Twenty Sixth July Two Thousand Nine

Item 1: "Reset Reviewed" by Mikhail Gorbachev
- agreement on a framework for a future legally binding treaty on reducing strategic offensive arms - reaffirmation of the interrelationship between these weapons and missile defense
- resume military-to-military contacts between Russia and the United States - rebuilding mutual trust
- danger that the new relationship could be mired in inertia and routine

Item 2: "Will the US- Japan Alliance Survive" by Joseph Nye
- with the Japanese experiencing a period of domestic political uncertainty, and North Korea's nuclear tests and missile launches increasing their anxiety, will Japan reverse its long-standing decision not to seek a national nuclear-deterrent capability?
- 1996 - the Clinton-Hashimoto Declaration stated that the US-Japan security alliance was the foundation for stability that would allow growing prosperity in post-Cold War East Asia
- the alliance faces three major challenges:
i. North Korea - violated their agreements, knowing that China, the country with the greatest potential leverage, is most concerned about regime collapse in North Korea, and thus the threat of chaos on its borders - Japanese fear that the credibility of American extended deterrence will be weakened if the US decreases its nuclear forces to parity with China - a mistake, however, to believe that extended deterrence depends on parity in numbers of nuclear weapons - best guarantee of American extended deterrence over Japan remains the presence of nearly 50,000 American troops
ii. Dramatic rise of China's economy - Japan afraid of being passed-over - little prospect of such a reversal because China poses a potential threat, whereas Japan does not, and that the US shares democratic values with Japan, and China is not a democracy
iii. New set of transnational challenges to vital interests, such as pandemics, terrorism, and human outflows from failed states

Item 3: "Africa's New Path" by Fareed Zakaria
- In 2007, before the economic crisis hit, 37 countries on the continent were growing at 4 percent a year or more, and 34 countries there are classified by Freedom House as "free" or "partly free."
- OECD reports that, in a first, Africa gets more money from investors than from foreign aid
- Paul Kagamen paints an intriguing picture of what a more hopeful African future might look like—driven by capitalism, pride, indigenous traditions, and a prickly nationalism that insists on finding its own path to success

Item 4: "The Ten Commandments for Ambitious Policy Wonks" by Stephen Walt
i. Thou Shalt Not Question U.S. Membership in NATO
ii. Thou Shalt Oppose the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
iii. Thou Shalt Not Question the Need for a Nuclear Deterrent
iv. Thou Shalt Not Question the Desirability of American Primacy
v. Thou Shalt Not Call For an Accommodation with Cuba (or North Korea, or Iran, or….)
vi. Thou Shalt Not Criticize the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, IISS, Brookings, or other major foreign policy institution
vii. Thou Shalt Not Take the Armed Forces’ Name in Vain
viii. Thou Shalt Acknowledge the Importance of Human Rights, Democracy, and Other American “Values”
ix. Thou Shalt Not Question the Right of the United States to Intervene in Other Countries
x. Thou Shalt Not Favor Negotiating with “Terrorists”

Item 5: "It's All in the Low Enriched Uranium" by Mohamed ElBaradei
- The 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, is in disarray:
i. The five main nuclear-weapon states have not taken seriously their NPT obligation to work for nuclear disarmament
ii. Nothing to stop countries that sign the NPT from simply walking out after declaring that “extraordinary events” have jeopardized their supreme interests
iii. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is supposed to police the non-proliferation system, is shamefully underfunded
iv. Export controls have failed to prevent the spread of sensitive nuclear technology
v. The international community, spearheaded by the United Nations Security Council, has more often than not been paralyzed in the face of challenges to international security
- To end proliferation of nuclear weapons:
i. Bringing into force the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
ii. Negotiating a verifiable treaty to end production of fissile material for use in weapons
iii. Radically improving the physical security of nuclear and radioactive materials (which is vital to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists)
iv. Strengthening the IAEA
v. Establishing an IAEA bank of low-enriched uranium to guarantee supplies to countries that need nuclear fuel for their power reactors

Item 6: "Why the World Needs a United Nations Army" by Gideon Rachman
- Ronald Reagan once asked Mikhail Gorbachev to imagine that there was “suddenly a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet”. The late American president speculated that this would ensure “we would forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries”
- An extraordinary international flotilla is patrolling the waters off Somalia, in an effort to stop attacks on the 30,000 ships that pass through the Gulf of Aden every year - US, China, Iran and Japan are policing this crucial international waterway
- Growing demand for international peacekeeping forces means that it is time finally to bite the bullet and give the UN a permanent, standing military capacity
- Such a force need not be a conventional army, with its own barracks and personnel - It would be better to get countries to give the UN first call on a certain number of their troops, for a specific period of time
- Permanent UN capability would mean that the UN could intervene much more quickly - usually takes between three months and a year to deploy a UN force
- Ronald Reagan once spoke approvingly of the idea of “a standing UN force – an army of conscience – that is fully equipped and prepared to carve out human sanctuaries through force”

Item 7: "Asia's Weakness in the Global Economy" by Andrew Sheng
- Japan export-led manufacturing strategy was successfully imitated throughout East Asia and in the famous flying geese formation, the four Dragon economies (Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore) followed by four Tigers (Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia) rapidly formed the global supply chain
- South Asia went a slightly different path - Heavily influenced by Fabian socialist philosophy, the region adopted a protected import-substitution strategy, so that its manufacturing prowess could not compete with East Asia - But India was able to find a market niche in IT services, exploiting its large human talent in science and mathematics in knowledge-based work
- Asian corporate and economic strategy had a fundamental flaw - financial sectors were not well developed - led to the Asian crisis and also the global imbalance
- Global supply chain is a network and the Asian and current financial crises are in effect network crises
- Metcalfe's Law states that the value of the network is exponentially related to the number of users - in search of scale, Asian firms have expanded at almost any cost, very often through high leverage, incurring huge risks
- Value chains - three key parts — the manufacturing, the distribution and the trading side - as their production become commoditized, the value chain or profit lies more in the trading and distribution side
- Asian companies have not yet established world-class trading companies - reason is that the trading side is the most knowledge intensive and individualistic of business - no Asian houses have successfully established investment banks or made consistently large profits in proprietary trading on a global scale

Item 8: "Asia Keeps the West's Betrayed Faith" by Kishore Mahbubani and William Weld
- Asian economies only began to perform well when they accepted and implemented Adam Smith’s theories of free-market economics
- Asians have retained their faith in western theories on economics, but have progressively lost faith in western practices of economic management
- Amartya Sen - the invisible hand of the marketplace has to be balanced by an emphasis on the visible hand of good governance
- Asia-Pacific region is exploding with new FTAs - largest in the world will be the one between the 1.2bn people of China and the 500m of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - has already been signed and ratified, and comes into force in 2010 - recent study by the Asian Development Bank notes that there are about 20 cross-regional FTAs at different stages of implementation, which have significantly improved economic welfare
- The current phase of globalisation was generated by the west, to be sure, but now we may witness the Asianisation of globalisation