Policymakers in China have paid attention to SO2 emissions reduction since the 1990s, as adverse environmental effects such as acid rain devastated large parts of the country. Shen empirically tests the “political regulation wave” theory based on temporal patterns in SO2 regulation between 2001 and 2010. During this time, reduction targets were nonbinding during 2001-5 but binding during 2006-10. Since SO2 emissions management entails a low level of ambiguity, regulatory efforts translate well into regulatory effectiveness. Results based on official data from statistical yearbooks and on satellite-based statistics concur that top prefectural leaders whose prefectures received high reduction targets were incentivized to produce an incremental yet steady decrease in regulation during 2001-5 to accommodate economic and stability goals, consistent with theoretical predictions. Later, when binding SO2 reduction targets became tied to local leaders’ career prospects, they fostered a more consistent regulatory implementation during their tenures.

From the earliest days of the nuclear age, the issue of verification has plagued efforts to restrain the development, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons and to ensure their destruction. It continues to do so. Especially sensitive are on-site inspections, but they have proved their worth in disarmament treaties since the 1980s and the last years of the Cold War. This chapter looks at verification thematically, by reference to testing, non-proliferation, disarmament, and deployment of nuclear weapons.

This chapter examines containment in crisis during Clinton's second term, in which Iraq repeatedly obstructed UN inspectors, ultimately leading to their permanent exit from Iraq and US retaliatory airstrikes in Operation Desert Fox. The United States in this period became increasingly isolated on Iraq policy as France, Russia, and China refused to support military action and called for the lifting of sanctions. Containment's domestic critics exploited these crisis by building a political coalition to discredit containment and shift US policy toward regime change through the strategy of rollback. This coalition succeeded in passing the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which symbolized the entrenchment of the regime change consensus in US politics, leaving defenders of containment isolated in the political sphere. Clinton, however, made little effort to enforce this law and continued to treat containment as the de facto policy.

This chapter argues that in Bill Clinton's first term containment worked well enough to limit the Iraqi threat, compel more cooperation with inspectors, and generally maintain the international coalition as well as domestic political support. Clinton's main change to containment was stressing compliance with the UN inspections rather than Saddam's removal as the main condition for the lifting of sanctions. His Iraq policy, however, was sandwiched between an international coalition that wanted to move toward normalization with Iraq and a domestic political sphere that wanted to intensify efforts to topple Saddam. Finally, developments in Iraq, especially the extent of Iraqi cheating on disarmament and Saddam's crushing of the internal opposition in 1995–1996, added greater legitimacy to the main ideas of the regime change consensus, especially the beliefs that containment would soon collapse and that Iraq would never comply fully with inspections because of the nature of its regime.

This chapter shows how the Bush administration and other Iraq hawks promulgated a successful case against containment after 9/11 based on the idea that containment and deterrence could not address the “nexus” threat of weapons of mass destruction, terrorist groups, and rogue states. It then examines what I call the “Powell–Blair” approach to Iraq, which defined the political/policy establishment's thinking on Iraq in this period. Tony Blair, Colin Powell, most of the foreign policy elite, and many Democratic politicians criticized how Bush was pursuing regime change but nonetheless endorsed the basic tenets of the regime change consensus. They made a tactical and procedural argument for pursuing regime change “the right way” but did not think that containment was a viable alternative. Thus, after the Bush administration made a cursory effort at supporting inspections in Iraq in the winter of 2002–2003, the majority of this establishment supported the invasion.

This chapter shows how the United States and its allies established a containment regime on Iraq after the Gulf War in the hope of using sanctions to compel Saddam to cooperate with UN weapons inspections. This chapter argues that despite the military victory in the Gulf War, a political narrative emerged in 1991 that Bush had missed several opportunities to overthrow Saddam and abandoned rebels who rose up against the Iraqi government, making the Gulf War a flawed victory. As Saddam obstructed inspections and challenged containment over the next two years, Democrats and neoconservatives developed the argument that containment could not address the Iraqi threat because it did not target the Iraqi regime, the source of its misbehavior, for removal. Containment thus became the US policy toward Iraq in an atmosphere of disappointment and recrimination that created a political bias against restrained approaches to Iraq and in favor of the more immediate pursuit of regime change.

This final chapter presents two case studies, one where the veto was utilized while atrocity crimes were being committed, and one where the veto was threatened (expressly or implicitly) while atrocity crimes were being committed. The first case study traces climbing death tolls and growing recognition that mass atrocity crimes were occurring in Syria, while Russia, sometimes joined by China, invoked the veto on thirteen separate occasions. The vetoes blocked recognition of crimes, investigation of crimes, prosecution of crimes, as well as other measures. That a significant number of resolutions that would have condemned regime and/or opposition crimes failed to pass or were significantly delayed could not have failed to send a metaphorical “green light” to the perpetrators; thus, the vetoes are partly responsible for the still unfolding human tragedy. The second case study traces climbing death tolls in the early 2000s while the Sudanese military and Janjaweed militia committed mass atrocity crimes against the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, and other ethnic groups in the Darfur region of Sudan. These crimes likely constituted genocide, and, at minimum, war crimes and crimes against humanity. During the key years when the crimes were occurring, China blocked by threat of the veto: initially, any imposition of sanctions on the Government of Sudan, and, permanently, any oil embargo, as well as peacekeeping that was not consensually negotiated with the Government of Sudan. Eventually, a hybrid peacekeeping mission was agreed to and deployed, but only after the height of the killing had occurred and with a weakened mandate. The Security Council’s delays and tepid approach to sanctions and peacekeeping, which significantly increased the death toll, are at least partly attributable to Chinese threats (both express and implied) to use the veto.