Albert Beveridge was a promising politician in his thirties when he stood up to speak in favor of war and the promotion of democracy to his peers in the U.S. Senate. A historian, Beveridge unabashedly called for the United States to remake the globe. “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world,” Beveridge proclaimed. “And we will move forward to our work, not howling out regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.”
Stripped of its more racist rhetoric, Beveridge’s 1900 speech to justify the U.S. war and colonization of the Philippines could have been made on Capitol Hill a century later in support of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the larger “global war on terror.” Beveridge, too, tried to make an ugly war into a necessary and uplifting venture. There are the same invocations of religious certainty and civilizing missions. The Republican senator from Indiana even had words for those who would voice skepticism about U.S. military actions. “All this has aided the enemy more than climate, arms, and battle,” the senator concluded.
The attempt by the Bush administration to expand U.S. military power and “lead in the regeneration of the world” has roots in U.S. foreign policy that extend further back than even Albert Beveridge. Justifications for preemptive war to safeguard U.S. security can be found in the words of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. The doctrine of manifest destiny helped expand the territorial limits of America. Only at the end of the 19th century, when it stretched from “sea to shining sea,” did the United States have to make a choice: leave well enough alone or expand overseas.
Spurred on by politicians like Beveridge, the United States entered late into the colonial game. At the end of the 19th century, when the European land grab in Asia, Africa, and the Americas had been going on for some time, the United States acquired its first colonies. Thereafter, with some exceptions, the American zone of control expanded not so much through territorial acquisition as through calculated alliances, the facilitation of corporate expansion, and selected military interventions to depose opponents and secure access to key resources.
Although the two major parties might bicker over any particular flexing of military muscle, the maintenance and expansion of U.S. power has been decidedly a bipartisan project. Anti-imperialists such as William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, and Robert Taft have raised objections. But a bipartisan chorus in favor of America’s global expansion has drowned out these populist, libertarian, and isolationist voices.
At the end of World War II, the United States had a chance to step away from its expansionist past. Again it faced two distinct choices. There was the option of peace and international human rights presided over by the newly established United Nations and inspired by the vision of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The second option was the construction of a national security state anchored in a growing military industrial complex at home and sustained by covert, militarized policies abroad. This second approach, pushed by the Truman wing of the Democratic Party and endorsed by key members of the Republican establishment, became the core of U.S. foreign policy for the latter half of the 20th century.
This Cold War foreign policy rested on a fundamentally unjust division of world spoils. “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population,” observed containment’s architect George Kennan in 1948. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”
The drive to maintain “this pattern of relationships,” perhaps the core misconception of U.S. foreign policy, persists to the present day. Injustice and national security, in fact, have an inverse relationship. The more injustice there is, the less security we all enjoy. In this report, we have urged the marriage of justice and security for both pragmatic and principled reasons. The timing is right. We have had three chances in the last 30 years to go down this path of greater international cooperation, and we failed each time. We are now facing a fourth opportunity. Let us hope that world history does not abide by the “three strikes and you’re out” principle.
Paths Not Taken
At three points in recent history the United States could have rejected the bipartisan consensus on militaristic internationalism and returned to the cooperative internationalism that brought representatives of 50 countries to San Francisco for the inaugural meeting of the UN. These moments came in 1975, 1991, and 2001.
In 1975, the United States faced defeat in Vietnam, was engaged in détente with the Soviet Union, and had begun negotiations to recognize Communist China. The Vietnam War marked the first major defeat of U.S. military power. Détente with the Soviets had the potential to reduce the growing arsenals of nuclear weapons. With the opening to China, a new age of international cooperation at the United Nations beckoned.
But the Cold War did not end in the 1970s. Détente with the Soviets faltered, horrific wars continued in Southeast Asia, and the UN continued to be hamstrung by superpower conflict. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was willing to relinquish control over their respective spheres of influence much less step back from their proxy wars elsewhere in the world.
When the Cold War did end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States had a second opportunity to help usher in an equitable and peaceful world order. The explicit need for nuclear weapons had disappeared. New regional structures like the Organization on Security and Cooperate in Europe and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum stood ready to provide new security frameworks. The UN was rapidly expanding its peacekeeping capacities. The United States might have taken the opportunity to press for a global peace dividend, so that all countries could benefit from shifting military spending to human needs.
The peace dividend never truly materialized, nor did peace itself. The United States owed over $1 billion in arrears to the UN by 2000 and repeatedly vetoed peacekeeping missions. Underfunded and without sufficient political backing, the UN was unable to prevent the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, and failed to bring stability to Somalia. The United States took advantage of the Soviet Union’s collapse to acquire greater market share in arms exports, which only fanned the flames of regional conflicts. Nuclear weapons reductions faltered. Under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the United States sought to maintain its status as the world’s sole superpower. In the 1990s, America became the “indispensable nation” because, to quote former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, “We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
As the third opportunity that came after September 11 demonstrated, however, the United States did not in fact see further into the future. Washington could have translated the outpouring of world sympathy over the 2001 attacks into a strengthening of international legal institutions to pursue and prosecute the perpetrators. It could have dramatically increased development assistance to the global South. It could have drawn down the U.S. military presence around the world that had made America an international lightening rod for anger and resentment.
But the United States did not do any of this. With bipartisan support, the Bush administration attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries where conflict still burns today. Instead of reviving the internationalist option, the United States proceeded to unravel what little remained of U.S. commitment to international law, international institutions, and respect for international public opinion. The administration managed to turn back the clock, not simply to the late 1940s and the launch of the Cold War but all the way back to the time of Albert Beveridge. Once again war and conquest, wrapped up in the more appealing package of democracy promotion, dazzled Congress into backing the administration.
As in 1900, the Bush administration chose the path of global expansion. It has attempted to remake the world in America’s image. Instead, it has been America’s image that has been remade, and the result has not been pretty.
Where Do We Go Next?
The policies of the last six years have palpably failed—on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, at the negotiating table with Iran, amid the chaos of Somalia and Sudan, in the shantytowns and abandoned farmland of the global South, and even in the stratosphere where our emissions accelerate global warming and our woefully expensive missile defense systems consistently fail to work.
In this report, we have traced the consequences of these failed policies through six stories. Lieutenant Ehren Watada lays out for us the crimes and misdemeanors of the administration’s Iraq policy. The salination of Topol Mondal’s farm and the impending inundation of Bangladesh focus our attention on the failures of U.S. climate change policy. Kim Jong Il’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons reveals the flaws of our nonproliferation strategy. The predicament of Karen Chacon demonstrates how free-trade solutions have only widened global inequalities. The anguish of Asha Hagi Elmi illustrates the folly that military intervention can repair the unjust conditions that give rise to regional conflicts. And the suffering of Maher Arar underscores the errors of our counter-terrorism efforts.
These failures of U.S. policy are not a secret. Virtually everyone outside a small perimeter around the White House acknowledges that U.S. foreign policy is broken. So, how do we fix it?
Before we turn to our Just Security approach—which integrates the recommendations of the previous five sections—let’s first assess the competition. Perhaps the most eligible contender is an updated version of Cold War realism. It is supported by liberal hawks of both parties. And it has a hallowed pedigree.
In the late 1940s, after the United States largely abandoned the FDR approach of principled internationalism, the Cold War leadership debated over two strategies: rollback and containment. The partisans of rollback wanted to use the dominant military force of the United States to roll back Communist influence and ultimately topple the Soviet Union itself. The Truman administration eventually settled on the alternative of containment: the deployment of U.S. troops and bases, and the construction of strategic alliances in Europe and Asia, to rein in Soviet and then Chinese influence. Cold War realists shied away from direct military confrontation with the Communist superpowers.
Today, with its doctrine of preventive war and an all-out military assault on terrorism, the Bush administration continues to advocate its own version of rollback. Since these military strategies have only overstretched U.S. capabilities and increased U.S. insecurity, it is not surprising that some Democrats and Republicans have recommended replacing the Bush doctrine with an updated version of the Truman doctrine of containment. This “new and improved” containment strategy would be deployed against transnational terrorism, threatening regimes, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The United States would strengthen its existing military alliances and maintain high levels of military spending. But it would be more discriminating about the use of military force.
Liberals must have a “fighting faith,” argues former editor The New Republic Peter Beinart, a faith that can separate worthy goals such as the war on terrorism and the struggle against tyrants from the human rights morass created by the Bush administration.1 Just as Truman faced the Soviet threat, the United States must create a united front against terrorism.2 The United States must not shrink from the use of hard power, because only through military force can it maintain a preeminent position in the world, defeat terrorism, and provide the hidden fist to bolster the hidden hand of the market.3 For these liberal hawks, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq was not wrong in principle but only in execution. More soldiers, more air power, and more resolve would have done the trick, just as the military brass argued 30 years ago in Vietnam. According to these new containment advocates, multilateral structures are fine in theory but often ineffectual or unreliable in practice. The United States must pay more attention to regions like East Asia, which are crucial to U.S. national interests, and pay less attention to regions such as Africa, which are largely peripheral. And U.S. military interventions overseas should be used both for furthering U.S. goals, such as democracy promotion, and for achieving larger humanitarian aims.4
Just as containment was preferable to a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its contemporary variant is an improvement on the schoolyard bully stance of the Bush administration. But containment of the liberal hawk variety is an impoverished alternative. This rehabilitation of Harry Truman’s foreign policy record is an attempt to pump up the Democratic Party with steroids lest it appear weak on the military or terrorism. It is close to the same Bush foreign policy, minus the more flagrant human rights violations.
If we apply the “new and improved” Cold War approach to the five questions that opened the introductory chapter, we find that it comes up lacking. The containment approach maintains U.S. dominance in nuclear weapons rather than advancing disarmament. The hard power approach continues to think of counter-terrorism in military terms. The liberal hawks view arms exports as central to securing alliances and subsidizing U.S. military research and development. The Cold War realists embrace free trade as a sure-fire way of growing the U.S. and global economy. And climate change doesn’t merit much discussion at all.
The Cold War is over. We live in a fundamentally different world—of important new economic powers like China, India, and Brazil, of increasingly connected and powerful civil movements, of changing notions of sovereignty, of global threats such as climate change. It seems odd that the foreign policy establishment can’t think outside the containment box. The Bush administration responded to this new world with a strategy of rollback that has inevitably generated blowback. The proposed alternative of containment does not resolve the fundamentally unjust assumptions of U.S. foreign policy. We must have the courage and the imagination to leave the Cold War behind and approach our common challenges with a fresh perspective.
An Integrated Just Security Alternative
What distinguishes this report from many alternative foreign policy proposals is an integrated approach that avoids the twin perils of hard power and global disengagement. It proposes a principled U.S. engagement with the international community. We recommend that Washington act as a global partner not a global boss.
Emerging from this report are several intersecting themes:
1) The United States must advance rather than undermine international mechanisms and institutions. In the course of human events, empires have succeeded empires. Today we have a unique opportunity to move from a unipolar system presided over by the United States to a secure, multipolar system that is held in place by a latticework of international institutions and laws. The United States should work with the UN to devise a workable solution to the Israel-Palestine debate, develop with other countries a viable cap-and-tax program to reduce carbon emissions, reduce the challenge of transnational terrorism with equally transnational legal mechanisms, support an Arms Trade Agreement to reduce the role of weaponry in sparking and heightening conflict, strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by working with other nuclear powers to radically reduce nuclear arsenals, and contribute to fashioning a global plan to train four million new health workers around the world.
2) We must support the rule of law, not the rule of the jungle. If we break the Geneva Conventions in our treatment of enemy combatants, we can only expect that other countries will do the same to our soldiers. If we launch a preventive war in violation of international law, we can only expect that other countries will follow our precedent. We cannot expect other countries to uphold fair labor practices when we ourselves have not ratified all of the core labor standards of the International Labor Organization. The United States should spend less time talking about the rule of law and more time practicing the rule of law.
3) We must lead by example, not by force. As the most powerful country in the world system, the United States can play a leading role in key areas. But with power comes responsibilities. We are the leading nuclear power, so it is incumbent upon us to take the first steps toward negotiating down nuclear arsenals. We are the leading producer of carbon emissions—and we pollute so disproportionately with respect to our share of the world population—that we must bear the greater burden of adjustment. We are the leading arms exporter, so we must take the lead in restraining such proliferation. Only when we lead by positive example can we expect the anti-Americanism that has sprung up all over the world—as a result of the Iraq War and scandals such as Abu Ghraib—to subside.
4) Global problems call for global solutions, but one size does not fit all. In coming up with alternatives to fossil fuels, it would be ridiculous to ask landlocked Austria to invest in tidal power. So, too, would it be illogical to expect that counter-terrorism strategies effective against al-Qaeda are automatically effective against all terrorist organizations. The support of democratic practice, which involves the active participation of social movements, is an insurance policy against the imposition of solutions that ignore particular, local conditions. We should also be wary of quick fixes. The Bush administration has focused on military power to solve the many dilemmas facing the United States and the world. We must be careful not to hold up other single solutions to global inequality, regional wars, and so on. There are no technological quick fixes to climate change. The free market and free trade are not magic powder that we can sprinkle over global inequality to make it go away. Resolution to difficult conflicts, such as the one between Israel and Palestine, will require a great deal of negotiation and compromise.
5) We should support just policies abroad because they also encourage just policies at home. We have seen how rising global inequality adversely affects U.S. workers by driving down wages and increasing job loss. Our arms export policies keep our military industrial complex humming and undermine attempts to redirect money to social needs. Our fearful pursuit of terrorists abroad has chipped away at the edifice of our civil liberties at home. Our refusal to support effective, global solutions to climate change have hamstrung attempts to reorganize the U.S. economy on a foundation of sustainable energy.
6) We need more public involvement in global affairs not less. Foreign policy issues can be complex. But so are the rules of major league sports, and most Americans have figured them out. We can’t leave it to the experts to solve the world’s problems. In many cases, the experts got us into the jam in the first place. As those who live in this country, we must use democratic means to close the gap between what the polls say and what our leaders are doing.
7) Security is not just about the military. We have defined security broadly in this document. When we speak of security, we are talking about freedom from military conflict and terrorist attack. But we also believe that security involves access to sufficient food and shelter, good health care and good jobs, a clean environment and well-functioning, accountable political structures.
These are the principles of a just security program. The specific recommendations—such as our plan for Middle East peace, our nuclear disarmament proposal, our proposal for a global health care workforce—flow from these principles. The different parts of Just Security are intrinsically related to one another. So, for instance, as we apply ourselves to finding sustainable sources of energy, we will find that we gradually reduce a contributing factor behind conflict, namely the securing of access to oil. If we make a concerted effort to address economic inequality, we will diminish one of the root causes of terrorism. As the United States works to build effective international mechanisms, such as an Arms Trade Treaty or a transborder carbon tax, then Washington will accumulate political capital rather than invite scorn as the world’s largest debtor in that category.
Money and Jobs
This integrated program will generate some new revenues, for instance from the carbon tax. But it will also cost money. If we are serious about dealing with the global health crisis, we have to figure out how to pay for it. Fortunately, a less militarized, less unilateral foreign policy will cost us a great deal less money. Policing the world is expensive. So is maintaining a nuclear complex. Assuming a more modest role in international affairs will allow us to redirect funds to other pressing needs, both at home and abroad.
The United States has managed, to use Chalmers Johnson’s resonant phrase, “to garrison the globe.”5 What will abandoning this global garrison mean for our military? Within a total military budget of $647 billion, the policing of our expanded sphere of influence constitutes 44.7%, or $289 billion (see table). We could save another $55 billion by trimming the Cold War weapons and Pentagon inefficiency out of the budget. The remaining $303 billion would be entirely sufficient to deter any attack on the homeland and to provide troops to internationally sanctioned peacekeeping and peacemaking operations. This remaining amount would still constitute four-and-a-half times the highest estimate of what China, our nearest competitor, now spends.
The United States is already moving in this direction with its “revolution in military affairs.” Fixed bases and lumbering tanks are giving way to rapid response units and visiting forces agreements. But this is not enough. The United States must transform its forward-based, offensively oriented military structure. The bottom line is not whether the U.S. military can respond quickly or slowly but whether the United States should be there in the first place. The congressional debate is about rethinking the U.S. military engagement in Iraq. It should be about rethinking U.S. military engagement in the world.
We need to spend more money on preventing conflict than generating it. Right now, within our total budget for security—including military forces, homeland security and non-military international affairs activities such as diplomacy, economic development, and nuclear nonproliferation—90% is currently devoted to the military.6 The money we spend on garrisoning the globe must be redirected toward negotiating peace agreements, securing nuclear material, and improving global livelihoods. Some of the savings would need to be devoted to military tasks. The largest of these will be addressing the long-term mental and physical trauma of Iraq War veterans. By the most authoritative estimate, these costs will likely equal the costs to date of prosecuting the war itself.7 There will also be transition costs, and costs for replacing equipment destroyed in the war.
We are not calling for an end to the U.S. military. We propose that it focus on its primary mission: defense. Also, although we emphasize diplomacy and the rule of law, we would be naïve to rule out the use of force. Earlier we called for a policy of discriminate force. We mean that military force is justified for the defense of the country, for peacekeeping, and protect allies through multilateral means. In counterterrorism operations, we support the use of force to uphold the rule of law just as police must use force sometimes to apprehend criminals, but this force must be undertaken with due respect for human rights.
Finally, we need to create jobs for all the people who are today dependent on the military-industrial complex. The United States created tens of millions of military-related jobs from 1941 through a succession of wars, hot and cold. We now face the threat of global warming. We should respond with an all-out program to build a new, Green economy. Instead of producing more efficient killing machines, we must now produce more efficient factories, appliances, and cars. Instead of an arms race, we must race against time with other countries to see who can find the most sustainable energy sources. Rosie the Riveter symbolized the new jobs and the new capacities created by the U.S. effort during World War II. Rosie the Recycler should become the symbol of the new jobs created by the U.S. effort to help save the world from climate change.
What about China?
The Soviet Union served as the rationale for the aggressive U.S. foreign policy and high levels of military spending during the Cold War. Terrorism serves that purpose today. But with withdrawal from Iraq just a matter of timetables and the “global war on terror” already losing some of its political force, Washington is grooming a new potential enemy.
In 2000, before terrorism became the focus of U.S. foreign policy, former deputy assistant secretary of defense Kurt Campbell wrote an article about the looming China threat. The Cold War was over, and U.S. politicians were suffering from serious “enemy envy.” China’s growing economy and burgeoning military budget suggested that it could be the next challenger to step into the ring with the United States. “Even the strategists concede that they now have a sense of renewed purpose after a prolonged period of melancholy and nostalgia,” Campbell wrote of the atmosphere among military and political strategists in Washington.8
But China is no Soviet Union. And it’s no al-Qaeda either. In fact, the current administration is of two minds when it comes to China. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review talks of the country’s “potential to compete militarily with the United States “even as it waxes optimistic about China as a “partner in addressing common security challenges.”9 Indeed, China has become a strategic partner in deed though not in name. On global terrorism, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and the imperative of global economic growth, Washington and Beijing saw largely eye to eye. The economics of the relationship are clear. From 2000 to 2005, U.S.-China trade grew 150% to nearly $300 billion.10 China has turned around and invested its huge trade surplus into U.S. bonds. As a friend who keeps our economy afloat and as a foe that justifies full-spectrum military spending, China is useful to the United States. Never before has a rival for U.S. power held us in quite such a tight clinch.
In this report, we’ve looked at China from various angles. Beijing is modernizing its military, but its nuclear arsenal is tiny and its military spending is still a fraction of the Pentagon’s budget. China’s growing economy is producing more and more greenhouse gasses, but it still trails the United States in per-capita emissions. The Chinese government has pulled hundreds of millions of its citizens out of extreme poverty, but low wages and the lack of workers’ rights in the country have a downward effect on wages and working conditions globally. China has expanded its diplomatic efforts in different parts of the world, but it continues to maintain close relations with repressive governments in Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, and elsewhere, and the Taiwan Straits remain a dangerous flashpoint.
While many Chinese policies are troubling, the country does not pose a military threat to the United States. As the United States and China move closer together economically, it will become ever more difficult for the Pentagon to use China to justify an ever-increasing military budget. In the 1990s, the United States treated China as a strategic partner. In an era in which engagement with China over economic policies, regional conflicts, and climate change is critical, such a partnership is needed now more than ever.
The multifaceted relationship between China and the United States is perhaps the strongest evidence yet that Cold War thinking—about containment, about hard power—no longer makes any sense. Attack a country that is the second largest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds? Contain a country where 80% of Wal-Mart’s suppliers are located? That’s yesterday’s foreign policy.
The Political Will
Much has changed in the United States since the days of Albert Beveridge. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the peace movement have all transformed U.S. society. The majority of Americans no longer believe that the United States has a mission to “civilize” the world. We have become a more just society, a more diverse culture, a more international country. Immigration has changed the composition of our population. To quote the song: we are the world. It is time to change our foreign policy so that it looks more like America and also reflects those strands of the American tradition that celebrate and advance justice.
Many of the ideas and proposals in this report have broad support among the American public. For instance, according to polling data from The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and World Public Opinion, “Seventy-five percent of Americans think the United Nations should be able to go into countries to investigate human rights abuses, 72% favor a standing UN peacekeeping force, and 60% endorse UN regulation of international arms sales.”11 Majorities of Americans believe that no nations should possess nuclear weapons,12 reject the notion that military force should be used to promote democracy, and believe that immediate steps must be taken to halt global warming.13
What was once considered radical has now gained mainstream attention. For instance, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn recently endorsed nuclear disarmament. Zbigniew Brzezinski bemoans the transformation of the United States from mediator in the Middle East to “a partisan for Israel.”14 Foreign policy columnist Thomas Friedman has gone green and now supports a carbon tax, and Pete Stark (D-CA) has introduced a bill to get one up and running.15 The House Armed Forces Committee has rejected the language of a “global war on terrorism.”
We need leaders and we need social movements that can translate this broad American appeal and this narrow elite support into an integrated program for American renewal. We believe that this program must be founded on the principles of just security laid out in this report. Only a just security policy will make us all feel more secure.
Our vision is inspired by justice, by what is fair. The social movements that have made U.S. society more just must now make U.S. foreign policy more just. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “The arc of the moral universe is long. But it bends toward justice.”
Endnotes
- Peter Beinart, “An Argument for a New Liberalism,” The New Republic, December 2, 2004.
- Ian Shapiro, Containment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
- Kurt Campbell and Michael O’Hanlon, Hard Power (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
- David Greenberg, “The Choice,” Boston Globe, May 21, 2006. Another variant of Cold War realism is “ethical realism,” which emphasizes a somewhat different legacy of Truman, namely his alliance-building skills and such practical programs as the Marshall Plan of aid to war-torn Europe. The “ethical “part, which recoils from the erosion of civil liberties under the Bush administration, emphasizes the value of prudence: that there are consequences to our actions and responsibilities that must be shouldered. See, for instance, Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman, Ethical Realism (New York: Pantheon, 2006); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Stephen Walt, Taming American Power (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005).
- Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis (New York: Metropolitan, 2007), p.7.
- Unified Security Budget, op. cit., p. 6.
- Bryan Bender, “Economists Say Cost of War Could Top $2 Trillion,” The Boston Globe, January 8, 2006.
- Kurt Campbell, “China Watchers Fighting a Turf War of Their Own,” The New York Times, May 20, 2000.
- U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review, 2006. Available at: http://www.defenselink.mil/qdr/.
- Figures taken from The U.S.-China Business Council, “U.S.-China Trade Statistics and China’s World Trae Statistics.” Available at: http://www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html.
- Americans and the World, “United Nations,” Digest. Available at: http://www.americans-world.org/digest/global_issues/un/un_summary.cfm.
- “AP Poll Shows Americans Prefer Nuclear Disarmament to Alternatives by Large Margin,” Common Dreams, March 31, 2005. Available at: http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/0331-11.htm.
- John Broder and Marjorie Connelly, “Public Says Warming Is a Problem, but Remains Split on Response,” International Herald Tribune, April 27, 2007.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance (New York: Basic, 2007), p.163.
- Thomas Friedman, “The Power of Green,” The New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2007; and, Thomas Friedman, “Only Halfway There,” The New York Times, May 13, 2007.