Michael Nacht

Beyond Mutual Recrimination: Building a Solid U.S.-Japan Relationship in the 1990s

T h e United States and Japan entered the 1990s with both the security and the economic sides of their relationship at some risk. The Washington Post headlined a “low point” in bilateral dea1ings.l A New York TimeslCBS NewsfTokyo Broadcasting System poll reported that 58 percent of Americans found ”the economic power of Japan” to be “a greater threat to the security of the United States these days” than “the military power of the Soviet Union,” with only 26 percent believing the opposite. And citizens of each nation overwhelmingly saw the other as its ”strongest competitor. ’Q At the elite level, there has been a rise of ”revisionists” in both countries stressing Japan’s strength and uniqueness, and the divergence of Japanese and American interest^.^ An outgoing State Department official even played I . M. Destlev and Michael Nacht

Internal change and regime stability

When the Shah of Iran was forced to leave his country in January 1979 two knowledgeable and prominent Americans publicly offered strikingly different interpretations of what had caused his political downfall.

The United States in a World of Nuclear Powers

There is little consistency in American policy toward those states that have obtained independent nuclear weapons capabilities. Bilateral relations between the United States and the new nuclear state prior to weapons acquisi tion have proven to be far more accurate indicators of future trends in U.S. policy than the acquisition by the state of nuclear weapons per se. In the future, five basic options con front the United States: malign neglect, nuclear realignment, confrontation politics, equality promotion, and adaptive con tinuity. The last option, which involves the implementation of a variety of political-military and energy-related strategies, is the most likely one to be adopted. Major shocks to the international system, however, will drive the United States toward greater use of sanctions against the new nuclear states.

The Politics: How Did We Get Here?

For decades, experts have furiously debated the merits of missile defenses. Now, a broad consensus has been built to authorize the initial deployment of a national missile defense system at some point. What led to the consensus?

Strategic Arms Control and American Security

In the winter of 1986, Thomas Schelling, the intellectual father of modem arms control, lamented that “arms control has certainly gone off the tracks. For several years what are called arms negotiations have been mostly a public exchange of accusations; and it often looks as if it is the arms negotiations that, are driving the arms race.”1 When Schelling wrote these words, there was certainly a good deal to be skeptical about. Not a single significant arms-control accord had entered into force between the United States and the Soviet Union since the ratification of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks agreements signed in May 1972 (SALT I). Subsequent agreements reached between President Richard Nixon and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to implement a threshold test ban on nuclear weapons and to restrict peaceful nuclear explosions were never ratified by the U.S. Senate. The superpowers had reached agreement on a statement concerning the prevention of nuclear war and had modified the protocol to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. And they both continued to adhere to most of the provisions of the SALT II treaty, which was signed in 1979, although it, too, was never ratified by the Senate. By the winter of 1986 the prospects for future negotiated agreements seemed slim indeed. Both the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations appeared completely deadlocked, acrimony dominated the Soviet-American dia-logue, and the superpower arms competition was as intense as it had ever been in the four decades of the Cold War.

Challenges to American national security in the 1990s

1. The Setting for American National Security in the 1990s.- Breaking with the Past.- The Soviet Union Retrenches.- European Implications.- East Asian Implications.- Third World Implications.- A World of Greater Complexity.- A Changing International System.- Changes in American Foreign Policy.- 2. Some Considerations on the Soviet-American Relationship in the 1990s.- 3. The New Thinking and Its Limits: Soviet Foreign Policy under Gorbachev.- The New Thinking.- China and the Soviet Union.- The Third World and the Soviet Union.- The United States and the Soviet Union.- Conclusions.- 4. Arms Control and the Future of Nuclear Weapons.- The Arms-Control Context.- Strategic Nuclear Arms Negotiations.- Strategic Defense and Space Arms Control.- Theater Nuclear Arms Negotiations.- Future Nuclear Force Reductions.- Strategic Nuclear Arms Control.- Strategic Defense and Space Arms Control.- Theater Nuclear Arms Control.- Conclusions.- 5. Strategic Nuclear Weapons after START.- Strategic Consequences.- Force Survivability.- Target Coverage.- Civilian Fatalities.- Discussion.- 6. Strategic Arms Control and American Security: Not What the Strategists Had in Mind.- What Is Arms Control All About and Who Says So?.- Personalities, Domestic Politics, and the Sense of History.- 7. Beyond German Unification: The Wests Strategic and Arms-Control Policies.- Conventional Forces in Europe.- What Goal for Conventional Defense?.- Defensive Strategies and the Future of Forward Defense.- The Future Role of American Troops in Europe.- Future Directions in Arms Control.- Nuclear Weapons in Europe.- Choices for Strategies and Force Postures.- Future Directions in Nuclear Arms Control.- Conclusions.- The Future of NATO.- The Strategic Purposes of Conventional Forces.- The Role of American Troops.- Conventional Arms Control.- U.S. Nuclear Weapons in Europe.- Reconstructing the Foundations of Peace.- 8. American Security Policy in the Pacific Rim.- The Elements of the Strategic Situation in East Asia.- The Evolution of the Three Regional Disputes.- The Rise and Retreat of the Soviet Union.- The Economic Dynamism of the Region.- Trends toward Multipolarity.- Issues for American Policy.- Forward Deployments.- Alliance Management.- Military Strategy.- Arms Control and Regional Disputes.- Diplomatic Strategy.- Conclusions.- 9. Why the Third World Matters.- Third World Threats to American Interests.- The Strategic-Military Threat Posed by the Third World.- The Threat to American Economic Interests Posed by the Third World.- The Threat to American Political-Ideological Interests Posed by the Third World.- The Hyper-Realist Approach to the Third World.- Responding to the Hyper-Realists.- The Strategic Military Threat Posed by the Third World.- The Threat to American Economic Interests Posed by the Third World.- The Threat to American Political-Ideological Interests from the Third World.- A Truly Realistic Approach to the Third World.- 10. New Weapons and Old Enmities: Proliferation, Regional Conflict, and Implications for U.S. Strategy in the 1990s.- The Proliferation of Advanced Weaponry.- From Advanced Conventional Weapons to Weapons of Mass Destruction.- Regional Proliferation Trends.- Advanced Weaponry, Regional Conflict, and Global Spillovers.- Patterns of Regional Conflict.- Global Spillovers of Proliferation.- A Proliferation Containment Strategy.- Checking Further Proliferation.- Containing Regional Consequences and Global Spillovers.- Containing the Proliferation Threat.- 11. Military and Civilians Uses of Space: Lingering and New Debates.- Lingering Debates from the 1980s.- New Debates for the 1990s.- Open Skies: The Policy issues and Debates.- The Role of the Media.- Multilateral Verification of Peacekeeping Operations.- 12. Security and Technology.- Americas Changing Position in the Global Econonny.- American Manufacturings Declining Position.- A Multipolar Global Economy.- From Spin-Off to Spin-On Technology.- Will American Industrial Decline Reshape the Security Structure?.- The Economic Projection of Influence.- Security and Military Equipment.- Will New Players Alter the Security Configuration?.- 13. Predicting the Future of American Commitments.- Why Americans Care.- Ethnic Considerations.- Changes in Precedent.- Economic Changes.- The Proliferation of Weapons.- Nuclear Proliferation.- Chemical and Biological Warfare Proliferation.- Delivery System Proliferation.- Naval Deployments.- About the Authors.

Public Management: Does it Exist? How do you do it?

One of the striking features of contemporary life in modern industrial societies is the enormous size of government and the extraordinary influence of government on the lives of the governed. For economists and other students of market forces and resource allocation problems in the “private” sector, it is becoming increasingly difficult and misleading to isolate analysis from the interactions between business and government. No matter what our particular area of interest — health, criminal justice, transportation, communication, education, “high” technologies, or defense — we find strong interactive effects between the challenges of capital formation, economic competitiveness, and industrial productivity faced by the private manager and the legal, administrative, and political forces that are the stuff of the public policy process.