Faculty members expound on current international relations at Reunion event

By Roger Segelken

A packed-to-overflowing seminar room in Uris Hall was the scene Friday afternoon, June 8, for a lively exchange of views as seven of the university's most outspoken faculty members held forth on the topic: "International Relations and the Republican Presidency."

Then alumni responded, telling some of their former professors what the "real issues" were.

Jeremy Rabkin speaks during the June 8 Reunion roundtable in Uris Hall, while Ronald Herring and Elizabeth Sanders look on. Charles Harrington/University Photography

The faculty roundtable was presented by the Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Peace Studies Program and was moderated by Ronald J. Herring, the Knight Professor of International Relations and director of the Einaudi Center.

Trying to explain why President George W. Bush proclaims as "dead" the Kyoto Protocols (to reduce global-warming emissions), Herring said the conventional explanations are not satisfactory. The old Texas aphorism, "You dance with who brung you," meaning political contributors, does not account for different interests of American industries, such as insurance companies that are worried about natural disasters due to climate change, Herring said.

Rather, Herring proposed, the Republican White House's indifference to global warming can be traced to three factors: "Oil patch pessimism" that energy conservation can reduce emissions (although the European experience proves otherwise, Herring said); "kindergarten justice, the attitude that if I can't have my way, I won't play;" and denial that global warming is a human-caused problem, an attitude that Herring said is particularly prevalent in the AFL-CIO labor organization and among Republican members of the U.S. Senate.

Theodore J. Lowi, the J.L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, said he knew he couldn't hold his remarks to the required five minutes so he prepared a hand-out listing "selected consequences" of the current Republican presidency. Lowi predicted a "permanent campaign" for the next three and one-half years and a "general move rightward to mobilize the Republican Party" on the domestic front. Among consequences in international politics, Lowi said he fears a Cold War remobilization, an "Asia-first" policy, with China defined as the key adversary, and a determination to defend Taiwan "at all costs," as well as a "strengthening commitment to unilateral action."

Elizabeth Sanders, professor of government, drew parallels between the current administration and the previous one, noting, "Both Clinton and Bush made their first foreign policy 'statements' by bombing Iraq." She said she looked forward to some positive effects of the Democratic takeover of Senate committees, after the party change by former-Republican James Jeffords. Test-ban treaties should receive better treatment in Congress, she predicted.

Peter Katzenstein, the W.S. Carpenter Jr. Professor of International Studies, also expressed optimism that this president, like previous ones, can cope with a steep learning curve. "What is remarkable is that peanut farmers, second-rate actors and owners of baseball teams can learn very quickly about foreign policy," he said, giving President Bush extra credit for surrounding himself with learned advisers.

"I'm probably the only one here who voted for Bush," Jeremy Rabkin, associate professor of government, began. Continuing, he maintained that "the fact that Kyoto is never going to happen has nothing to do with oil. Every time we reduce emissions, they increase emissions in Third World countries." Rabkin noted a 12 percent increase in emissions every two years in China.

Kurt Gottfried, professor of physics emeritus, said a change in this nation's "nuclear posture" is long overdue and that the nuclear readiness status of both the United States and Russia "is still remarkably close to the Cold War," with missiles from either nation prepared to launch within 15 minutes. Military discipline in Russia is "in real danger of collapse," Gottfried said, and the wrong hands on the controls of Russian missiles "could wipe the U.S. off the map."

There are two "competing tendencies" among Republicans, Milton Esman, professor of government emeritus, said. One tendency is to identify with the ideological right wing, "a very important constituency," Esman said, despite that faction's beliefs in isolationist nationalism and "a fortress America." Right-wingers, particularly those in the Congressional leadership and in the Defense Department, exhibit "nostalgia for the Cold War," he said. But Republicans also are beholden to what Esman called corporate America, which has quite different interests. "Corporations are strong advocates for economic globalism. They look for opportunities to become as competitive as possible." Many corporations favor free-trade agreements, such as NAFTA, Esman observed, while most right-wing politicians do not. "The big question is: Which will prevail in the next few years?"

But those aren't the only big questions, several alumni in the audience maintained, when they got their chance. What about the role of the spreading AIDS epidemic in world affairs? Or what about the Internet?

Not surprisingly, the professors had answers for those questions, too.