For most of the 1990s, U.S. foreign-policy makers, analysts of Russia in the United States, and leaders of U.S. nongovernmental organizations have pointed to generational change as the beacon of hope for Russia. Because it was believed that the transition from communism to capitalism and democracy would require a "short term" decline in the well-being of Russian society - and that the older generations would suffer the most during the transitional period - all hope was placed on the younger generation. Unlike their grandparents and parents, the young people would enjoy the benefits of reform and therefore embrace the reforms advocated by these U.S. policymakers and analysts.

"Why the major reversal in Bush's thinking on Russia? Most have attributed this amazing transformation to September 11. . . . But September 11 is only part of the story."

To make his case, [Bush] has a powerful historical experience to draw upon: the end of the Cold War. Regime change in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union fundamentally enhanced American national security. If Iraq possessed Russia's nuclear arsenal today, the United States would be in grave danger. Two decades ago we feared this same arsenal in the hands of the Kremlin. Today we do not. The reason we do not is that the regime in Russia has become more democratic and market-oriented and therefore also more Western- oriented.

Second, democratization on the periphery of Europe has stalled. A dictator who praises Stalin and Hitler runs Belarus. President Vladimir Putin has weakened democratic institutions and grossly violated the human rights of his own citizens in Chechnya in his attempt to build "managed democracy" in Russia. In Ukraine, President Leonid Kuchma aspires to create the same level of state control over the democratic process as Putin has achieved in Russia to ensure a smooth -- that is, Kuchma-friendly -- transition of power when his term ends in 2004. In contrast to Russia, Ukraine has a vibrant democratic opposition, whose leader, Viktor Yushchenko, is likely to win a free and fair presidential election. This vote in 2004 will be free and fair, however, only if the West is watching. Only in Moldova has authoritarian creep been avoided, but that's because of the weakness of the state, hardly a condition conducive to long-term democratic consolidation.

PALO ALTO, CALIF.
A year ago, a group of terrorists from Saudi Arabia and Egypt attacked the United States using box cutters as their weapons and citing extremist versions of Islamic fundamentalism as their cause.

Today, the Bush administration and Congress are focused almost solely on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, with almost no reference whatsoever to his ideology.

This narrow focus has only a loose relationship to the grander vision of "securing freedom's triumph" that President Bush has outlined as the mission of American foreign policy in the new millennium.

As currently framed, the debate about Iraq has produced three dangerous distortions. First, the discussion has confused the means-ends relationship between weapons of mass destruction and regime change. Suddenly, both hawkish Republicans and antiwar Democrats now have asserted that the destruction of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is the new paramount objective in the war on terrorism.

For the hawks, regime change is the means to achieving this objective. Those less eager to go to war assert that this same goal can be achieved by other means, such as sending in the weapons inspectors or even by a surgical strike against weapons facilities.

Both sides of this debate are focused on the wrong objective. Regime change – democratic regime change – must be the objective. If over the next years and decades, a democratic regime consolidates in Iraq, then it will not matter to the United States if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.

Does anyone in the United States know how many weapons of mass destruction the British or French have? Does anyone even lose much sleep over the fact that Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons and launch vehicles capable of reaching the US in a matter of minutes?

Specialists are rightly worried about the safety and security of Russian weapons, but most Americans no longer make plans for what to do in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack. It was not a robust nonproliferation regime, coercive weapons inspections, or a preemptive war against the Soviet Union that produced this shift in our attitudes about Russia's weapons of mass destruction. Rather, it was regime change in the Soviet Union and then Russia.

Someday, the same will be true in Iraq. Israel already destroyed Iraq's nuclear weapons program once in 1981, delaying but not eliminating the threat. The real objective of any strategy toward Iraq, therefore, must be the creation of a democratic, market-oriented, pro-Western regime.

The singular focus on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction – not unlike the misplaced focus on arms control during the cold war – prevents the US from pursuing a grander strategy that could secure the more important objective of democratic regime change. Moreover, many of the means for achieving this objective are nonmilitary by nature, an aspect forgotten in the discussion.

A second distorting consequence of the current debate is that we have become obsessed with one leader, one country, and one category of weapons, none of which were involved directly in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Iraqi dictatorship (and not simply President Hussein) is certainly part of the problem, but Iraq cannot be the only front of the war on terrorism. In fact, victories on other fronts could create momentum for the Iraqi regime's demise. Ronald Reagan's strategy for defeating communism did not begin with a military invasion of the Soviet Union, but rather aimed first to roll back communism in peripheral places like Poland, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Imagine how isolated Hussein would be if democratic regimes took hold in Iran, Palestine, and Afghanistan.

A third distortion of the debate is the near silence about the kind of regime the Bush administration plans to help build in Iraq after the war. The Bush administration is busy making the case against Hussein, but has devoted much less attention to outlining the plan for a new regime in Iraq. Will it be one state or three, a federal or unitary state, governed by the US or the United Nations? How many decades will occupation last?

We need to have the same "frenzied" debate about Iraq's reconstruction that is now being devoted to Iraq's deconstruction. A serious discussion of the postwar regime in Iraq will help inspire support in Congress, the international community, and within Iraq. Now is the time to be concrete about future blueprints.

To be credible, the message of change must also be directed at other dictators in the region. The probabilities of fanatics coming to power in Pakistan and using weapons against American allies are greater than the probabilities of Hussein doing the same.

Without reform, revolution in Saudi Arabia is just as likely as an Iranian attack on American allies. Failure to define a grand strategy of transformation in the region will condemn American soldiers to fighting new dictators like Hussein over and over again.

A new narrative about Post-Soviet Russia is taking hold in policy, media, and academic

circles and shows signs of entrenching as a new conventional wisdom. By this reading, Russia's experiment with democracy has flat-out failed. So misconceived and mismanaged were the political and economic reforms of the 1990s that they have fueled mass disenchantment with democratic norms and brought authoritarianism back into repute. Russians, in short, are said to be giving up on democracy.

For those concerned with democratization in the communist world, the final years of the Soviet Union were a truly exhilarating time. At the end of the Gorbachev era, the Soviet Union experienced an explosion of grassroots nongovernmental activity. For the first time in nearly a century, civic groups, trade unions, political parties, and newspapers organized and operated independent of the state. 1 In the final year preceding the collapse of the USSR, these newly formed organizations also cooperated with each other, forming horizontal links in their shared quest to challenge the Soviet system. Most impressive were the miner's strikes in 1989 and again in 1991, as well as the mass demonstrations on Manezh Square in downtown Moscow that occurred repeatedly throughout fall 1990 and spring 1991. At times, hundreds of thousands filled the expansive square. Russian society was politicized, organized, and mobilized. The Soviet state had to respond. Occurring in the shadow of decades of totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, this kind of social activity was remarkable. The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and exponential rise in citizen participation in these groups fueled hope that a proto-civil society was taking root--one capable of strengthening Russia's young and tenuous democracy.

...

Just about a year ago, this newly created Subcommittee opened its formal hearings with a look at the U.S.-European relationship. I said at the time I felt that the transatlantic relationship was the most important relationship this nation had. Today, in the aftermath of 911, I feel this relationship is even more important and in many respects stronger than ever.

It is fitting today that we open our hearings with what I consider the second most important relationship we have, that with Russia. U.S.-Russian relationships have significantly changed since the terrorist attacks on September 11.

Russian President Putin, in what some have defined as a bold defiance of many in his own population, his bureaucracy and his military, has seized upon the tragedies of the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an opportunity to transform relations with the U.S. from distant and sometimes hostile to one of broad cooperation and new opportunities in many fields.

By identifying terrorism as the common enemy and associating Russia with the common cause of the United States and others to deal with global terrorism, President Putin seems to be attempting to forge a new alliance with the West and with the United States.

...

The transition from communism in Europe and the former Soviet Union has only sometimes produced a transition to democracy. Since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most of the twenty-eight new states have abandoned communism, but only nine of these have entered the ranks of liberal democracies. The remaining majority of new postcommunist states are various shades of dictatorships or unconsolidated "transitional regimes." This article seeks to explain why some states abandoned communism for democracy while others turned to authoritarian rule. In endorsing actorcentric approaches that have dominated analyses of the third wave of democratization, this argument nonetheless offers an alternative set of causal paths from ancien régime to new regime that can account for both democracy and dictatorship as outcomes. Situations of unequal distributions of power produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule. In countries with asymmetrical balances of power, the regime to emerge depends almost entirely on the ideological orientation of the most powerful. In countries where democrats enjoyed a decisive power advantage, democracy emerged. Conversely, in countries in which dictators maintained a decisive power advantage, dictatorship emerged. In between these two extremes were countries in which the distribution of power between the old regime and its challengers was relatively equal. Rather than producing stalemate, compromise, and pacted transitions to democracy, however, such situations in the postcommunist world resulted in protracted confrontation between relatively balanced powers. The regimes that emerged from these modes of transitions are not the most successful democracies but rather are unconsolidated, unstable, partial democracies.

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, questions have arisen as to which course the United States should sail in the new international order. In this volume, some of the nation's foremost foreign policy experts present carefully crafted and bold perspectives of what America's global role should be. All contributors, leading authorities in the fields of economics, history, international relations, and political science, offer alternative viewpoints. These sharply drawn approaches permit the general reader and scholar alike to glean an understanding of the main schools of thought about American foreign policy today.

They are written in accessible prose without esoteric language or scholarly jargon. The past decade witnessed a transition from an era of bipolar confrontation with the Soviet Union to a new and still-emerging epoch. Although American economic, military, and diplomatic influence stood unrivaled in the past decade, the future looks much less predictable. The unique insights represented in this volume will help inform the reader about possible courses America can navigate in uncharted seas. Rogue states, humanitarian interventions, terrorism, major and middle powers, international organizations, global trade agreements, and other political and economic developments are analyzed in the context of the policies recommended in this volume. The perspective spans the spectrum from global activism to antiglobalization.