Managing The International System
Over The Next Ten Years: Three Essays
Task Force Report #50
The Trilateral Commission (© 1997)
Bill Emmott, Koji Watanabe and Paul Wolfowitz
ISBN: 0-930503-76-7
62 pp./paper/$9.00 plus S&H
To (Brookings)
Table of Contents
Managing the International System Over the Next Ten Years
Bill Emmott
- A New Order for the New World?
- How, Then, Can Today’s World be Described?
- Six Themes in the Natural 1990s
- The Main Tasks for the Next Ten Years
- The Dangerous Weaknesses of the Trilateral Countries
Japan in Need of Reform and Trilateralism
Koji Watanabe
- Japan in Need of Reform
- The Challenge for Trilateralism: A Japanese Perspective
- Epilogue
Managing Our Way to a Peaceful Century
Paul Wolfowitz
- The World Viewed from Home
- The World Heading into the Twenty-first Century
- The Rise of New Powers and the Tragedy of the Twentieth Century
- Some Characteristics of the Emerging System
- Implications for Trilateral Cooperation
- The Challenge of Preserving the Peace
- The Need for Public Support
Summary
T he authors of the three individual essays in this book reflect on the challenges, over the next ten years or so, of managing the international system and of democratic industrialized societies in that system. These essays have helped frame a re-examination within the Trilateral Commission of the underlying rationale and needed directions of its work.
Bill Emmott argues that “the future is defined more by disorder and obscurity than by order and clarity, and that policies must be shaped accordingly to be agile and to deal with a range of potential dangers....[The] Trilateral alliance has a role to play that is, if anything, even more crucial in this disordered future.” For the reforms needed in Japan, Koji Watanabe contends, “Japan has to be all the more international, all the more engaged and active in the shaping of the international setting within which domestic reform has to take place.” Cooperation among advanced industrial democracies will continue to “form an important pillar” for Japan within “multilayer networks of bilateral, regional and functional cooperation.” Comparing the current period to the end of the last century, a time of unwarranted complacency about the international order, Paul Wolfowitz argues that the foreign policy stakes for the United States and the other industrialized democracies remain very large: “If we can sustain Trilateral cooperation, we will have a strong base from which to tackle the specific challenges we face.”
Authors
(titles at time of publication)
Bill Emmott, Editor, The Economist
Koji Watanabe, Senior Fellow, Japan Center for International
Exchange; Executive Advisor, Keidanren; former Japanese Deputy Minister
for Foreign Affairs
Paul Wolfowitz, Dean, Nitze School of Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University; former U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
