Suchergebnisse

Unilateralism and multilateralism must be understood to be American diplomatic stabilization instruments, focused on protecting the country's interests. It now appears that George W.Bush made milder changes in his time than once thought. The Obama administration seems to use a discourse much more open to multilateralism. The evolutions of global power balances will, in the future, urge Washington to turn more often to multilateral negotiation. Adapted from the source document.

This article discusses the secret American-North Vietnamese negotiations which led to the signing of the January 1973 Paris Agreements. The author contends that secret diplomacy does not alone explain the dismal (from the American viewpoint) outcome. Ultimately, the Kissinger-Tho talks were but a forum for making the decisions that were actually dictated by the events on the ground in Vietnam & the hectic diplomatic activity that Kissinger was engaged in elsewhere. The central argument is that the negotiations in Paris failed to produce a durable peace for Vietnam, not due to poor negotiation skills but because both sides ultimately viewed the agreements as a temporary reprieve rather than a permanent solution. Adapted from the source document.

Is the Bush Administration bent on wrecking the United Nations? This paper will essentially argue that the current us Administration has neither broken with the past tradition of American policy vis-a-vis the UN, nor been bent on dismantling the international organization itself Rather, it is engaged in a long-standing American project that aims at using the UN to serve its national interests. If it does not -- as has often been the case over the past few years -- the Bush Administration, like many of its predecessors, is willing to revert to a well-tested alternative of declaring the UN irrelevant for the time being. Adapted from the source document.

Halftitle Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contetns -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Prologue: Two Trips to Moscow -- 1. Where Yalta Worked: The "Finnish Solution" -- Part One -- "Containment" in a Borderland, 1948-1949 -- 2. "We Are Not Czechs": Finland and the Spring Crisis of 1948 -- 3. The Politics of Uncertainty -- Part Two -- In the Danger Zone, 1949-1953 -- 4. "Two Roads to Follow" -- 5. The Looming Danger -- Part Three -- Containing Coexistence, 1953-1956 -- 6. A New Look for Finland? -- 7. The Spirit of Porkkala -- Epilogue: "Bridge-building" versus "Finlandization"-The Enduring Dilemma -- Appendix: The Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance between the Republic of Finland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

The United Nations has been called everything from "the best hope of mankind" to "irrelevant" and "obsolete." With this much-needed introduction to the UN, Jussi Hanhimaki engages the current debate over the organizations effectiveness as he provides a clear understanding of how it was originally conceived, how it has come to its present form, and how it must confront new challenges in a rapidly changing world. After a brief history of the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, the author examines the UN's successes and failures as a guardian of international peace and security, as a promoter of human rights, as a protector of international law, and as an engineer of socio-economic development. Hanhimaki stresses that the UN's greatest problem has been the impossibly wide gap between its ambitions and capabilities. In the area of international security, for instance, the UN has to settle conflicts--be they between or within states--without offending the national sovereignty of its member states, and without being sidelined by strong countries, as happened in the 2003 intervention of Iraq. Hanhimaki also provides a clear accounting of the UN and its various arms and organizations (such as UNESCO and UNICEF), and he offers a critical overview of how effective it has been in the recent crises in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, for example--and how likely it is to meet its overall goals in the future. The United Nations, Hanhimaki concludes, is an indispensable organization that has made the world a better place. But it is also a deeply flawed institution, in need of constant reform.

This article argues that the Cold War nostalgia of the present in the United States is ultimately based upon a poor - instrumentalist - reading of history. If anything, Cold War nostalgia shows the malleability of our present-day understanding of the past. Adapted from the source document.