Foreign Affairs

Over the past decade, China's leaders have pursued rapid economic reform while stifling political change. The result today is a rigid state that is unable to cope with an increasingly organized, complex, and robust society. China's next generation of leaders, set to take office in 2002-3, will likely respond to this dilemma by accelerating political reform—unless a new cold war with the United States intervenes.

With no Soviet threat, America has found it exceedingly difficult to define its "national interest." Foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the country on key priorities: building a military ready to ensure American power, coping with rogue regimes, and managing Beijing and Moscow. Above all, the next president must be comfortable with America's special role as the world's leader.

The Kyoto pact on global warming is neither a battle won nor a costly burden -- more like a quick political fix for the vast problems of climate change. Above all, policymakers need to think more about the long term. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions requires including the developing countries who sat out Kyoto. Research into affordable energy sources that emit little carbon dioxide must intensify. And the world must develop international bodies to minimize the costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, including trading emission rights.

Last year, the world gathered at Kyoto to grapple with the threat of global warming. But the Kyoto approach-negotiations to set national limits on the emissions of the greenhouse gases that are heating the earth-cannot solve the problem. The emissions targets will never be met without the cooperation of the developing countries, and they will not consent. We would do better to attack global warming through mutually agreed-upon actions, especially a nationally collected tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Around the world, democratically elected regimes are routinely ignoring limits on their power and depriving citizens of basic freedoms.

The developing world will be the main beneficiary of global climate control—with the developed world picking up the tab. But wouldn't it be better to invest in development today than pay for climate relief tomorrow?

What enthusiasts took for a global rush to democracy may be reversing direction, with backsliding and stalled transitions in the former Soviet Union, Africa, the Middle East. So far, one sees disarray or new strongmen much like the old; no competing ideologies seem to be beckoning. Market reforms have not been the cause in most cases. More affluent countries with Western ties seem to be sticking the course better. However the trend plays out, it should lead the administration to rethink democracy promotion. The truth is that U.S. policy is not significantly responsible for democracy's advance or retreat in the world.

China may be the high church of realpolitik in the post-Cold War world. Its military and civilian elites regard other nations, alliances, and internationalism of any stripe with suspicion. There are only two exceptions. Realpolitik would suggest that any rift between the United States and Japan is good for China. But China fears the remilitarization of Japan more than it dislikes American forces (which maintain the status quo in East Asia). And with Taiwan, China is willing to risk a major confrontation over even a nominal change in the island's status. With a huge stake in the region, America should figure these realities into its strategy.

After wiping out smallpox and winning other battles against the microbes, modern medicine ran into the aids virus. With urbanization and jet travel bringing people together in greater concentrations and more rapidly, infectious diseases are enjoying new opportunities to spread--and to evolve drug-resistant and more lethal strains. Advances in genetics make the threat of biological warfare even more threatening. It is time to write a better prescription for public health.

People need an international system for security of many kinds. But the United Nations today is precariously funded, stretched thin by an unprecedented number of peacekeeping missions, and generally underequipped to deal with the rising demand for its services. Reform is necessary for the middle-aged organization. States touchy about sovereignty and interest groups pushing their agendas must sink their differences and work out a plan to revitalize the world body. They might consider giving it an independent source of income and some standing troops for enforcement power.

The "Wise Men" are gone, and with them went the old style of foreign policy. A new America - with new domestic forces - will create a new foreign policy.

Now that the 'obsessions' of the Reagan era can be laid to rest, it is time for the USA to reformulate the premisses and goals of its Latin American policy, and to develop a 'positive agenda' which moves beyond the calculations of US domestic political interests.

Mexico's famed political stability has not been destroyed by the country's current economic crisis. But that stability can no longer be taken for granted. Over the past half-century, the Mexican political system has brought economic development, albeit unjustly distributed, inefficiently planned and plagued with waste and corruption. It has ensured social peace and political continuity, although with recurrent repression and electoral fraud. And it has maintained peaceful relations with the United States, despite asymmetries, irritants and sporadic confrontations. These three pillars of Mexico's stability, which is unique in Latin America, are not yet crumbling, but all are growing weaker, as is the political system they sustain.

Through nearly four decades, the circumstances of its creation and existence have forced the modern state of Israel into a deep-seated preoccupation with security, the precondition for its survival. As the nature of the threats to its continued existence changed at various junctures between 1947 and the present, so have the military and security doctrines guiding national policy. Israel now stands at another turning point, and the time has come for a new security doctrine, a strategy resting upon long-standing principles, but significantly modified to meet the circumstances of 1985 and beyond.

When Eleanor Roosevelt received the 1947 Nansen Award for her work with refugees in postwar Europe, she said she was depressed to know that 70,000 refugees still remained in camps. She and the other humanitarians of her times saw refugees as a transitory phenomenon caused by the great world wars, a problem that could and should be solved promptly with goodwill and appropriate resources.

We live at a juncture where U.S. foreign policy is at higher risk than at any point since the end of the Vietnam War. Great and sometimes confused and countervailing interests are at stake in Nicaragua; indeed, across Central America. The Persian Gulf is a tinderbox, which could be engulfed in the flames of Islamic fundamentalism. And we have seen the Middle East_s coastal plain torn and fragmented to the point of anarchy in Lebanon.

Soviet citizens were probably relieved at the selection of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, for he stands in sharp contrast to his aging and ailing predecessors. At 54, he is young enough to be their son. More important, the mortality odds are that he will be around for a decade or more to implement those programs he wants. The likelihood of such continuity is in itself an important change. Also impressive are the speed and the purposefulness with which he has assumed control and addressed himself to the country's problems. This is clearly a man in a hurry who realizes he has to deal with some significant dilemmas, particularly in the economic sphere.

When Yuri Andropov died in February 1984, the Central Committee waited four days to name his successor. It is not clear whether this resulted from a real struggle for power or was simply because of an intervening weekend. In either case, the delay symbolized the stagnation and even the retrogression during Konstantin Chernenko's year in office.

What wise men had promised has not happened. What the damned fools predicted has actually come to pass," exclaimed Lord Melbourne during one of the British politician's fits of exasperation over the situation in Ireland. Well, viewing the post-World War II course of Soviet-American relations, one is tempted to echo the nineteenth-century statesman's sentiments.

Forty years ago, U.S. nuclear power was indispensable in ending World War II. In the postwar era, American nuclear superiority was indispensable in deterring Soviet probes that might have led to World War III. But that era is over, and we live in the age of nuclear parity, when each superpower has the means to destroy the other and the rest of the world.