United States – Page 144 – Rising Powers Initiative

Mitchell, Derek

Abstract
A unified Korean Peninsula will challenge U.S. strategy and policy toward the Asia-Pacific region. In this context, CSIS is conducted a 12-month study aimed at designing a framework for U.S. policy objectives toward a unified Korea to anticipate challenges to U.S. interests and consider ways to manage them in a changing security environment.
PDF

Nau, Henry. R

Summary
The United States has never felt at home abroad. The reason for this unease, even after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is not frequent threats to American security. It is America’s identity. The United States, its citizens believe, is a different country, a New World of divided institutions and individualistic markets surviving in an Old World of nationalistic governments and statist economies. In this Old World, the United States finds no comfort and alternately tries to withdraw from it and reform it. America cycles between ambitious internationalist efforts to impose democracy and world order, and more nationalist appeals to trim multilateral commitments and demand that the European and Japanese allies do more.

In At Home Abroad, Henry R. Nau explains that America is still unique but no longer so very different. All the industrial great powers in western Europe (and, arguably, also Japan) are now strong liberal democracies. A powerful and peaceful new world exists beyond America’s borders and anchors America’s identity, easing its discomfort and ending the cycle of withdrawal and reform.

Nau draws on constructivist and realist perspectives to show how relative national identities interact with relative national power to define U.S. national interests. He provides fresh insights for U.S. grand strategy toward various countries.

In Europe, the identity and power perspective advocates U.S. support for both NATO expansion to consolidate democratic identities in eastern Europe and concurrent, but separate, great-power cooperation with Russia in the United Nations. In Asia, this perspective recommends a shift of U.S. strategy from bilateralism to concentric multilateralism, starting with an emerging democratic security community among the United States, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Taiwan, and progressively widening this community to include reforming ASEAN states and, if it democratizes, China. In the developing world, Nau’s approach calls for balancing U.S. moral (identity) and material (power) commitments, avoiding military intervention for purely moral reasons, as in Somalia, but undertaking such intervention when material threats are immediate, as in Afghanistan, or material and moral stakes coincide, as in Kosovo.

Mead, Walter Russell

Summary
America’s response to the September 11 attacks spotlighted many of the country’s longstanding goals on the world stage: to protect liberty at home, to secure America’s economic interests, to spread democracy in totalitarian regimes and to vanquish the enemy utterly.

One of America’s leading foreign policy thinkers, Walter Russell Mead, argues that these diverse, conflicting impulses have in fact been the key to the U.S.’s success in the world. In a sweeping new synthesis, Mead uncovers four distinct historical patterns in foreign policy, each exemplified by a towering figure from our past.

Wilsonians are moral missionaries, making the world safe for democracy by creating international watchdogs like the U.N. Hamiltonians likewise support international engagement, but their goal is to open foreign markets and expand the economy. Populist Jacksonians support a strong military, one that should be used rarely, but then with overwhelming force to bring the enemy to its knees. Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with liberty at home, are suspicious of both big military and large-scale international projects.

A striking new vision of America’s place in the world, Special Providence transcends stale debates about realists vs. idealists and hawks vs. doves to provide a revolutionary, nuanced, historically-grounded view of American foreign policy.

Trenin, Dmitri

Abstract
Just 15 years after the Cold War’s end, hopes of integrating Russia into the West have been dashed, and the Kremlin has started creating its own Moscow-centered system. But instead of just attacking this new Russian foreign policy, Washington must guard against the return of dangerous great-power rivalry.

Adamsky, Dima

Summary
This book studies the impact of cultural factors on the course of military innovations. One would expect that countries accustomed to similar technologies would undergo analogous changes in their perception of and approach to warfare. However, the intellectual history of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in Russia, the US, and Israel indicates the opposite. The US developed technology and weaponry for about a decade without reconceptualizing the existing paradigm about the nature of warfare. Soviet ‘new theory of victory’ represented a conceptualization which chronologically preceded technological procurement. Israel was the first to utilize the weaponry on the battlefield, but was the last to develop a conceptual framework that acknowledged its revolutionary implications.

Utilizing primary sources that had previously been completely inaccessible, and borrowing methods of analysis from political science, history, anthropology, and cognitive psychology, this book suggests a cultural explanation for this puzzling transformation in warfare.

The Culture of Military Innovation offers a systematic, thorough, and unique analytical approach that may well be applicable in other perplexing strategic situations. Though framed in the context of specific historical experience, the insights of this book reveal important implications related to conventional, subconventional, and nonconventional security issues. It is therefore an ideal reference work for practitioners, scholars, teachers, and students of security studies.

Mochizuki, Mike

Summary
While appearing to be more nationalistic and less reluctant to engage international security challenges, Japan continues to pursue a comprehensive strategy integrating its security and economic interests. It has recalibrated this strategy by expanding defense cooperation with the United States, becoming more assertive about defending its own territory, providing non-combat support in the war on terrorism, and promoting East Asian economic integration. Despite widespread public opposition to the U.S.-led war against Iraq, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro has so far minimized the political backlash against his support for the Bush administration’s policies. By bolstering its alliance with the United States, Japan has also gained greater maneuverability to pursue a more autonomous foreign policy in Asia and beyond. Through a multifaceted approach, Japan seeks to cultivate an East Asian environment that is more hospitable to its long-term economic and security interests.

Heginbotham, Eric, Ratner, Ely. and Samuels, Richard J

Abstract
Japan is undergoing profound changes that are empowering its political leadership at the expense of its bureaucracy. But rather than bringing about a clean transfer of institutional authority, the reforms have created gridlock. The U.S.-Japanese alliance isn’t dead, but it is getting more complicated.
PDF

Shambaugh, David

Summary
Tangled Titans offers a current and comprehensive assessment of the most important relationship in international affairs—that between the United States and China. How the relationship evolves will have a defining impact on the future of world politics, the Asian region, and the citizens of many nations. In this definitive book, leading experts provide an in-depth exploration of the historical, domestic, bilateral, regional, global, and future contexts of this complex relationship. The contributors argue that the relationship is a unique combination of deep interdependence, limited cooperation, and increasing competition. Never in modern history have two great powers been so deeply intertwined—yet so suspicious and potentially antagonistic toward each other. Exploring this cooperative and competitive dynamic, the contributors offer a wealth of detail on contemporary Sino-American relations unavailable elsewhere. Students will find Tangled Titans essential reading to understand the current dynamics and future direction of relations between the world’s two most important powers.

Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Asia Society; East Asia Institute

Summary

The Chicago Council undertakes a large-scale public opinion study every two years that compares American and international public opinion on a wide range of important international issues. A significant part of each biennial survey is additionally dedicated to examining a timely theme. The theme of the 2006 survey was, “The Rise of China and India.”

This data collection presents a unique comparison of international attitudes on how the emergence of China and India as economic dynamos and claimants to great power status will affect the global economy, international security, and politics. Moreover, this study sought to assess American public opinion (Part 1, Public Opinion Survey, United States) on a variety of challenges facing the United States today including international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, conflict in the Middle East, the rising economic and political power of Asia, economic competition from abroad, and threats to energy supplies and the environment. This data collection also provides an understanding of how the Chinese (Part 2, Public Opinion Survey, China) and Indian (Part 3, Public Opinion Survey, India) publics view their nations’ international challenges and opportunities and their respective roles as emerging great powers. Parallel surveys were also conducted in Australia (Part 4, Public Opinion Survey, Australia) in conjunction with the Lowy Institute for International Policy, and in South Korea (Part 5, Public Opinion Survey, South Korea) in conjunction with the East Asia Institute.

Demographic variables include race, age, gender, religious affiliation, highest level of education, and political identification.

Cohen, Craig S

Summary
The last decade has seen the United States involved in two wars, an ongoing worldwide struggle against terrorism, and more recently a severe economic recession. This period has exposed two great structural challenges facing the United States. First, in a globalized world, vectors of prosperity quickly become vectors of insecurity. And second, the center of gravity in world affairs is shifting to Asia. During the past two years particularly, we have heard a steady chorus predicting, and in some places celebrating, America’s decline, and this chorus has begun to shape some people’s perceptions at home and abroad. At the time of this writing, the United States has weathered the near-term dangers of the economic crisis, but the long-term prognosis for America’s fiscal health and subsequently our forward presence around the world remains in some question. The feeling is that, if we cannot get our own house in order, we have no business leading on the world stage.

How the rest of the world sees the continuing capacity and relevance of U.S. leadership is at the heart of this volume. The specific question under investigation is how certain pivotal countries view U.S. power at this moment in time. Debates about U.S. primacy and decline tend to be episodic and somewhat academic in nature. And yet, the decisions our allies and adversaries make depend in part on their assessments of the trajectory of American power. Foreign assessments have real-world implications for U.S. policy. In this volume, CSIS experts analyze the views of U.S. power from 10 different strategically important countries/regions: China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, the Persian Gulf, Israel, Turkey, Germany, and Russia.
PDF

Furukawa, Katsuhisa, Michael J. Green, James J. Wirtz, Yuri Fedorov, Avner Cohen, Peter R. Lavoy, Kang Choi, Tan See Seng, and Rod Lyon

Summary
The Long Shadow is the first comprehensive, systematic examination of the roles and implications of nuclear weapons in the dramatically different post–Cold War security environment. Leading experts investigate the roles and salience of nuclear weapons in the national security strategies of twelve countries and the ASEAN states, and their implications for security and stability in a broadly defined Asian security region that includes the Middle East. The study also investigates the prospects for nuclear terrorism in Asia.
A chief conclusion of the study is that nuclear weapons influence national security strategies in fundamental ways and that deterrence continues to be the dominant role and strategy for the employment of nuclear weapons. Offensive and defensive strategies may increase in salience but will not surpass the deterrence function. Another major conclusion is that although there could be destabilizing situations, on balance, nuclear weapons have reinforced security and stability in the Asian security region by assuaging national security concerns, strengthening deterrence and the status quo, and preventing the outbreak and escalation of major hostilities.
As nuclear weapons will persist and cast a long shadow on security in Asia and the world, it is important to reexamine and redefine “old” ideas, concepts, and strategies as well as develop “new” ones relevant to the contemporary era. In line with this, the global nuclear order should be constructed anew based on present realities.

Tannenwald, Nina

Summary
Why have nuclear weapons not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? Nina Tannenwald disputes the conventional answer of ‘deterrence’ in favour of what she calls a nuclear taboo – a widespread inhibition on using nuclear weapons – which has arisen in global politics. Drawing on newly released archival sources, Tannenwald traces the rise of the nuclear taboo, the forces that produced it, and its influence, particularly on US leaders. She analyzes four critical instances where US leaders considered using nuclear weapons (Japan 1945, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War 1991) and examines how the nuclear taboo has repeatedly dissuaded US and other world leaders from resorting to these ‘ultimate weapons’. Through a systematic analysis, Tannenwald challenges conventional conceptions of deterrence and offers a compelling argument on the moral bases of nuclear restraint as well as an important insight into how nuclear war can be avoided in the future.

Sokolski, Henry

Summary
This International Institutions and Global Governance program Working Paper argues that current U.S. political will to reduce nuclear dangers should be channeled into a practical set of control measures that are more likely to secure bipartisan support and can begin to be implemented without the legal consent of other states.
Click here for the full report.

Schelling, Thomas C

Summary
Traditionally, Americans have viewed war as an alternative to diplomacy, and military strategy as the science of victory. Today, however, in our world of nuclear weapons, military power is not so much exercised as threatened. It is, Mr. Schelling says, bargaining power, and the exploitation of this power, for good or evil, to preserve peace or to threaten war, is diplomacy—the diplomacy of violence. The author concentrates in this book on the way in which military capabilities—real or imagined—are used, skillfully or clumsily, as bargaining power. He sees the steps taken by the U.S. during the Berlin and Cuban crises as not merely preparations for engagement, but as signals to an enemy, with reports from the adversary’s own military intelligence as our most important diplomatic communications. Even the bombing of North Vietnam, Mr. Schelling points out, is as much coercive as tactical, aimed at decisions as much as bridges. He carries forward the analysis so brilliantly begun in his earlier The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Strategy and Arms Control (with Morton Halperin, 1961), and makes a significant contribution to the growing literature on modern war and diplomacy. Stimson Lectures. Mr. Schelling is professor of economics at Harvard and acting director of Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.

Sagan, Scott D., and Kenneth N. Waltz

Summary

In The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed, professors Waltz and Sagan resume their well-known dialogue concerning nuclear proliferation and the threat of nuclear war. Kenneth Waltz, Dean of Realist Theory in international relations at Columbia University, expands on his argument that “more may be better,” contending that new nuclear states will use their acquired nuclear capabilities to deter threats and preserve peace. Scott Sagan, the leading proponent of organizational theories in international politics, continues to make the counterpoint that “more will be worse”: novice nuclear states lack adequate organizational controls over their new weapons, resulting in a higher risk of either deliberate of accidental nuclear war. Treating issues from the ’long peace’ between the United States and Soviet Union made possible by the nuclear balance of the Cold War to more modern topics such as global terrorism, missile defense, and the Indian-Pakistani conflict, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed is an invaluable addition to any international relations course.