Editor's Page

...such global dilemmas will come to the fore in our Fall issue, in which we will present a major symposium on American foreign policy...

...Here, of course, is where nervousness sets in...

...The question is appropriate, but also deceptive, because America's integration into the global economy and the country's status as the sole superpower make isolationism a dangerous chimera...

...A weighty point, one that, combined with the long history of Balkan ethnic conflict and an American's memory of Vietnam, ought to temper advocacy of engagement there...

...Still I queried, perhaps displaying military naiveté or a hapless gut sympathy for minorities left to slaughter, how can it be that after billions of dollars and decades of NATO preparations for apocalyptic battle, prowess vanishes entirely when it comes to genocide...

...Surely NATO planned for contingencies— like a Soviet move into Yugoslavia...

...Uneasiness grows as murderous news multiplies—Rwanda, Haiti, elsewhere...

...one million people died of malaria in Africa last year...

...A little over a year ago, at a briefing at NATO headquarters in Brussels, I heard an American colonel, in quick succession, acclaim the organization's new dialogue with ex-Warsaw Pact generals, argue for the continuation of NATO funding despite the end of the cold war, and, finally, explain why the organization should not intervene in Bosnia...

...M.C...

...Americans are torn between dreadful images from abroad on the evening news and the knowledge that deep problems afflict us at home...

...No, I was told, NATO was a defensive alliance...

...This issue of Dissent devotes particular attention to thorny questions of social policy...

...Linda Gordon examines the long-term consequences of how welfare has been conceived, emphasizing the deleterious repercussions of allowing for two classes of social citizenship...

...SUMMER • 1994 • 307...

...Those, like Robert Dole, who shriek demagogically that American troops in multilateral peacekeeping or peacemaking efforts can only be commanded by Americans, had best realize that if the United States does not want to be world cop, an international force must be formed in which we share (but are not always the principal bearer of) burdens...

...It is not just a matter of violence...

...Margaret Weir exposes what happens when attempts to reduce federal domestic spending combine saddling local governments with increasingly difficult social responsibilities, opposing cities to suburbs, and inflaming racial tensions...

...One is tempted to holler: something must be done...

...Tito's defense strategy, he said, rested on expectation of a Soviet invasion...

...Then one surmises that much of the world expects the U.S...

...every nook and cranny of Yugoslavia had been turned into an arms depot so that a guerrilla war could be sustained for some two years without foreign help...

...A year and thousands of corpses later, one looks back with the greatest dismay at the ignoble behavior of the West and the UN in the Bosnian carnage...

...to do it— whatever "it" is...

...How can domestic malaise be confronted seriously if resources are stretched across oceans and Americans are world police...

...This issue of Dissent wrestles especially with domestic concerns...

...Elliott Sclar then dissects the right-wing myth that privatization cures all social ills...

...And there is a moral problem: we cannot simply turn away when ghastly events occur elsewhere—unless our model is Neville Chamberlain discoursing on "faraway countries about which we know nothing...

...If the United States is to address its domestic woes, it will have to reimagine its international role...