Managing the International System over the Next Ten Years

The authors of the three individual essays in this book reflect on the challenges, over the next ten years or so, of managing the international system and of democratic industrialized societies in that system. These essays have helped frame a re-examination within the Trilateral Commission of the underlying rationale and needed directions of its work. Bill Emmott argues that "the future is defined more by disorder and obscurity than by order and clarity, and that policies must be shaped accordingly to be agile and to deal with a range of potential dangers.... [The] Trilateral alliance has a role to play that is, if anything, even more crucial in this disordered future." For the reforms needed in Japan, Koji Watanabe contends, "Japan has to be all the more international, all the more engaged and active in the shaping of the international setting within which domestic reform has to take place." Cooperation among advanced industrial democracies will continue to "form an important pillar" for Japan within "multilayer networks of bilateral, regional and functional cooperation." Comparing the current period to the end of the last century, a time of unwarranted complacency about the international order, Paul Wolfowitz argues that the foreign policy stakes for the United States and the other industrialized democracies remain very large: "If we can sustain Trilateral cooperation, we will have a strong base from which to tackle the specific challenges we face."