Prisoner Dilemmas: The American Obsession with POWs and Hostages

For centuries, the issue of American hostages and POWs has had incredible emotional and political resonance. Driven by a combination of idealism, wrath, and concerns over reputation, the status of captive Americans can become a national obsession. While deeply moral in many respects, this intense focus can encourage risky rescue operations, deepen conflicts, and lead to more Americans being captured abroad. Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both suffered grave political damage from hostage crises, and the recent capture of an American by Somali pirates highlights the continued danger that a hostage crisis could overshadow the presidency of Barack Obama. U.S. officials should publicly downplay the issue of hostages and POWs, and work quietly behind the scenes to free the men and women concerned.     

Status and Leadership on the Korean Peninsula

This article examines both South and North Korea's search for status in international relations. By exploring how these countries seek status for themselves, how states define status for themselves and others, and also what status they are willing to grant other regional states, this paper concludes that crafting a stable regional status hierarchy will be as important to future stability on the Korean peninsula as will be the crafting of a stable balance of power or deepening economic interdependence.     

The Costs of Respecting Sovereignty

Respect for sovereignty can be an effective tool to manage relations between states, drawing boundaries of acceptable behavior. But there are also clear costs of respecting sovereignty. A foreign policy based on a principled defense of sovereignty can be, in fact, morally wrong, politically illegitimate, and strategically dangerous. This does not mean that sovereignty should be broken wantonly, but only that prudential judgment must be exercised to weigh the costs and benefits of respecting the sovereignty of a state. In the end, our security and our values, not the principle of sovereignty, should be the metric by which we should judge the necessity and legitimacy of U.S. actions.     

Power and Paradox: Asian Geopolitics and Sino-American Relations in the 21 Century

The pattern of Asian geopolitics can be examined by employing three analytical perspectives. The first employs East Asia and the vigorous debate over the meaning of the rise of China as an intellectual prism to observe the currents of geopolitical continuity and change that are currently abroad in the Asian region. The second explores the extent to which the interacting forces of geopolitics and military modernization foster the rise of new force projection capabilities that may affect the strategic environment in Asia—particularly in East Asia. Here, the focus is mainly on the arsenals of the three indigenous Asian giants, China, Japan and India, all of whom have developed, or are in the process of developing, significant air and maritime assets whose operations have the potential to intersect in East and South East Asia. Russia is not as much a presence because it no longer possesses its powerful Soviet-era Pacific Fleet and has, in essential respects, retreated to its traditional role as a Eurasian land power.¹ The third examines the future of Sino-American relations in Asia in the context of the debate over China's ascent and U. S. decline—a discussion that has intensified since the implosion of the U.S. financial system in 2008 and the onset of the worst global recession since the 1930s.     

The Many Faces of Mexico

This article will reexamine basic assumptions about the geopolitics and character of the United States-Mexico border, take a closer look at current events that have affected the drug war and, finally, discuss possible policy responses beyond those routinely voiced in the public domain.     

King Fahd's Saudi Arabia

Written shortly after King Fahd of Saudi Arabia's death, this profile takes the measure of the man: “Profligate though he may have been, Fahd never forgot that Saudi Arabia was a rich place with a small army in a region full of ghastly predators. He proved forceful even with a weak hand.”