Fall 2004
Pre-Election Limbo
Few things attest to American hegemony more than the vacuum in everyone else’s foreign policy pending the US presidential election. Before November 2, Paris and Berlin certainly don’t want to help George W. Bush’s campaign and reward his three-year putdown of old Europeans by sending their own troops to get killed alongside Americans in the embers of the Iraq war.
Atlanticism for the 21st Century 
Essay by Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
NATO’s Secretary-General contends that the worst is over after the transatlantic feuds that broke out with the Iraq war. The naysayers always exaggerated in any case. Momentum returned with the Istanbul summit last June. The US and Europe remain each other’s No. 1 strategic partners. And terrorism requires cooperation between the two as never before.
America’s Aspirations for NATO
Analysis by Stephen J. Flanagan
This old American NATO hand isn’t so sure. The United States had greater expectations at Istanbul, and was disappointed with the meager results. US officials and the public still have positive feelings about the alliance. Yet the widening capabilities gap between the United States and Europe and Europe’s reluctance to do heavy lifting in Iraq or even fulfill troop pledges in Afghanistan bode ill.
Alliance in Distress
Analysis by Constanze Stelzenmüller
Die Zeit’s security correspondent is even less sure that NATO has weathered the storm well. The alliance is a remarkable survivor—but is today’s activism in enlarging, taking on ever more “our of area” missions as if there were no limit to overstretched forces, and modernizing forces and equipment in a fundamental transformation really a sign of vigor? Or is it an indication of hallucinatory hyperactivity?
A Security Council Seat for Germany
Analysis by Karl Kaiser
Berlin should get a permanent seat on the Security Council as part of the United Nations adaptation to global changes in the last fifty years. Germans once hoped for a common seat for the whole European Union—but it is now clear that this goal is Utopian. Berlin is a major contributor to the United Nations, financially, in troop commitments, and in ideas. It should have a commensurate political role.
Out with the G8, In with the G20
Analysis by Colin I. Bradford und Johannes F. Linn
Back when the G7 was founded 30 years ago, the six North Atlantic economic powerhouses and Japan were the logical participants. By now, however, China has the world’s fourth largest economy, developing nations are rising fast (and sometimes triggering crises), and the G8 spectacle has mutated into a political gabfest. Let’s dump the G8 and give its urgent tasks of global economic coordination to the more appropriate G20.
A Glum 2015 Scenario—If...
Analysis by Adam S. Posen
The persistent question of the past decade—has Germany’s once-upon-a-time economic miracle really degenerated into terminal decay?—depends on today’s choices. A lot of conventional wisdom is hogwash, but if reforms fail now, the answer will unfortunately be yes. Rich countries can limp along for years without being forced to alter their thinking. Does no one have a positive vision for the future except the Greens?
Germany’s Misery Index
Analysis by Warnfried Dettling
The reason that proposed welfare trims abrade the German psyche is not just the familiar coziness of a system that Bismarck started a century and a quarter ago. It’s a question of identity. The Dutch, Swedes, and even the French can lose benefits (and empires) and still remain Dutch, Swedes, and French. But after the disasters of the first half of the 20th century and the unimaginable successes of the last half, can Germans lose a key component of their post-1945 transformation and still remain German?
Tweedledum and Tweedledee in German Reforms
Analysis by Franz Walter
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a Margaret Thatcher look-alike to carry out root-and-branch reform in Germany. The conservatives had their chance in the 1990s and were no keener than the Social Democrats to shift consumption subsidies to cutting-edge productivity incentives. And in any case, the conservative opposition’s rise in opinion polls has more to do with disaffection from the Social Democrats than with positive approval of a Christian Democratic vision.
The Middle East after the Iraq War
Analysis by Yossi Alpher
Three dynamics are at work now: global complications following America’s post-9/11 shift to focus on Iraq rather than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; the American quandary in post-war Iraq itself; and the absence of any realistic two-state peace strategy on the part of Sharon, Arafat, or Bush. The international community should now ensure that partial Israeli settler withdrawal from the Gaza Strip does not create a Palestinian Bantustan.
Triggering a Discourse of Resistance
Analysis by Khaled Al-Hroub
Regrettably, the US campaign for democratization in the Middle East is only a bargaining chip. It is being instrumentalized to press Arab regimes to follow US foreign policy wishes. Washington eases the pressure for domestic reform when non-democratic regimes stay silent on the US war and occupation in Iraq, and on Israeli policies toward Palestinians. But the US may be having an ironic success in triggering an elite discourse of opposition to Washington.
Democratizing the Mideast
Analysis by Udo Steinbach
The American campaign to democratize Iraq, and through it the Greater Middle East, was hampered from the outset by a failure to take the region’s history and culture properly into account, says the Director of the German Orient Institute. The traditional Islamic concept of good governance centers on justice, not on individual freedom or political participation. Democratization will have to be a long, evolutionary process.
Watering Down Mideast Democratization
Analysis by Nikolas K. Gvosdev
Regrettably, George W. Bush’s bold plan for a Greater Middle East Initiative got watered down to more of the same old rhetoric about incremental change on the part of regimes that are themselves the main obstacles to democratization. Technical assistance is not the problem; the lack of political will in ruling hierarchies is the problem. Nor is the vigorous post-cold war civil society in Central Europe a useful model; civil society in Arab states hardly exists.
The Israeli Image of European Antisemitism
Analysis by Avi Primor
Many Israelis avoid traveling to Europe out of fear of antisemisitm there, just as many Europeans avoid visiting Israel out of fear of terrorist bombs. Yes, there is antisemitism in Europe. But there is also a certain Israeli magnification, sometimes ingenuously, sometimes intentionally, of European hostility to Jews. The 1688 annual antisemitic incidents in the US do not make the US as a whole antisemitic any more than the attempt of Brussels to take some responsibility for atrocities in ex-Belgian mandate countries in Africa makes Belgium antisemitic.
On Relegitimizing Torture
Analysis by Jan Philipp Reemtsma
The disturbing Abu Ghraib photos remind us: Nothing justifies the use of torture in a democracy. No short-term gain, however urgent the cause, is worth undermining the bedrock democratic guarantee of rule of law and individual autonomy. Criminals and suspects may legitimately be incarcerated, but they may not be enslaved. They may be pressed to confess, but not physically coerced to do so. Whenever people are treated in a way that deprives them of their capacity to dissent, our very civilization is put at risk.
The Fraught Polish-German Partnership
Analysis by Basil Kerski
Germany and Poland had no sooner effected their historic post-World War II reconciliation in the 1990s than they plunged into some new, some old acrimony in the 21st century. By now, differences over support for the American war in Iraq and voting rights in the draft EU constitution are a thing of the past. But the perennial claims for compensation from Poles on the part of descendants of the 1945 Germans expelled from Silesia continue to roil the waters.
Russia and NATO Condemned to Partnership
Analysis by Dmitrij Trenin
Moscow still worries about encirclement by some deployment of NATOforces on the territory of the new Polish and Baltic members of the alliance. And the West still worries about some effort by Russia to dominate its neighboring ex-Soviet states. But both fears are myths. The more likely trend is for Russia to become a much more important partner of both NATO and the EU in the next ten to 15 years.
