Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Agenda for the 1997 Carnegie Non-Proliferation Conference.
These days there are no more double standards about dictatorships. If they're "emerging markets" for U.S. exports, we love them all. In this era, foreign policy is made by the Commerce Department and the U.S. trade representative - their job is to pry open markets, not societies. In places like Indonesia, you can't do both. President Suharto is the Indonesian market.
No leader of either party has had the courage to tell the American people that preserving the current benevolent international environment may be less expensive than fighting the Cold War, but not that much less. We keep cashing in the same "peace dividend" over and over.
Iran’s growing weapons capabilities already pose a grave risk to U.S. allies and U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region, but this threat could greatly worsen in coming years, as Iran graduates to even more potent weapons than it currently possesses, enlarges its missile arsenal, builds longer-range systems, and learns to mate its weapons of mass destruction with these advanced delivery systems.
China's success in shaping American foreign policy through the American business community has been extraordinary. If the wealth created in the Chinese economic miracle sows seeds of future political pressures from a new entrepreneurial class, that same wealth also provides the Beijing government and its army with the muscle to rebuff internal and external pressures for political reform.
The most likely setting for the world's first nuclear war, observers generally agree, is South Asia.
The Chinese leadership views the world today in much the same way Kaiser Wilhelm II did a century ago: The present world order serves the needs of the United States and its allies, which constructed it. And it is poorly suited to the needs of a Chinese dictatorship trying to maintain power at home and increase its clout abroad.