Strained `Relations'

REVERSING RELATIONS WITH FORMER ADVERSARIES

Edited by C. Richard Nelson and Kenneth Weisbrode.

University of Florida Press

216 pp., $39.95

Students whose idea of leisure-reading involves snuggling up with the memoirs of former government officials might enjoy Reversing Relations with Former Adversaries: U. S. Foreign Policy after the Cold War. The book might also be useful to government concentrators looking for a way to sidestep heavy reading in an international relations class. Students who do not fit into one of these categories might want to wait for the movie.

The Atlantic Council of the United States, a group that grew out of NATO devoted to studying U.S. foreign policy and world relations, commissioned Reversing Relations with Former Adversaries as a part of their project on U.S. relations with Cuba. This academic association presents case studies of nations that have become friendlier towards the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The council aims to provide information about how the U.S. should approach the much looked-for normalization of diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba.

Improving relations with Cuba, one of the last holdouts of old school Communism, would work towards ending the last major Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere. In fact, picking up the pieces of the Cold War has been an overriding theme in recent U.S. diplomacy. Looking at the stories in Reversing Relations, one can consider all six of the formerly hostile states discussed in the book as either direct or indirect results of the Cold War. Even the U.S.'s troubles with Iraq stem from Iran's Soviet backing during the Iran-Iraq war.

Any work on foreign policy aimed at the general public must strike the difficult balance between academic scholarship and public accessibility. The essays in Reversing Relations may be more interesting than a foreign policy textbook, but can hardly be called riveting. Ironically, those interested in reading Reversing Relations probably already know most of the information the book presents; anyone who has been around since the 1950s and kept up with current events will have seen nearly all the events offered here unfolding as they happened.

In terms of academic scholarship, the book might be viewed as a series of summary articles on U.S. foreign relations. Yet even by this criteria it falls short of expectations. The article on the recent history of the United States' relationship with China, a topic about which countless books and papers have been written, condenses this immense subject into 20 pages. Any one of the other essays--involving the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Iraq, and Cuba--are also much more complex than can be expressed in such a small space.

The book is meant to shed light on the United States' problems with Cuba, and is a foreign policy survey only insofar as its articles contribute meaningfully to understanding this particular relationship. The summaries in Reversing Relations would be justified if they led to concrete conclusions about how the U.S. should proceed in its dealings with Cuba. Failure to integrate the separate articles and produce these conclusions is this book's biggest failing. How can problems with the former Soviet Union and China, two major world powers and UN Security Council permanent members, compare to diplomatic relations with Nicaragua and Cuba, in which the U.S. is so much more powerful than either of these states?

In both of these cases, the U.S. let itself be taken advantage of, via either Vietnam's careful exploitation of the sensitive POW-MIA issue and domestic pressure Iraqi trade created in America before the Gulf War. In short, Reversing Relations suggests that normalizing relations requires as many different approaches as there are nations, and that the lessons learned from one situation should only be applied to others in the broadest, most cautious sense.