The United States had innumerable military advantages it could bring to bear against Native American tribes: wealth, numbers, technology, industrial organization. Why did it take so long -- over a hundred years -- to triumph? The answer is a complicated story, interweaving policy and military failures, failures of understanding and execution, and throughout it all an obdurate unwillingness of Americans on the frontier to uphold their government's policy. The Indian Wars were finally won with the combination of simplified objectives, ruthless prosecution by both military and economic means, and international cooperation to preclude sanctuaries from which tribes could operate. But the lessons, and especially the military lessons, were there from the start. Adapted from the source document.
Argues for a three-pronged policy approach to handling Iran's nuclear ambitions. The last three years of Iranian behavior is delineated, before considering why Iran chose so blatant an approach to its nuclear program as well as the extent of the US lack of information surrounding the Iranian project. US policy & options are presented, along with military scenarios & likely the Iranian response. Adapted from the source document.
NATO has been so consumed with managing the Balkans & nascent EU security policies that it has largely ignored the much more serious defense challenge of managing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. US & European officials have divergent approaches that must be reconciled for the US to construct a national missile defense in the near term. The means for creating a common approach lie within reach: modifying the ABM Treaty if possible, including critical allies, assisting European ballistic missile defenses, sustained priority in NATO budgeting & programming, supporting EU strategic intelligence collection & assessment, & building US-EU "pillar two" links. Adapted from the source document.
With the end of the Cold War, opportunities long foreclosed to Europe came back into view on the horizon. The prospect of Western Europe providing for its own security became a realistic proposition for the first time in fifty years. The French government developed a strategy for replacing US power with a more cohesive European Union security and defence identity which garnered substantial support from other European NATO countries, especially Germany, resulting in an intensive four-year competition over which institution would form the basis of Europe's security and defence capabilities. By the end of 1995, NATO had decisively won this contest, due to rapid reconfiguration of NATO's military structures and the test for both organisations of responding to Yugoslavia's collapse. In the final analysis, it was the military capability of NATO that defeated the French alternative security structure. This article tells the story of that evolution.
The debate on European security over the past several years has focused almost exclusively on the question of whether, and to which countries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) should expand its membership. With the near certainty of NATO Parliaments ratifying the admission to NATO of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, two important policy issues now loom: how enlargement will affect NATO's contribution to European security, and whether further enlargement is a preferable course of action to other alternatives for enhancing security in Europe. This assessment concludes that NATO's central challenges will remain internal. The NATO allies have still not developed a workable consensus on the breadth, either geographically or functionally, of NATO's role in post-Cold War Europe. As discussions over the cost of enlargement and the crisis in Iraq have demonstrated, the burdensharing issue remains a source of resentment on both sides of the Atlantic. The "revolution in military affairs" occurring in U.S. military forces and continued attention to the European Union's economic and monetary union will exacerbate the burdensharing issue. Many of NATO's internal difficulties are inherent in the transition after the Cold War; however, they nonetheless deserve more attention than they currently receive. NATO has succeeded in creating a NATO-centric European security system, and must resolve these disputes for Europe to be secure. Incorporation of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO does not change NATO's central purposes, nor does it, on balance, change the alliance's ability to effectively carry out its responsibilities. Although their inclusion will certainly make the accession states feel more secure, and Russia perhaps less so, the net effect of NATO's first tranche of expansion will not appreciably change the European security landscape. NATO's further enlargement in the near term does pose higher risks of greater insecurity, most notably in relations with Russia.
Under President Donald Trump, the United States has burned like a wildfire through the goodwill it accrued in seventy years of propagating its liberal political values. Can Western nations preserve the liberal world order against rising authoritarian powers without the United States, or with Washington working against them? In America vs the West, Kori Schake argues that the success of the liberal order is not preordained. It will have to be fought for, compromised for, and rejuvenated. Can it be done without American leadership? That will depend on the strengths of the major challengers - Russia and China - but above all on whether the West's middle powers are prepared to band together
