not be fully effective in forcing that country or actor to freely and voluntarily curb the threats of use or even relinquish their "claim to fame." To physically prevent the use of this weapon or weapons is when the military option should be considered for possible employment. We are now stepping into the realm of the "twilight zone" of counterprol1feration-a coherent strategy to prevent countries from acquiring any WMD through a combination of nonproliferation regimes, export controls, and political persuasion, or should efforts to prevent the acquisition of these weapons fail, to deter or destroy them prior to their use. The estimation of the adversary's potential threat and intent by the United States or United Nations will help determine the level of military response. The threat is a combination of factors including the type of weapon or proliferation that has occurred, the delivery capability, the adversary's intent of use, and the inherent regional instability. The willingness to take military action (unilaterally, bilaterally, or multilaterally) in response to this threat is also a combination of factors, including US/UN military capability, our knowledge of the adversary, what US/UN interests are at stake, and the domestic and international support perceived for the use of the military option. If

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willingness to act by the United States or the United Nations is not commensurate to the level of threat, the military option is simply not available because it will fail. One fact predominates: the use of military force should not and cannot be the first option explored in response to a threat. It must follow and be totally integrated into a unified response using political, economic, and military options. If the military action is then to be used, two outcomes must occur. First, the military action must inflict the minimum requisite punishment to ensure the adversary is worse off than before. Second, the action must establish a credible reputation through its results to discourage future proliferators from triggering like actions. If the intended military action does not succeed, not only will it not remove the specific threat that precipitated the military response, but the entire world will assume that military action is futile as a solution to the problem of proliferation. An effective and efficient nonproliferation regime (and possibly a counterproliferation option) will send a clear and precise message to any current or potential proliferator. This message must be carried forward by a unified, coordinated effort of the political, economic, and possibly the military elements of the world body. First, the acquisition of WMD will not be easy or cheap. Second, any attempts to threaten or use WMD will be dealt with rapidly and severely by the United States and the international community. There are many potential pitfalls to using a military option in a counterproliferation regime, and their effects must be balanced when contemplating the use of military force. A military response is only a stopgap measure at best. Israel's surprise attack on Iraq's Osiraq reactor in June 1981 only temporarily slowed Iraq's nuclear program. Second, military strikes are likely to produce unintended consequences. For example, Israel's attack on Osiraq only drove the program underground into hardened facilities. An attack on an operating reactor could also risk a Chernobyl-like disaster. Third, military strikes set a precedent for other countries to launch their own attacks against suspected sites on the territory of adversaries. 114

(South Korea has made some provocative statements about knocking out North Korea's nuclear facilities in the wake of the Gulf War.) Finally, military strikes against nuclear facilities are a clear violation of international norms against such action. In fact in December 1990 the United Nations General Assembly voted 141-1 to condemn attacks against nuclear reactors. The lone dissenting vote was cast by the United States. 22 The current nuclear nonproliferation regime does nothing but maintain the nuclear status quo, and inherent to that situation are secret and unchecked proliferation activities by a variety of state and nonstate actors. If the world is scared enough and sane enough to really desire an end to this nuclear madness, it is absolutely essential that the nuclear haves practice what they preach to the have-nots and that all rules of nonproliferation and nuclear weapons reduction and elimination apply equally to all participants across the board. There have been many who have proclaimed their ideas in this arena to be the panacea, and it is a sure bet there will be others in the future with a better mousetrap. There are though certain logical precepts and common-sense steps, which, if applied, will have a constant positive force on the nonproliferation regime. No progress will be possible though without the active participation and unanimous agreement of the present members of the declared nuclear states. In this respect, progress will not be possible under any circ*mstances without the foresight and the initiation of strong, enlightened leadership on the part of the United States. This is the premier national security challenge the United States faces in the arms control and proliferation arenas today. Will America recognize its responsibilities to step forward and provide the requisite leadership critical to undertake this task?

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Notes 1. United States Anus Control and Disarmament Agency, Arms Control and Disarmament Agreements, Text and Histories of the Negotiations (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990). 3. 2. Treaty Document 102-20, Message of the President of the United States transmitting the 1reaty between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (Washington. D.C.: US Government Printing Office. 25 November 1991), iv. 3. Ibid., v-vi. 4. Alexei G. Arbatov, "Russian Nuclear Disarmament: Problems and Prospects," Arms Control 14. no. 1 (April 1993): 105. 5. Ibid., 103. 6. Ibid., i, 131. 7. Peter Herby, "Building the Chemical Disarmament Regime," Arms Control Today, September 1993, 19. 8. Oscar Luire, "Stopping the Spread of Nuclear Weapons: Still Time to Act," The Defense Monttor21, no. 3 (1992): 1. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., viii, 3. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. "Algeria to Sign Anus Treaty," Reuters News Service, 22 December 1993. 14. Ibid., viii, 3. 15. Ibid., 4. 16. Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., "The North Korean Crisis" (editorial), Arms Control Today, May 1993, 2. 17. "If North Korea Has Bombs," New York Times, 28 December 1993. 18. Ibid., i, 89. 19. Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr., "It's Ukraine, Stupid!" (editorial), Arms Control Today, September 1993, 2. 20. Jonathan Dean, "Comprehensive Control over Nuclear Weapons," Arms Control 14. no. 1 (April 1993): 250. 21. Jon B. Wolfsthal, "Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones: Coming of Age?," Arms Control Today, March 1993,3. 22. Ibid., viii. 6.

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The Changing Nature of Alliances Maris McCrabb The final decade of the twentieth century marked a dramatic change in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. l America's security, traditionally defined as preserving the United States as a free nation with its fundamental values and institutions intact, seemed as assured as at any time in the postWorld War II era.2 For 40 years America knew what national security meant-protection against the overarching threat of communist expansion. Furthermore, America knew the means to counter this threat-a series of alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with like-minded states oriented against the Soviet threat. With the demise of the Soviet Union and democracy breaking out in the former communist states of Eastern Europe, the threat to America's security seems tangibly diminished. Likewise, the role of, and indeed the need for, its alliances has undergone a substantial transformation. The purpose of this study is to examine the changing nature of alliances in light of the changed nature of the international environment.3 It describes current alliance characteristics and discerns emerging trends within alliances. It examines the changed motives for membership and under what conditions the alliance will either act or not act. It describes the formal and informal decision-making apparatus within the alliances. Fundamentally, this is an attempt to uncover the objectives of these alliances. The thesis of the study is that alliances are moving from traditional balance-of-power and external-threat orientations toward mechanisms for resolving conflicts internal to the alliances or among their participants. To show how the changed nature of the international environment is changing the nature of alliances, this study looks at three cases: NATO, the Western European Union (WEU), and the Visegrad Group. NATO and the WEU are alliances that have roots

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in the very origins of the cold war. They allow us to examine the impact that the new international environment has on existing alliances. The Visegrad Group (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic) barely fits the definition of an alliance. However, there is some argument that this group carries the seeds of what future alliances may well look like and why and how they may be formed. The relevancy of this study lies in the impact that these changes will have on US military options and contingency planning. It is almost becoming a cliche that America will no longer engage in unilateral military operations-Panama, EI Dorado Canyon, and the antidrug efforts notwithstanding.4 Likewise, it is becoming redundant to speak of the malaise of NATO and its search for an identity and mission in the “new world order.”5 This “NATOsclerosis” has in some ways occurred parallel with the rebirth of the WEU as a competing military security institution and poses questions concerning the link between NATO and the WEU such as whether they can coexist in the same manner they have done so over the past 40 years and, if so, what roles and missions each will play. Finally, while much of the concern has been over the security needs and aspirations of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a potential US security/ concern must also include the other former Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) states. An important question deals with the security arrangements of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, for example, fitting into the larger NATO (or WEU) universe. This study begins an examination of these concerns, with a brief historical background on the two previous upheavals in the realignment of alliances: the nineteenth-century attempt by the Congress of Vienna to institutionalize the Grand Coalition after the defeat of Napoleon and the post-World War II point-counterpoint of NATO and the WTO. The attention then rapidly turns to the twenty-first century by looking at the future of NATO and the role the European Union (EU) 6 and the WEU will play in US security calculations. The study examines opportunities and pitfalls that an 118

organization like the Visegrad Group presents to the US. Finally, it closes with some conclusions and recommendations for US policy.

Historical Background Napoleon's opponents formed coalitions whose members fluctuated according to the perceived self-interests of the individual nations.7 Their fundamental outlook was determining if the greatest threat was Napoleon or those who opposed him. The only nation consistently opposed to him throughout the Napoleonic Wars was Great Britain. Post-Napoleonic Nineteenth Century Napoleon's fall began with his establishment of the Continental System on 21 November 1806.8 This system was Napoleon's attempt to close continental Europe to British trade. Britain needed those markets. She exported metals and textiles and imported naval stores and cereals. Napoleon's attempt to force Spain and Portugal into the system (through invasion) started the Spanish War of Independence. To support the Iberian nations (and to tie down French forces), Britain landed troops in Portugal on 21 October 1807, and the Peninsular War began. It became Napoleon's “Vietnam” quagmire. Likewise, the French invasion of Russia on 24 June 312 was directed at stopping Russian trade with Great Britain. The first attempt at semiformal collective security was the Quadruple Alliance of November 1815, which consisted of Austria, Prussia. Russia, and Great Britain. Bourbon France was admitted in 1818. Its purpose was to control threats from within Europe. The alliance, which met irregularly in congress, prohibited intervention in internal affairs, 9 but it did not stop are between nations (or even member states), nor was it a rum to resolve conflicts. The continental keeper of the peace was Austria under the leadership of Prince von Metternich. After 1850, the role of Russia in European stability was also central. These two states

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provided the “backstop” for other, ore regional partnerships such as Britain protecting Belgium. Austria protecting Italy, and Prussia protecting the Rhineland. Continuing the arrangements solidified by the Battle of Trafalgar. Britain remained hegemonic on the seas. It would be a mistake to believe that the Congress of Vienna stopped war between the major powers or that it was successful in eliminating revolution (which the rulers equated with a desire to eliminate autocratic rule) from Europe. The ancient regimes that existed before 1789 were gone forever. Thus, this early attempt at the use of an alliance for collective security failed. Post-World War D Point-Counterpoint-NATO and the WTO The next major realignment of alliance powers occurred after World War II. The entry of the United States into NATO marked a watershed in the history of US security policy. Since the days of the Founding Fathers, America had studiously avoided entanglement with foreign alliances. With the founding of NATO, not only had the US entered into a permanent security alliance with other states, but also the US pledged itself to playing a leading role in ensuring the stability of the Western world. While there is scholarly debate on the origins of the cold war, there is some agreement on the precipitating events.10 Two of the most significant events occurred in Turkey and in Greece.11 Traditionally, that part of Europe had been protected by Great Britain, but Britain, weakened by the war and unable to provide assistance to either Greece or Turkey, turned to the United States. President Harry S. Truman, in a historic reversal of US policy, announced on 12 March 1947 that the US would “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure.”12 This Truman Doctrine was interpreted by the Soviet Union as an intrusion into the internal affairs of other states. The wartime amity between the Soviet Union and the United States was on fragile ground. By 1947, Poland was ruled by the

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Communist party. In February 1948, the pro-Western party in Czechoslovakia was expunged. Then in June 1948, the Soviets blocked all overland access to Berlin, which, while under fourpower (US, Soviet, British, and French) administration, was completely surrounded by the Soviet zone of occupation. Truman immediately instituted the famous Operation Vittles-the Berlin airlift. That same month, the US Senate passed a bipartisan resolution supporting collective defense in Western Europe, and on 4 April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington. Its original 10 European countries13 plus Canada and the US were expanded by Greece and Turkey in 1952, West Germany in 1955, and Spain in 1982.14 To counter NATO, Stalin institutionalized Soviet control over Eastern Europe through the WTO, which was founded on 14 May 1955 when eight European states15 signed a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance.16 The cold war was on, and Europe was divided into two camps. Alliances now formed a dominant, though not exclusive, overarching framework for international relations between states. This brief historical review has highlighted three important considerations to bear in mind when analyzing future alliance characteristics and models. First, for the US and for most nations, alliances have been the exception. Second, alliances have been formed to counter a known external threat. Finally, prior to the current situation facing NATO, alliances fell apart soon after the common threat was gone; they did not evolve into lasting arrangements, nor did they necessarily expand to include nondefense security issues.

Towards the Twenty-first Century The following case studies on NATO, the WEU, and the Visegrad Group are avowedly Eurocentric. There are three reasons for this.17 First, only in Europe has the US pursued multipartner alliance ties. The other defense security alliances are more

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traditional bilateral alliances and/or multilateral coalitions. Second, it is in Europe that the specter looms of long-standing US alliance partners framing their own alliance without the US. Finally, the issue of central and eastern European countries poses a significant dilemma for both the US and other European nations, notably whether there should be Western security guarantees to these states and. if so, what form should they take. Some argue that these guarantees should be expressed as bilateral arrangements with EU/WEU and/or NATO. However, if there are not security guarantees to these states, the question remains whether they will form a multilateral security arrangement among themselves. This last issue has been at the heart of the proposed “Partners for Peace” initiative launched at the January 1994 NATO summit. According to Anthony Lake, President Bill Clinton's national security advisor, Through [the Partnership for Peace), former members of the Warsaw Pact will be able to plan, train, exercise, and, if necessary, operate with NATO forces. ...NATO itself will be better prepared for possible contingencies in the east and the new democracies will be better prepared to play their role in building a secure Europe. 18

The US, Europe, and the Future of NATO It is not the purpose of this study to explore in any depth the origins of NATO. 19 As outlined above, NATO was primarily formed to counter the perceived threat of Soviet expansion in Europe following World War II. It is important to note that NATO followed efforts by individual European states to form a collective defense (discussed in more detail below). It is also important to note that NATO's defense security orientation was only part of the US plan for ensuring the security of Europe. The Marshall Plan was as much a part of the US moves in Europe as was the Washington Treaty codifying the Atlantic Alliance. The future of NATO largely depends upon the future role the US is willing to play in the alliance. That, in turn, depends mainly on what role the alliance will play in maintaining European defense and political security. Obviously, then, the role of the

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alliance will be determined by what challenges NATO foresees in these two areas. This has much wider implications. It also concerns NATO joint force planning. Prior to the collapse of the WTO, NATO joint force planning was a means by which NATO countries coordinated their military capabilities and policies. Without a common threat, NATO has no obvious need for joint force planning. This therefore frees individual nations to develop their own force structure and employment policies.20 The first key question concerns the possible threats to European security. Once that concern is answered, the next step is to determine what US interests are in Europe. From these interests, we can then determine what role, if any, the US will play in the NATO alliance. Finally, these changes in NATO's perceptions of threats will affect the decision making in the alliance. There are three possible defense security threat scenarios in Europe.21 The first is a resurgent Russia threatening stability in Europe by directly threatening the West. While the probability of this occurring may be quite low, the costs of a major power war in Europe would be quite high. Under this scenario, NATO provides a transition insurance policy. NATO and US forces committed on the Continent exist perhaps for decades as Russia completes its transition to political democracy.22 The second scenario is war in Eastern Europe that threatens the West. This scenario has two aspects. The first is the spread of war to the West. This would most likely occur if the West (or even a single Western state) appears to one of the belligerents to be actively (or covertly) aiding their adversary. The second aspect involves the West being drawn into a war in the East when Russia enters on the side of one of the belligerents. This ties the second scenario back to the first. Again, NATO would act as a balancer of forces in Europe. The last scenario involves Russia going to war against a neighboring Eastern state, such as the Ukraine.23 This scenario would be considered threatening to the West as a prelude to the

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first scenario (i.e., a resurgent Russia threatening the West). In this case, NATO acts as a guard against the conflict spilling over into the West. Given these threat scenarios, the next fundamental issue posed concerns the US security interests in Europe. There are two important parts to the discussion over American interests in Europe. While there are some “Fortress America” advocates who argue that the US should return all its forces stationed overseas back to the US, most adhere to the notion that the US must remain engaged in Europe. The issue, though, is what is meant by “engagement” and what is the extent of that engagement. Some argue that with the demise of the Soviet Union and the WTO and the end of the cold war, the US no longer has any defense security concerns in Europe. They are optimistic that the likelihood of major power war in Europe is small and that outbreaks of wars within and among small powers, while regrettable, are not of concern to the us. Others argue that the US must remain militarily engaged in Europe for defense, political, and economic security reasons. Essentially, they argue that America could be excluded from a prosperous and stable Europe based around the EU and extending into Eastern Europe and possibly Russia. A second argument revolves around an unstable Europe leading to a renewed great-power rivalry.24 Another rationale for NATO is that it maintains stability within Western Europe.25 This line of argument centers on the fear of a militarily resurgent Germany. With the movement of Western Europe's forward defense line away from the German border, these fears center on two potential outcomes. The first is a Germany that seeks defense security in nuclear weapons or at least in an expanded military. Ironically, the second is the fear of a militarily impotent Germany. The nuclear Germany scenario envisions Europe, stripped of the US nuclear umbrella, reverting to pre-World War II security policies when each nation viewed its security as being based upon its own capabilities. Here Germany, faced with a nuclear France

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and Great Britain in the west, and a nuclear Russia and perhaps Ukraine in the east, abrogates the 1955 Paris Agreements that prohibit Germany from possessing nuclear weapons. This scenario is not dependent upon Germany actually possessing the weapons, only that it might obtain them. The argument rests on the belief that a nuclear (or even a militarily strong) Germany will be perceived as a threat to other Western European (indeed, perhaps all European) nations. The latter scenario, a militarily weak Germany, is based upon the argument that in the absence of US forces in Europe other Western European states need a bulwark to the instability of Eastern Europe that a militarily strong Germany could provide. In light of the three threat scenarios postulated above, the reductions taking place in the German military are of increasing concern to other European states.26 In sum, while the US distinctly has defense security interests in NATO, the likely scenarios point to much more murky threats than in the past. Consequently, the US will no longer play the role of “first among equals” in NATO decision-making. Therefore, it is important to consider some of the ramifications for policy-making in an alliance of equals. 27 The first is that a given situation is less likely to be identified as a problem requiring action when responsibility is dispersed among alliance members. This creates a bias towards avoidance of issues. Second, issues tend to be framed narrowly, again reflecting the uncertainties, particularly those caused by the uncertainties of collective actions, over which actor is expected to do what. Third, the absence of a compelling threat tends to make government leaders more susceptible to fickle public opinion. This is exacerbated by elections that are not synchronized, leading to at least one of the member states facing electoral concerns. Thus, the nature of “the West's welfare-minded, inwardlooking societies, leads to risk-averse, self-protective thinking.”28 Finally, weak political leaders, sensitive to public opinion, looking at ambiguous issues will be less likely to commit themselves to decisive action without a high degree of consensus among the 125

alliance members. The result tends to be decision by committee and the attendant possibility of inaction and groupthink. The EU and the WEU The WEU shares common roots with NATO. Those roots stem from a recognition by the Western European nations following World War II for a need for collective defense. The first act began with a Treaty of Defense Alliance (known as the Dunkirk Treaty) between France and Great Britain signed on 4 March 1947. Its intent was to prevent further German aggression. This arrangement was extended to include Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on 17 March 1948 (the Brussels Treaty).29 This alliance formed the nucleus for the Atlantic Alliance and NATO. Furthermore, these nations, with the exception of Great Britain, formed the nucleus for discussions that led to the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).30 The ECSC was the brainchild of French foreign minister Robert Schuman. It was concerned with high politics. The reindustrialization of Germany was a great concern to the other nations of Western Europe. They were committed to finding a way of preventing another central European war. Germany, on her part, was searching for a way of regaining control over the Ruhr and Saar areas that had been under French jurisdiction since the end of the war.31 The ECSC filled each party's requirements. Germany regained sovereignty over the areas while the other nations, through the ECSC High Authority, retained some control over the outputs and uses of these regions (as well as the outputs and uses of all ECSC member states). The idea that integration would lead to increased regional security had a distinct scholarly basis. David Mitrany, a leading theorist of this school that came to be called “functionalism,” believed that the close collaboration inherent in economic integration would eventually “spill over” into other areas, thus building a “web of interests” that would foster

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increased political cooperation and hence provide a five basis for regional security stability .32 The success of the ECSC led to further negotiations on establishing a European political community and European defense community. These were designed to further integrate Germany into Europe. However, both of these proposals failed in the French National Assembly in 1954. This led to negotiations to broaden the Brussels Treaty Organization. The ensuing Western European Union came into force on 6 May 1955 when Germany and Italy joined the original five signatories of the Brussels Treaty .33 There are three interconnected decision-making bodies in the WEU. The Council is the executive and policy-making organization with general competence over all questions relative to the application of the treaty. It meets twice a year and the presidency is held for one-year terms on an alphabetical rotation. It has a subcouncil Permanent Council consisting of ambassadorialrank ministers that meets biweekly. The Assembly, composed of 108 parliamentarians, while largely consultative, is empowered to make binding decisions concerning questions about its internal functioning. It usually meets twice a year. The final organization is the WEU Institute for Security Studies, which carries out research for the Council and Assembly, promotes greater awareness of European security issues, and organizes meetings with other European institutes.34 From the early 1960s to the mid-1980s, the WEU was somnolent. This was due to the entry of Britain into the EU and the “civilian power” approach European states took to harmonize external policies. Thus, the primary rationales for the WEU-to provide a forum for Britain to discuss common issues and to cooperate on security issues-were assumed by other organizations. I

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