Editors' Note

Does the increase in the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as international relief groups indicate the presence of a robust global civil society? Few would dispute the contribution of these NGOs to alleviating world suffering. But according to Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and James Ron of McGill University, the growing number and involvement of NGOs in international assistance activities also has a down side. Cooley and Ron suggest that "organizational insecurity, competitive pressures, and fiscal uncertainty" are becoming increasingly common in the transnational sector: In seeking to "reconcile material pressures with normative motivations," NGOs "often produce outcomes dramatically at odds with liberal expectations." Cooley and Ron use three case studies of transnational assistance to show how market pressures can increase the likelihood of dysfunctional and opportunistic behavior by international relief organizations.

Victor Cha of Georgetown University explains why President George W. Bush should continue U.S . engagement with North Korea, contrary to the opinion of hard-liners in his administration who contend that engagement is a failed—and potentially dangerous—policy. Cha agrees with skeptics in the Bush administration who argue that the Clinton administration's engagement of North Korea did not fundamentally alter the regime's malevolent intentions. Indeed, despite a variety of economic and political incentives from Washington, Seoul , and Tokyo , Pyongyang has neithe r dismantled its weapons of mass destruction program nor discontinued work on developing ballistic missiles. He disagrees with the skeptics, however, that North Korea sees engagement as a sign of U.S. weakness. Cha proposes a policy of "containment-plus-engagement" that would use a combination of carrots and sticks to "prevent the crystallization of conditions under which the North Korean regime could calculate aggression as a 'rational' course of action even if a [North Korean] victory was impossible."

In a challenge to much of the conventional wisdom, Jerome Slater of the State University of New York writes that observers in the United States and Israel have unduly laid blame for the decades-old Israeli-Syrian conflict on the leadership in Damascus. Although both Israel and Syria have been "inflexible, ideological, and prone to maximal demands," Slater says, Israel bears greater responsibility for the lack of a comprehensive Israeli-Syrian settlement. Slater begins with an overview of the conventional wisdom and then assesses challenges to it by Israel's "new history movement." He then traces the "lost opportunities for peace" between the Israelis and the Syrians since 1948. Slater concludes that the key stumbling block remains Israel's unwillingness to withdraw to its pre-June 1967 borders.

The discovery of mailed anthrax spores shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, rattled an already-shaken nation. Since then, public awareness of the dangers of biological weapons has increased tremendously. Jonathan Tucker of the Monterey Institute of International Studies examines the Nixon administration's decisionmaking process that in 1969-70 led to the U.S . declaration to renounce biological and toxin warfare. In addition to examining some of the unintended consequences of this decision, Tucker seeks to show how "understanding the factors that shaped those decisions can illuminate some of the key issues facing the United States as it confronts the growing threats of biological warfare and terrorism."

Glenn Snyder of the University of North Carolina reviews John Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, which lays out Mearsheimer's theory of offensive realism. According to Mearsheimer, states are forever locked in a limitless power struggle within an anarchic international system. To enhance their security, they constantly seek to accumulate more power. Snyder praises the work as a "a major theoretical advance," but argues that Mearsheimer's pessimistic assessment of state behavior and the international system is not fully justified. In his "unremitting focus on power-security competition among great powers," argues Snyder, Mearsheimer gives "short shrift" or omits entirely many other important aspects of international politics.

Robert Jervis and Henry Nau take issue with several points made by Randall Schweller in his review of John Ikenberry's After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after...