Profile: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes “Changing Our Ways’s Role in the New World.” The book is the final report of a commission that was asked to recommend a new post-Cold War foreign policy framework (see 1991-1997). The report calls for “a new principle of international relations” asserting that “the destruction or displacement of groups of people within states can justify international intervention.” It advises the US to “realign” NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to deal with these new security problems in Europe. [American Spectator, 6/1999]

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publishes “Self-Determination in the New World Order” by Morton H. Halperin (head of State Department policy planning under Madeleine Albright) and David Scheffer (Albright’s special envoy for war crimes issues). The book proposes a set of criteria for the US to use in responding to the independence and separatist movements that have arisen since the break-up of the Soviet Union. The authors argue that in certain circumstances, such as when civil unrest threatens to create a humanitarian crisis, “American interests and ideals” compel the US to assume “a more active role.” Interventions “will become increasingly unavoidable,” the authors write. Foreshadowing the unabashed unilateralist foreign policy adopted by the Bush administration after the September 11 attacks, they write that “the United States should seek to build a consensus within regional and international organizations for its position, but should not sacrifice its own judgment and principles if such a consensus fails to materialize.” [Review of International Affairs, 4/2000]

A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace finds that the positive aspects of NAFTA just barely compensate for its negative effects. Among its findings:
The net jobs gain in Mexico has been surprisingly small. In fact, 30 percent of all jobs that have been created in the maquiladora sector (export assembly plants) have been lost as company operations have since moved to lower wage countries such as China.
Despite growth in productivity, real wages in Mexico are lower than they were when NAFTA first took effect. Although this can partially be attributed to the Peso Crisis of 1994-1995. It is also noted that wages in Mexico are “diverging from, rather than converging with, US wages.”
Income disparity has grown drastically, with the top 10 percent of households having increased its share of the national income while the remaining 90 percent has lost its share or has seen no change at all. [Papademetriou et al., 8/2003]

Joseph Cirincione. [Source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace]The nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) releases a comprehensive study called WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications, written by Joseph Cirincione, the director of CEIP’s Nonproliferation Project; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, president of CEIP; and George Perkovich, vice president for global security and economic development studies at CEIP. The study takes a critical look at the arguments used by the Bush administration to support the claim Iraq had WMDs. Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean writes: “All of their key assertions are examined in detail and found to be wanting. Established evidence is lined up in charts beside the assertions of Bush-Cheney, making the administration’s dishonesty obvious.” The study finds that the administration “systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile program”; conflated bits of evidence of pre-1991 weapons programs into arguments that Iraq had viable and growing WMD programs; distorted intelligence findings by “routinely dropping caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty”; and “misrepresent[ed UN] inspectors’ findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire.” Despite the study’s precision, it is all but ignored by the mainstream media. [Dean, 2004, pp. 139-140; Cirincione et al., 8/2004]

During a dinner with visiting US nuclear experts, Iranian leaders Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Rowhani say that Iran’s nuclear weapons research had been halted in 2003 because Iran felt it did not need the actual bombs, only the ability to show the world it could make them. “Look, as long as we can enrich uranium and master the [nuclear] fuel cycle, we don’t need anything else,” Rafsanjani says, according to George Perkovich of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Our neighbors will be able to draw the proper conclusions.” [Washington Post, 12/8/2007]