Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- Follow Carnegie
- Search
- Global Resources
Global Centers
Languages
Unless the international community pursues a regional strategy for rebuilding Afghanistan, the security of the Central Asian states and Pakistan will be so compromised that new terrorist groups with global reach soon will be using Eurasia as their launching pad again.
The United States will soon become the first nation since World War II to withdraw from a major international security agreement. President Bush's abrogation of the ABM treaty will undermine President Putin in Russia, alienate U.S. allies, antagonize China, polarize domestic debate and weaken national security. Ironically, it will also expose the fragility of missile defense plans. It has been technology, not treaties, limiting effective defenses.
Kyrgyzstan is really coming to a turning point. Any further deterioration in its political conditions will justifiably earn it the label of an authoritarian state. Many already consider it to be one, although most would grant that it is the softest of the region's authoritarian regimes.
The Process of democracy building in Kyrgystan has faltered. Kyrgyzstan must open up again politically and work toward greater economic transparency both through the creation of an independent judiciary and through a more directed and far reaching campaign against corruption.
The United States and Russian Federation reached an important arms control milestone on December 5 when both sides completed reductions in the strategic nuclear arsenals to 6,000 accountable weapons each, as required under the START I Treaty. These reductions are a massive reduction from the size of the nuclear arsenals both countries deployed when the agreement was signed in 1991, and demonstrate the value of negotiated, verified arms reduction agreements in U.S. security policy.
Bad weather twice postponed the intercept test scheduled for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, previously known as National Missile Defense. Weather plays a much greater role than most realize in the success of these demonstrations. The official reason for cancellation is that the poor weather at Vandenburg Air Force Base "did not meet range safety requirements." High winds at the test site may have been enough to force a postponement, but less than ideal weather could mean that the interceptors cannot intercept at all.
Released ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Building Capitalism, by world renowned economist Anders Åslund, provides the most comprehensive empirical analysis of the economic transformation of the countries comprising the former Soviet bloc during the past decade and challenges conventional wisdom.
The new US military presence in Uzbekistan is one more sign of how the dominant geopolitical paradigms of the last half of the twentieth century are no longer operative. The Cold War and its aftermath post-Cold War period are at an end.
