Global Rivalry Research Articles

The Superpowers and an Arab-Israeli Political Settlement: The Cold War Years

From about 1950 until the end of the cold war in the late 1980s the Arab-Israeli conflict became entangled in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. The prevalent view in the United States was that the Soviet Union sought to exploit the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to drive the West from the Middle East and secure its own domination over the area. From this perspective, Soviet ambitions were antithetical to the prospects for a settlement of the conflict that would protect the legitimate security interests of Israel, America's principal regional ally. For these reasons the United States ignored various Soviet proposals for mutual superpower disengagement from the Middle East and sought to exclude the Soviet Union from diplomatic efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict. In some ways American policy succeeded: the Soviets became increasingly less influential in the Middle East from the early 1970s onward, and the United States was able to unilaterally mediate partial Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements in the mid-1970s and the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in 1979. However, the price of this success was high. The argument of this article is that American policy was based on misperceptions about Soviet interests, objectives, and behavior in the Arab-Israeli conflict. As a result of these misperceptions the cold war was exacerbated, there were several near-confrontations between the superpowers, and most importantly opportunities to reach a comprehensive settlement of the ArabIsraeli conflict were squandered.

Multinational Structures and Strategies of U.S. Food Firms

The focus of this report should be clear from the title; it is to analyze strategic mechanisms used by U.S. food manufacturers in an evolving world of global rivalry among firms from many nations. Several sources of evidence point to a growing geographic scope of markets, along with growing interdependence in national food industries. First, transportation costs among countries continue to decline because of ongoing productivity growth in air and water transportation and communications (McFarland). Second, many U.S. industries faced dramatic increases in import competition in the last twenty years (Eichengreen), while foreign investment links into and out of the U.S. continue to expand (Lipsey). Finally, trade in processed foods among developed economies continues to expand (OECD). Growing interdependence presents new profit opportunities for food firms, especially those who can effectively transfer existing competitive advantages to new markets. Growing trade and increased investment links may also lead to increased competition in domestic product and capital markets and an erosion of existing competitive advantages held by domestic firms and employees. Because increasing interdependence creates losers as well as winners, and because government policies may affect the size of any net gains as well as the distribution of gains, analysts and policy makers require detailed information about the sources and effects of growing trade and investment links. With increasing interdependence among national food sectors, firms will find themselves competing in many countries. We concentrate on strategies by which firms effect sales in a foreign market: licensing of a foreign manufacturer, exports from the United States, direct investment in the foreign country, or investment in a third country with export sales to the foreign market. In many ways, U.S. food firms have made a distinctive set of choices among modes of foreign entry, especially when compared to other U.S. corporations. A company's choice among modes of foreign entry is not arbitrary; rather, a set of product, market, firm, and government characteristics typically drive those choices. We limit our focus to sales strategies and do not explicitly consider methods of initiating direct investment, such as the choice between acquisition of an existing firm and the construction of new facilities. Acquisitions account for almost all initial direct investment in the U.S. food industry (Pagoulatos), while Connor asserts that acquisitions account for about half of direct investment by U.S. food parents. We highlight the particular structures and strategies of U.S. food manufacturers through the use of secondary sources and two principal databases. One is the Benchmark Survey of U.S. direct investment abroad, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the Department of Commerce for 1966, 1977, and 1982 (1987 is forthcoming). That source provides great detail for comparisons across industries and countries and over the recent past, but provides little disaggregated detail for firms or industries within the food

US-Soviet Global Rivalry: Norms of Competition

This paper examines alternative approaches for developing norms of competition that might help to avoid war-threatening confrontations between the superpowers. Analysis of the abortive Nixon-Brezh nev experiment with 'general principles' and of subsequent efforts to devise general 'codes of conduct' to regulate the US-Soviet global competition suggests that such approaches are not workable. The paper argues that more attention should be given by the superpowers to a 'case-by-case' approach that focuses on the relative interests of the two sides in each specific area. The paper outlines a typology of competi tive 'games' that takes into account differences in the relative balance of interests between the US and the Soviet Union in various parts of the globe and points out the implications of these differences for norms of competition. Norms based upon relative interests, however, cannot be expected to work relia bly in all instances because the superpowers often experience difficulty in determining their interests in a particular area and in communicating their interests to each other in a timely and reliable way. The pa per notes the efforts the superpowers have made in recent years to develop a diplomatic mechanism for frequent discussions of regional problems and suggests how these bilateral discussions could be im proved and made more useful.