This collection of twenty-five essays written over the past five years by international economic policy expert Charles Wolf Jr. covers a range of worldwide economic, political, security, and diplomatic issues.

Wolf looks at the challenges facing the United States at home and around the globe including critical issues regarding China, Japan, Korea, Russia, Iraq, and other key locales.

These essay many of which originally appeared in such renowned publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the International Herald Tribune, among others reflect the pattern of policy issues to expect in the twenty-first century: a variety and complexity of themes that spill over the standard boundaries of political, economic, and military affairs.

Throughout the book, the author offers his often-controversial viewpoints, such as his assertion that unilateralism in U.S. national security policy may sometimes be preferable to multilateralism or that the erroneous expectation that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons does not imply that the intelligence leading to this expectation was flawed.

Wolf reexamines each essay in the light of later developments with a postaudit comment that addresses whether the original argument is still valid and relevant compared with when it was first written.

Visit Looking Backward and Forward: Policy Issues in the Twenty-first Century Download Page

You can download the publication in PDF format. Full-text PDF versions of each chapter can be accessed by clicking on the desired chapter title.

Author: Charles Wolf Jr.
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press (May 21, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0817948716
ISBN-13: 978-0817948719

TABLE OF CONTENTS

    * Foreward by Newton N. Minow
    * Preface

      PART ONE. CHINA
    * Capitalism, Chinese Style
    * Foreign Investment Leverages China's Growth
    * Fault Lines in China's Economic Terrain
    * China's Currency Dilemma and How to Resolve It
    * More about the Chinese Currency
    * Two Major Problems Confronting China: One Hard, the Other Harder
    * U.S.-China Relations: Mostly Partners, Sometimes Rivals

      PART TWO. OTHER ASIA
    * Japan's Comfortable Stagnation
    * Dealing with North Korea: Unilateralism, Bilateralism, or Multilateralism?
    * Kim Jong-Il's Financial Bind

      PART THREE. OTHER REGIONS
    * Europe's Unilateralism May Have a Brighter Side
    * Absent Weapons Don't Imply Faulty Intelligence
    * Resolving the UN Dilemma
    * What if Iraq Had Not Been Invaded
    * How Sunni Capitalism Can Trump Sunni Insurgency
    * Signs of Regress and Progress in Russia's Economy

      PART FOUR. THE GLOBAL VIEW
    * The Case for Selective Unilateralism
    * Whether Multilateralism Is Better or Worse than Unilateralism Is, Well, Situation-Dependent
    * Traditional Allies Are Not Permanent Allies
    * The Principal Global Imbalance Lies Elsewhere

      PART FIVE. THE UNITED STATES
    * Doomsday for the Doomsayers?
    * The Mythology Surrounding Energy Security
    * Efficient Equity Markets Require Smarter Investors
    * Public Diplomacy: How to Think about and Improve It (coauthored with Brian Rosen)
    * Liberals and Conservatives: Who's What and Where?

    * About the Author
    * Index

About the Author

Charles Wolf Jr. is a senior economic adviser and distinguished corporate chair in international economics at RAND, a professor of public policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School, and is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard. From 1967 until June 1981, he was head of RAND’s Economics Department, and thereafter was director of RAND research in international economics. He was the founding dean of the RAND Graduate School, and served in that capacity from 1970 to 1997.

Dr. Wolf is a director of Capital Income Builder Fund, Inc. and Capital World Growth and Income Fund, Inc.

Dr. Wolf has served with the Department of State, and has taught at Cornell, the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, and Nuffield College, Oxford. He is the author of more than 250 journal articles and the author or coauthor of two-dozen books including Markets or Governments: Choosing Between Imperfect Alternatives (1993), The Economic Pivot in a Political Context (1997), Asian Economic Trends and Their Security Implications (2000), Straddling Economics and Politics: Cross-Cutting Issues in Asia, the United States, and the Global Economy (2002), Fault Lines in China’s Economic Terrain (2003), and North Korean Paradoxes: Circumstances, Costs, Consequences of Korean Unification (2005), and Russia’s Economy: Signs of Progress and Retreat on the Transitional Road (2006).

He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times.

Dr. Wolf’s main research and policy interests are the international economy, international security, and the relations between them.

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