Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
This is an extraordinarily important moment for the United Nations. Before attention is lost in the controversies over the war itself and in the challenges of its aftermath, the United Nations must capture, clarify and publicize the record of international inspections in Iraq: for itself, for member governments and for the public.
The pace of developments in nuclear proliferation over the past 18 months is unprecedented, and it is hard for even dedicated experts to keep track and make sense of all the latest developments. Yet with all the developments, from Libya to Pakistan to North Korea, several questions have emerged to form the core debate over the future direction of U.S. nonproliferation policy.
If there is a substantive critique of Bush foreign policy beyond mere Bush-hatred, it is the administration's failure to win broad international support for the war and for other major policies. The emergence of a unipolar order and the nervousness these new circumstances can create even among America's friends has made gaining support a difficult task.
American nationalism today imperils America's global leadership and its success in the war against terrorism. More than any other factor, it is this nationalism which divides the US from a post-nationalist Europe. And insofar as it has become mixed up with a chauvinist strain of Israeli nationalism, it also plays a disastrous role in US relations with the Muslim world.
There has been a good deal of talk in the US about a parallel between President George W. Bush's "plan" for democratising the greater Middle East and the Helsinki process that contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire. When thinking about western policy and the Muslim world, it does indeed make sense to look for lessons from the cold war - but this is not the right one.
One way of looking at the United States today is as a European state that has avoided the catastrophes nationalism brought upon Europe in the twentieth century, and whose nationalism therefore retains some of the power, intensity, bellicosity, and self-absorption that European nationalisms have had kicked out of them by history.
A panel discussion with Carnegie Senior Associate Martha Brill Olcott, Carnegie Visiting Scholar Husain Haqqani, Carnegie Moscow Associate Alexei Malashenko, and David Cook, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University.
Recent events in Pakistan and Libya are directly affecting the Bush Administration's approach to North Korea's nuclear program. The disclosure of A.Q. Khan's elaborate efforts to uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons technology and the decision by Col. Khadaffi to abandon his WMD programs have reinforced the Bush administration's perception that their tough approach is paying dividends.
A discussion meeting with Dmitri Trenin, Senior Associate and Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, on the new tendencies in Russia’s foreign policy under President Putin, including the future of U.S.-Russia relations.