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In October 1993, US soldiers landed in Mogadishu with a seemingly straightforward mission: they would abduct the lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had gained power after the fall of Mohammed Siad Barre’s dictatorial regime. The disastrous operation, which resulted in the deaths of 18 US soldiers and hundreds of Somalis, signaled only the beginning to the country’s troubles. Over a decade later, efforts to restore order...

In 1997 the Indonesian economy was devastated by a financial crisis, sending its currency plummeting and exposing President Suharto’s corrupt and shortsighted policies. The meltdown turned out to be the nail in the coffin for the aging dictator, whose hold on power had lasted for 30 years. What was perhaps more interesting than the resignation of this beleaguered president was the response made hundreds of miles away. On Jim...

Located only blocks away from St. James’s palace in London’s West End, the neoclassical mansion of Lancaster House was perhaps an unlikely venue for the final act of a century-long era of colonial rule and occupation. However, beginning on December 10, 1979 the house played host to a conference of British and Rhodesian leaders who negotiated the terms of independence for the last African territory remaining under European colonial...

On November 9, 1989 the government of East Berlin announced that it would begin dismantling the Berlin wall, which for 28 years had stood as a concrete symbol of the global divide between eastern and western blocs. Two years later, the Soviet Union officially disbanded and the United States, at least for the moment, appeared to be the lone superpower on the world stage. Indeed, the position of preeminence...

In many respects, the 1990s was the decade of ethnic conflict. Following the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the world witnessed a rapid development of civil wars, secessionist movements, and genocidal conflicts that were all defi ned along ethnic lines. The Bosnian and Rwandan genocides sparked outrage and indignation from many members of the international community. Chechens in Russia initiated underground guerilla operations against their former Soviet...

As the world reflects on the fifth anniversary of September 11, the prospect of another catastrophe looms. From the explosion of a nuclear weapon in a major city to a pandemic that could kill millions, potential disasters inspire fear from citizens and political action in the name of preparedness. But our perceptions are sometimes amorphous, uninformed fears of the worst-case scenario. And the policy response – as exemplified by widespread...

US President John F. Kennedy was deeply influenced by historian Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and applied its lessons about World War I to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Did reading academic work help Kennedy forge a cautious policy that avoided nuclear war? Today, policymakers around the world champion democratization, believing that democracies do not go to war with each other. But are they aware of the scholarship of...

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. But did it end? The year began with the violent reassertion of Soviet authority over Lithuania, an exhibition of brutality that rallied international support for democrats and independence movements in the USSR. The year closed with the formal resignation of a powerless Mikhail Gorbachev and the official dissolution of the Soviet Union into independent republics loosely joined as the Commonwealth of Independent States. The...

Markets determine the price of your morning cup of coffee and the value of your retirement savings. In ways less obvious but no less real, markets also determine your prospects of being targeted by a terrorist attack. They trade in nuclear weapons, human beings, and body organs. Unlike the market for coffee, these entail illegal activity and operate underground. But they are markets nonetheless. The globalized world is the site...

Thomas Jefferson believed that “history, by apprizing [people] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations.” For all those who base predictive power on knowledge of the past, Jefferson’s proposition is conventional wisdom. But it need not be taken at face value, nor as the deepest statement on the making of predictions. By...

When the French Foreign Minister suggested the USSR might placate the Pope by tolerating Catholicism, Josef Stalin famously quipped, “The Pope? How many divisions has he got?” It is an irony of history that the figure whose weakness Stalin scorned helped to catalyze the fall of his empire. The late Pope John Paul II is widely regarded as pivotal to the events that ultimately led to the fall of Communism...

With the tsunami that killed several hundred thousand Southeast Asians came the world’s sudden and intense interest in international health—for a time. The cast of characters that compose the international community, from nongovernmental organizations to secretaries of state, from academics to cable news networks, descended on Southeast Asia to restore hope, dispense aid, and even promote peace among formerly warring parties in the Indonesian province of Aceh. Heads of...

It is one of the main questions confronting experts in both government and academia: “What drives foreign policy?” Theorists provide many answers—geopolitical concerns, security issues, domestic public opinion, or institutional constraints. But a literalist might answer more simply and no less accurately: energy. Energy provides the physical fuel for the many undertakings within the global community from transportation to electricity. But it also has pervasive influences in realms to which...

Across Europe, jubilant celebrations clash with glum moods in individual states. Low voter turnout and sparse understanding of institutions belie efforts toward transparency and engagement. The face of Europe is changing, and the emergent entity faces a new set of challenges. The European Union welcomed 10 new member states in May 2004, and in mid-June all 25 EU members agreed on a draft constitutional treaty for Europe. Not to...

Without a definite beginning and with no foreseeable end, international trade is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing phenomena of the 21st century. Perhaps the origins of international trade lie in the Industrial Revolution that began in Great Britain, when production shifted from agriculture to manufacturing. Western European countries started to rely on trade to provide raw materials for production. A gradual move to "freer" trade followed; countries gradually...

Diplomacy may be the art of statesmanship, but intervention is rarely artful. Whereas diplomacy happens comfortably behind tables, intervention often unfolds dangerously on the ground. Surely one of the most intriguing methods of state-to-state interaction, intervention is also one of the most wide-ranging in form. Many prominent scholars, for example, point to subtle economic and cultural intervention as natural corollaries to liberal trading regimes. Even military interventions may be...

Rarely in modern times has religion’s role in international affairs been discussed with the sense of urgency that it is today. In previous eras, religious passions fueled the fires that built nations, forged cultural identities, and raised up whole civilizations—often only to bring them crashing down again. Now, the world is as rife with uncertainty and insecurity as ever, and religion has again emerged as a potentially decisive influence...

Since the end of the Cold War, policy makers and scholars alike have struggled to characterize an international system in transition. Their challenge is to describe the nature of the driving forces that have changed world affairs—on both state and interstate levels--since 1989. Much of the focus has been on structural approaches that stress the role of broad global forces--such as Samuel Huntington's "third wave" of democratization, or the...

In the mouth of an old man fishing on the Oujiang River, it carries the authority of ancient wisdom: “Heaven is high; the Emperor is far away.” This Chinese aphorism, used since time immemorial to emphasize the distance between China’s government and the local, quotidian life of its people, encapsulates the challenges facing any attempt to understand the country’s future.

The world’s most populous state and the World Trade Organization’s...

In a world where millions of people live below the international poverty line, the debate over international economic development has profound and immediate significance. In recent years, optimism over neoliberal development programs has heralded economic development as the way to promote democratization and human rights as well as to combat the global problems of poverty and disease. But the virulent debate over the nature of development policies belies this...

Concerns over the future role of the United States dominate international discourse and policy. This issue’s symposium critically assesses the nature and impact of these rival perspectives onthe United States. Joseph Nye, the dean of the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government and former US cabinet member, opens our symposium by discussing the pragmatic benefits of soft power, which engenders goodwill and cooperation, allowing for the greater success of...

Intelligence is often called the most thankless profession because it garners attention only through its failures. The aftermath of September 11 certainly supports this view. In the months that followed the attacks, extensive public debate took place over the role intelligence should play in the post-Cold War world. This issue’s symposium draws on the views of policymakers and practitioners to evaluate the important role intelligence will play in the...

There is a temptation to think that democracy has triumphed as the world’s dominant governmental paradigm. In one sense this is undoubtedly true. The world’s strongest and most stable nations tend to be democratic, and the influence of their practices and ideas has helped produce broad democratization in recent years. But democracy’s success as practiced varies widely around the world, and the fate of the so-called “third wave” of...

International law is the object of both great hope and great fear. In an era of unprecedented globalization, international legal institutions serve as vehicles for the facilitation of commerce and cooperation among nations. And in the last year, after the worst act of international crime in history, many view international law as a prerequisite for justice. Yet there is no doubt that the desire for a global legal order...