Honey and Vinegar; Incentives, Sanctions, and Foreign Policy

Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. First Printing [Stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. xii, 211, [1] pages. Index. Richard Nathan Haass (born July 28, 1951) is an American diplomat. He has been president of the Council on Foreign Relations since July 2003, prior to which he was Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State and a close advisor to Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Senate approved Haass as a candidate for the position of ambassador and he has been U.S. Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. He succeeded George J. Mitchell as the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland to help the peace process in Northern Ireland, for which he received the State Department's Distinguished Service Award. In late 2013, Haass returned to Northern Ireland to chair inter-party talks aimed at addressing some of the unresolved issues from the peace process such as parades, flags and "the past". Buttressed by input from scholars, diplomats, and observers with an intimate knowledge of U.S. foreign policy, Honey and Vinegar examines "engagement"-strategies that primarily involve the use of positive incentives. The book contends that although engagement has received little scrutiny relative to other, more punitive foreign policy approaches, it has great potential as a tool for modifying the behavior of regimes with which the United States has significant disagreements. Heightened awareness of the costs associated with the use of sanctions or military force has catalyzed a search for policy alternatives. In this quest to find other appropriate policy options for pursuing foreign policy goals, strategies of engagement warrant serious consideration. As argued in these pages, the use of incentives, rather than penalties, may be particularly well suited to the post-Cold War world, where globalization has made the economic isolation of any country difficult to achieve.