The national security policy of the United States has begun to show evidence of a transition from the Bush administration to that of the Clinton administration.¹ It is however, a transition with continuing structural features of the Bush administration's instinct for military responses and globalization of issues. The Clinton administration has made the claim that on the big issues of policy such as those of Russia and the North American Free Trade Agreement, it has been successful, while on the smaller issues of Haiti and Somalia it admits problems and failures.2 What is eluding U.S. policy is a post-1989 framework to replace that of the Cold War. Clinton's key adviser began to put it more clearly when he spoke of a need to distinguish the immediate from the important, presumably Somalia from Russia.3 There is a pending Presidential Review Document with the inauspicious number 13 that stipulates crisis levels one, two and three with descending likelihoods of U.S. military intervention. Level one involves an attack on a NATO country or nuclear weapons in an unstable region and calls for an immediate U.S. military response. Level two is a security threat of interest to an ally but of secondary interest to the United States. The response is to build a coalition, apply pressure and send U.N. troops. Level three involves humanitarian efforts; U.S. funds are to be provided but no U.S. troops.4 This plan represents an effort to articulate guidelines to future national security decisions. But a question can be raised as to what extent it answers critical questions of the recent past in terms of automatic costly military responses rather than diplomatic responses and global, even U.N., responses rather than regional-actor ones.

The post-Cold-War world finds the United States the single superpower, the only power with global reach and a global view. But while its vision may still be intact, its global reach is being reduced. The universals of superpower competition are being replaced by the inertia of U.S. structural unipolarity unaccompanied by the universals of Cold War ideology. U.S. national security policy has continued, but even in decline, its remaining "reach" has little in the way of ideological rationale. As this is happening, there is significant agreement that a transition from a loose bipolar world to unipolarity towards multipolarity is already underway.5 Central to this process is the identity of Germany, Japan and ultimately Russia and China as the new additions to the great powers of Britain and France. It is already evident that regions have emerged as more significant international entities, and that in fact these have become areas of both new conflict - Yugoslavia and the new Central Asian republics - and continuing conflicts - the Middle East, India and Pakistan, the two Koreas. But it also appears to be the case that each of the present and likely great powers in the emerging multipolar system are themselves emplaced in regions to which they in fact owe their greatness: the United States (North America), Germany (Europe), Japan (East Asia), Russia (Eurasia).6 The World Bank has made the argument that economically, "Regionalism is back and here to stay."7 Judged in terms of defining both real American national interests and more limited U.S. power capabilities, it is important to understand that each such region is a system of semi-autonomous relations with each possessing its own regional nation-state power hierarchy and indigenous leadership.8 It can be argued that this provides the United States with the diplomatic opportunity to variously collaborate with such leaderships or play them off against one another in order to stabilize the international system and reduce the global American military profile.

While the present focus is on the concept of the region in the post-Cold-War world, certain habits learned from the Cold War have carried over, such as those of thinking globally and defining national security policy in military terms. For example, the old globalism of containment is replaced by the vagaries of a new world order or the only slightly less vague concepts of democratization and "marketization." Military interventionism instead of diplomacy has been beating a tattoo sounding the notes of Lebanon, Libya, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf, Somalia and Haiti. These have been useful exercises in which performance has been tested and which, with one or two exceptions, have justified a certain amount of pride. But have they increased the national security of the United States and have they justified their cost?

Finally, it is assumed in what follows that the world is in transition, neither moving in the optimistic direction of a new world order nor in the pessimistic one of "chaos" and "turbulence," as characterized by another author.9 Instead, it is a transition to a more ideologically and structurally diverse world, or as one realist (pessimist?) has termed it, "disorder restored."10 If it is indeed a future of disorder in contrast to the "order" of the Cold War, it is not anarchy. Instead, it is a dynamic multipolar international system based on regions and regional subordinate systems within which the struggles of nationalist identities and hegemonic regional leadership rivalries continue to occur.

THE GLOBAL SYSTEM IN TRANSITION

The International System

The previously dominant international system of the Cold War has been altered by the fact of U.S. unipolarity, but this status is being changed as the international system makes the transition to great-power multipolarity and as the United States reduces its military capabilities. Some observers have noted that even as this process develops, the previous political dominance of the international system has been replaced in the present era by an international economic system of global dimensions that appears to anticipate a new multipolar system including Germany, Japan, China, the United States and Russia.11

The Regional Subordinate System

Regions as cultural areas have always existed, but they only emerged politically with decolonization after World Wars I and II. During the Cold War, regions had been less salient but often experienced the trauma of superpower ideological rivalries and interventions, e.g., Latin America and Chile, Central America and Cuba or Grenada, South Asia and Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and Vietnam.12 In the present period this intrusion has continued to a degree, with the United States in Panama and the Middle East, and Russia in the Baltic states, Azerbaijan and elsewhere. In the anticipated multipolar future, a pattern is developing where the decline of the Cold War universals of ideology and political reach have in turn lessened the hold that the superpowers have had upon regional client states who were often in turn hegemons in their region. The result is that these regional regimes have come under attack both internally and externally. This has tended to unfreeze regional relationships and has created the opportunity for an emerging multipolar regional system.

This loosening of both international and regional systems does not necessarily result in international anarchy. Each of the present or emerging great powers at the international level is regionally based and therefore simultaneously a regional hegemon and an actor in the international system. Conflict in the global system might eventually develop among the multipolar states, but it is more likely to be located in a region where two great powers reside, for example, China versus Japan in East Asia or, more commonly, in adjoining regions: China versus Japan in Southeast Asia13 or Germany versus Russia in Central Europe. The region as locus of conflict might also occur as a great power challenges an extra regional great power which has commercially or politically entered the former's region. This pattern of regionally-based great-power rivalry could begin with competing for commodities or markets and extend to currying the favor of regional hegemons or middle powers by economic means or by the transfer of arms or weapons technology.

Thus regional conflicts are not likely to diminish in the post-Cold-War world. Older regional conflicts and the struggle for hegemony by middle powers are likely to continue with the support of present great power clients, e.g., the Arab-Israeli conflict with the United States supporting Israel and Egypt and Russia supporting Syria and occasionally Iraq, or the Pakistani-Indian conflict with China supporting the former and Russia the latter.14

The Domestic Political System

In much of the Third World, regime insecurity is continuing to motivate foreign policy behavior, for example, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, Pakistan in South Asia and Taiwan in East Asia. In addition, much of what is referred to currently as ethnic conflict is in reality the contestation of nationalisms that are challenging the legitimacy of established states, e.g., Yugoslavia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the former USSR in general. This ethnic civil war represents the continued power of the appeal of nationalism, e.g., the Czech and Slovak Republics in Central Europe. It feeds into the international conflict occurring in regions, e.g., the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. As long as ethno-nationalist conflict remains within historical boundaries with no outside-power involvement, there tends to be apathy on the part of regional powers, e.g., the Czech and the Slovak Republics and even the conflict in Bosnia. On the other hand, when outside powers are involved, e.g., Vietnam and China in Cambodia, then the issue attracts regional and even international attention. Internal turmoil in states with weak governmental structures often leads to international intervention, e.g., Somalia.

U.S. FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY

The Cold War: National Security Policy or Foreign Policy?

From the establishment of the National Security Council in 1947, through the Cold War and afterwards, military means and ends have dominated U.S. security policy to the detriment of diplomacy. The expression "Cold War" reflects this mentality, as illustrated in the cases of Vietnam and epitomized by Irangate, where a military solution in Nicaragua became a conspiracy carried out by American military personalities. This issue of the Cold War and conditioned military responses is clarified by Clausewitz: "War is diplomacy carried out by other means." In instance after instance in the 1980s and 1990s, the Cold War habit of automatic military interventionism was resorted to without adequate or serious efforts to attempt either a directly negotiated solution or one conducted via regional intermediaries. The result has been costly in terms of lives, property destruction and U.S. tax dollars.

Ignoring Regional lnternational Relations

The bipolar nature of the Cold War led to policies that by and large tended to see Soviet designs and ambitions in every corner of the globe. Thus in Chile, the Allende regime was viewed as a communist one rather than a movement seeking indigenous social and economic justice; in Vietnam, a civil war of conflicting nationalist futures for the country was interpreted instead as a Cold War struggle. During this period, little consideration was given to the regional origins of conflicts unrelated to the Cold War. In 1958 the United States sent troops to Lebanon against "communist insurgents," who were in fact pan-Arab Lebanese-Nasserist progressives challenging the authority of Lebanese Christian leadership.

This intervention, along with American intelligence interventions in the Congo with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and elsewhere in Africa, illustrates a global pattern of U.S. military rather than diplomatic actions.

American Security Policy in the 1980s and 1990s

Even with the end of the Cold War, inertia has continued the militarization of national security policy in the cases of Panama, Grenada, Libya, Lebanon (1983) and (through surrogates) Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The more recent cases of the Gulf War and even Somalia illustrate military rather than diplomatic preferences.

Arguably even the Cold War universalization of issues continues, but now without the guidance of a concept such as containment. The American global eye seizes upon a concept such as terrorism or alleged religious fanaticism in order to define a new international threat. In the process, the issue becomes distorted beyond any correspondence with reality.

The Region In U.S. National Security Policy

Ironically, it was President Bush in a speech on the day of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (August 2, 1990) who introduced the concept of region into security-policy thinking. This was developed further by Paul Wolfowitz, former undersecretary of defense for policy under Bush.15 In general, he recognized that regions are places in the post-Cold-War world where violence can occur and therefore dangerous. He estimated that by the year 2000, fifteen developing states will be able to manufacture ballistic missiles and eight may have nuclear capabilities. Having defined regions as trouble spots, he noted that by and large, with the exception of NATO and Europe, they will be dealt with by means of bilateral treaties and alliances with particular countries. In short, the U.S. response was to be both military and unilateral. Clinton administration thinking on regions has continued in much the same line.

Illustrative of this continuity in security policy thinking from one administration to the next are references to regions in the National Military Strategy (NMS) report for 1992 by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.16 Regions are recognized as vital, but then are in effect defined as equivalent to established U.S. military theaters and commands, e.g., Pacific, Europe, Central Command (East Africa and Southwest Asia) and Atlantic. While these theaters may be useful in terms of demarcating military command responsibility, they are insensitive to the complexity of the actual regions contained within them: for example, Europe includes Central Europe, Russia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Furthermore, the actual adaptation of U.S. national security policy to regional circumstances is delegated by NMS to the commanders in chief (CINC) of each theater command. In other words, the complexities of understanding the politics, culture, social organization and economics of a large number of states are left to the authority of a single military commander.

This seems to be once again defining a priori a potential regional crisis as a military matter subject to military and not diplomatic solutions. The success of forming an allied coalition during the Gulf War was, after all, a tactical military alliance. The absence in the post-war Gulf of a collective security based on important Arab force commitments is striking by contrast.

What might be political issues are responded to by relying upon bilateral treaties of mutual security with particular states in regions of priority to U.S. interests such as Asia and the Persian Gulf. Lip service is thus paid to collective-security and alliance approaches to regional conflict because it is clear that the theater/regional CINCs will define and orchestrate U.S. commitments in their areas of operations. Thus, from the perspective of NMS, regional tensions and conflicts will have military solutions and a great deal of attention will be spent on defining U.S. force-forward presence and stationing. The most recent authoritative document on national security policy is by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Report on the Roles, Missions, and Functions of the Armed Forces of the United States (February 1993),17 which explicitly states that the guiding principles of U.S. national security policy remain contained in NMS, while the report itself addresses issues of the organization of the force.

There have been an additional number of efforts to think speculatively about the national security future. One of the more suggestive of these is Project 2025 of the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University (May 6, 1992).18 This working paper also identifies regions as the location of future conflicts but then goes on to describe them as politically chaotic rather than approaching them as complex but ordered subsystems. This chaos is said to result from the internal collapse of regimes. At the same time, it recognizes that some Third World states will become major military powers, hegemonic regional states possessing ballistic missiles and nuclear capabilities, such as Pakistan and India. In general, however, Third World states are said to possess artificial boundaries, have weakly legitimate rulers, and leaders who monopolize wealth and practice authoritarian politics. In fact, however, only a few states outside of Africa possess these attributes. The report overlooks both the relative stability of politics in the Third World and the importance of understanding regional dynamics and organizations.

THE GULF WAR AND SOMALIA

The Middle Eastern Regional System

The Camp David accords of 1979, which brought about a bilateral peace between Egypt and Israel, ended the Egyptian hegemonic leadership of the Arab state system. In 1987, Egypt was invited back into the Arab League, but by that time the power relationships had altered. Syria and Iraq were now equal to Egypt in military terms, even though Iraq had suffered heavy losses in its 1980-88 war with Iran. It was Iraq's effort at recovery after 1988 and its reemergence as a military power that moved Egypt into its leadership role in forging the Arab alliance against Iraq in 1990-91.¹⁹ Likewise, Syria had its own longstanding animosity towards Iraq. Saudi Arabia was, of course, directly militarily threatened. Thus, in 1990, the Middle East was a regional international system with Egypt, Syria, Iraq and to a degree Saudi Arabia as the major players. The Gulf crisis caused most of these states to align themselves with U.S. policy as a matter of their own self-interest.

Not only did the regional balance of power work to support U.S. national security policy; in this instance the coincidence of interests was even cost-effective. Arab Gulf money and other allied contributions more than paid the economic costs of the war. This balance of power is of course dynamic, and three years after the war, the power relations have altered somewhat.20

Prelude to the Gulf War

In 1988, Iraq had won its war with Iran. The regional historical dynamic of hegemonical rivalry for the domination of the Gulf would seem to have called for U.S. diplomacy to either benignly neglect both parties or tactically tilt toward Iran. But U.S. policy favored Iraq, the victor. This resulted in millions of dollars of U.S. government-authorized loans to Iraq, which chose to purchase American agricultural goods, and advanced weapons and dual-use technology from American and European firms. U.S. policy was building up Iraq in its regional rivalry with Egypt. The agricultural loans alone permitted Iraq to reallocate its own resources towards specific items such as the "Super Gun" and nuclear-weapons components.21

Further illustrating this failure to comprehend regional dynamics was the message (redolent of Dean Acheson and Korea) President Bush sent via his ambassador in Baghdad (April Glaspie) to Saddam Hussein. Its essence was that the United States looked with concern at the emergence of tension between Iraq and Kuwait, but that the United States had no position on border disputes between Arab states.22 At best, this was interpreted by President Hussein as a blinking yellow if not green light in the punishing of Kuwait. Iraq's position was that Kuwait had stolen Iraqi oil from its Rumaila oil field during the 1980-88 war and then used the proceeds to make loans to Iraq to help support its war effort. Iraq also felt it was protecting Kuwait from Iran. As soon as the war was over, Kuwait demanded repayment for what was regarded as Iraq's money in the first place. Again, from the Iraqi point of view, this only encouraged its historical claim that Kuwait had been under the administrative control of Baghdad from the time of the Ottoman Empire and thus was territory that belonged to Iraq. The aggravation was increased when Kuwait refused to discuss leasing to Iraq two uninhabited islands located off the port facility Iraq was constructing at Umm Kasr to lessen its vulnerability to Iran in their shared access rights in the Shatt al-Arab waterway. In short, Iraq had in fact a serious diplomatic case to make, but Washington did not seriously pursue a diplomatic response either at this time or later.23

The Gulf War

The U.S. goals in reaction to the invasion of Kuwait began with a determination to reverse it. By December 1990, however, Washington had personalized the conflict by seeking the elimination of Saddam Hussein. For example, the possibility of a unilateral withdrawal by Iraq from Kuwait and thus the achievement of the U.S. objective of reversing the invasion was termed in that month a "nightmare scenario."24

There followed, however, a masterful U.S. diplomacy of military-alliance formation and the gaining of international legitimacy via U.N. approval and even, by a narrow vote, regional legitimacy by virtue of an Arab League vote for the American led military effort. This was a rare instance of both diplomacy and an informed use of regional actors to achieve U.S. policy goals.25 It should be noted, however, that this was diplomacy being utilized in order to pursue military ends. In the period leading up to the initiation of war on January 17, 1991, there was a largely U.S., but also allied, military buildup. This buildup, after November 1990, had reached such proportions as to exceed the security requirements of militarily protecting Saudi Arabia. Instead, it constituted such a huge force commitment as to make a diplomatic solution unlikely or even impossible, if in fact one was seriously intended.

The U.S. objectives of the war then succumbed to the contradiction of two policy objectives. On the one hand, it sought the reversal of the invasion of Kuwait and the reduction, but not destruction, of Iraq in order to preserve it as a counterfoil to Iran, and, on the other hand, it sought to destabilize Iraq politically in order to be rid of Saddam Hussein. The first objective was achieved through precision bombing and the decisiveness of the land war. The fighting ended abruptly on February 26, 1991. The secondary objective of eliminating Saddam Hussein floundered on ambivalence and the failure to militarily support the U.S.-encouraged uprising of the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south.

The Gulf Now

The policy of diverting attention away from the hegemonic rivalry in the Gulf to the personality of Saddam Hussein has been accompanied by attention to military overflights and clandestine plots to achieve this end. The effort to have an opposition to Saddam organize from abroad has not been well conceived and appears to have failed because the opposition itself is internally divided. Instead, military measures continue as the United States and its allies fly missions over no-fly zones that were unilaterally declared by the United States, Britain and France but do not have explicit U.N. Security Council approval.

The United States now has incurred a responsibility for the security of the Kurds in the north, while in the south the no-fly zone has not prevented the Iraqi army from freely punishing the Shia population.26

Further illustrative of the inertial preference of military over diplomatic solutions in the post-Gulf-War period, the United States has entered into a series of bilateral security treaties with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and instituted a U.S. forward-troop presence and the pre-positioning of military equipment. This means that CENTCOM has become the active security regime in the Gulf. Once again, U.S. diplomacy has failed in not seizing the diplomatic potential for an Egyptian and Syrian security regime as called for in the March 1991 Damascus Declaration with Saudi Arabia. As a result, U.S. national security is being defined in costly military terms and not in cost-effective diplomatic terms.

The "dual containment" policy regarding the Gulf enunciated by Clinton's Middle East specialist on the National Security Council provides a label for a Gulf policy dominated by a military formula. "Dual containment" as a political policy of playing Iran off against Iraq would be shrewd and subtle. Instead, "containment" is given a military definition meaning a policy in defense of a status quo that cannot be maintained. U.S. policy has resurrected the intractability of the Kurdish problem of the post-World-War-I peace settlement. Accompanying this resurrection are the fishing expeditions of Tehran, Ankara, Damascus and Baghdad in Northern Iraq while the Kurdish leadership there is hopelessly divided. In the Middle East, Mustapha's law (the local version of Murphy's law) operates, as for example, in the U.S. downing of its own helicopters.27

Meanwhile, Iran is steadily rearming conventionally with improved SCUD-C missiles and submarines plus chemical and biological weapons. It is also acquiring a nuclear capability, and some estimate that it will produce a nuclear device in the same ten-year period once estimated for Iraq. In addition, Iran has moved from its previous status in the periphery of the Middle Eastern subordinate system to active participation in its core. Iranians and Iranian-supported Lebanese (Hezbollah) periodically engage Israeli soldiers in South Lebanon, and Iran supports Hamas in the occupied territories. While U.S. policy remains militarily fixated on Iraq, the U.S. Gulf Arab allies are busily making accommodations toward normalizing relations with Iran. In other words, the regional international dynamic moves ahead while U.S. policy remains flawed and frozen in place.28

Somalia: Aid and U.S. Military Action

Somalia fell victim to the Cold War as a result of first being courted by the Soviets and later by the Americans, both of whom supported the leader of the country, Siad Barre. The overthrow of Barre plunged the country into two years of political anarchy and famine. While the American intervention came about on the basis of humanitarian appeals and with U.N. approval, it is noteworthy that it was an American force that landed to instill order in a country belonging to the Arab League. The general argument presented here is illustrated by what occurred subsequently. The American military delivery of humanitarian aid degenerated into a military solution: "get Aideed." A cold shower of reality shocked the United States when 18 Americans were killed on October 3, 1993. The question of internal leadership in Somalia was and remains to be politically negotiated.

Somalia is a less controversial instance where diplomatic activity might have been directed toward the Arab League via the agency of Egypt to seek an Arab military force to intervene in a member country for humanitarian reasons. It should be remembered that the unanimity principle of decision-making in the Arab League was replaced by that of majority vote during the Gulf War. An Arab League decision might have been facilitated in this instance by the Egyptian secretary general of the United Nations requesting Arab League action. The American military involvement would then have become one of lift and logistical support and not high-profile intervention. The irony is that as the American troops were departing in early 1994, Egyptian troops were only then arriving, and Egyptian diplomacy was seeking a political solution.

CONCLUSION

It is important to stress that in spite of the argument about regions in these remarks, the business of a great power is to interact with other great powers. The emerging multipolar world at the level of the international system is also potentially one of conflict. As Kissinger has argued once again recently, the United States should be the balancer of the new balance-of-power configuration and work to obviate great power conflicts.29

To paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, however, the United States should ''think globally and act regionally." There is a need to locate American security concerns worldwide, whether in Central Europe, Korea, Cambodia or South Asia, within the context of a regional balance-of-power subordinate system. The Gulf War illustrates how an awareness of this can work to U.S. advantage. Paradoxically, in the postwar Gulf, U.S. policy consists of bilateralism rather than alliances or collective security. The Middle East is such a regional subordinate system, possessing its own emerging poles. The states are interdependent to varying degrees and oscillate between cooperation and conflict.

It is apparent that the long-term stability and security of the Gulf and its oil are linked to the other two conflicts of the region-the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon and the Palestinian problem. Iran, for example, both engages the Israelis militarily in Lebanon and supports the Hamas faction of the Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories. The support of the Palestinians continues to legitimize Arab regimes in spite of these regimes' condemnation of the PLO for supporting Iraq in the Gulf War. The emergent Islamic political opposition in Saudi Arabia, for example, insists that the regime support the Palestinians and the liberation of the holy city of Jerusalem.

Thus a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian issue is important to the stability of U.S. policy in the Gulf and elsewhere in the region. The realization of this fact explains the extraordinary continuity of U.S. attention to the peace process on the part of the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. The American security regime for the Gulf with its bilateral security agreements and U.S. forward positioning and presence is continued evidence of the militarization of U.S. national security policy. In the spring and summer of 1991, the United States either insisted upon, or acquiesced with Saudi Arabia in, repudiating an agreement the latter had made in March for the Egyptian and Syrian assumption of security responsibilities for the Gulf (the Damascus Declaration). If an Arab security regime had been agreed to, the American component could have slipped back "over the horizon" perhaps leaving behind dual Arab and American forward positioning. This force would have been supplemented by U.S. lift and logical support. This policy has had a destabilizing effect on Saudi Arabia. Its close ties with the Americans have created a religious opposition where previously the religionists had not only supported the government but were its mainstay.

The continued militarization of U.S. policy towards Iraq has replaced the goal of having Iraq and Iran check one another in their drive for Gulf hegemony. Diplomacy coupled with the effort to instill an Arab security regime, would be both cost-effective and stabilizing.

For the region as a whole, U.S. security policy needs to continue to seek solutions to the political problems of Lebanon and the Palestinians in order to facilitate a possible working relationship with an Arab alliance (e.g. Egypt and Syria) or even with the Arab League. As demonstrated in the latter's support for U.S.-sponsored U.N. policy in the Gulf War, the new majority-vote mechanism within that body suggests the possibility of the emergence of some kind of regional collective security mechanism.

Finally, the advent of increasingly effective delivery and guidance of chemical, biological, conventional and nuclear warhead systems has alarmingly transformed military calculations regarding first-strike capabilities and deterrence in the military dynamic of the region. The technology of Jericho Us, SCUD-Cs, SS21s, M9s, etc. has created ballistic missiles with ranges of 150-600 miles which are perfectly suited to limited regional targets. The volatility of this technology precludes the idea that time is on anyone's side in the conflicts of the region. The political problems must be addressed before much thought can be directed to a regional arms-control regime that might stabilize both advanced technology and the conventional arms race that continues at a furious pace.

 

1 This is a revised version of what was first presented as the Olin lecture on February 4, 1993, at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where I was the distinguished visiting Olin professor, spring semester 1993. The views presented here are my own and not those of the U.S. Air Force Academy or the U.S. Air Force. I would like to thank Colonel Douglas Murray, chair, Department of Political Science, U.S. Air Force Academy, and my other colleagues in the department for stimulating discussion regarding the issues raised here. They were not in agreement with everything said here, but I learned from them. I would also like to thank Martha Chamberlin, the Olin Foundation administrative assistant, for her assistance in facilitating the preparation of the lecture.

2 President Clinton, interview, The Washington Post, October 17, 1993, p. A28.

3 Anthony Lake, interview, The New York Times, October 31, 1993, p. 8.

4 Newsweek (International), February 28, 1994, p. 3.

5 Even an analyst wanting to see the continuation of U.S. unipolarity concedes by the title of his article that it is in fact transitory and suggests multipolarity is the international future. Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment'' in Graham Allison and Gregory F. Treverton, eds. Rethinking America's Security (New York: Norton and the Council on Foreign Relations, 1992), pp. 295-306.

6 Paul Kennedy, in his economic analysis of the world future, proceeds by regional analysis and comparisons and by noting the likely regional winners. These are not unexpectedly present or future regional hegemons. Paul Kennedy, "Preparing for the 21st Century: Winners and Losers," New York Review of Books, XL, No.4 (February 11, 1993), pp. 32-44 and Preparing for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Random House, 1993).

7 Jaime de Melo and Arvind Panagariya, The New Regionalism in Trade Policy (Washington, DC: World Bank Center for Economic Policy Research, 1992), p. 1. This is a preliminary report of a conference whose papers are to be edited by the authors as New Dimensions in Regional Integration and published by Cambridge University Press.

8 This analytic approach to regions was first developed by the present writer and his co-author, who argued that regions should be approached in terms of systems of cooperation and conflict. Louis J. Cantori and Steven Spiegel, The International Politics of Regions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970) and the "Analysis of Regional International Politics: The Integration versus the Empirical Systems Approach," International Organization (Autumn 1973), pp. 65-94.

9 James N. Roseneau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Chance and Continuity. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

10 John Mearsheimer, "Disorder Restored" in Allison and Treverton, pp. 213-37.

11 For example, Kennedy cited above. What is not clear, however, is what the free-trade assumptions of a global economy portend as the world breaks up into regional trading blocs, e.g., EU, NAFTA, several such organizations in Latin America, etc. See Melo and Panagariya, above, f. 7.

12 Termed by Cantori and Spiegel the "intrusive" system, i.e., regional international political dynamics plus great-power intervention.

13 The role of Japanese policemen and self-defense forces under U.N. authority in Cambodia is interpreted as exactly anticipating a Japanese regional activist role. David Sanger, "Japan Asks: Who Dispatched Us to This Hell Anyway?" The New York Times, May 14, 1993.

14 This is the argument of Barry Buzan, "Third World Regional Security in Structural and Historical Perspective" in Brian L. Job, ed. The Insecurity Dilemma: National Security of Third World States. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), pp. 176-90. Regions, in fact, figure importantly throughout this volume.

15 Paul D. Wolfowitz, "The New Defense Strategy" in Allison and Treverton, pp. 176-95.

16 Colin L. Powell, The National Military Strategy 1992 (Washington, DC: The Pentagon, 1992). This is a planning document which is important because it remains in force beyond its year of publication. It still guides U.S. military strategy.

17 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Report on the Roles, Missions, and Functions of the Armed Forces of the United States, February 10, 1993.

18 Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, Project 2025 (May 6, 1992).

19 Egypt's policy is discussed in Cantori, "Foreign Policy Success, Economic Benefits and Political Impasse: The Egyptian Corporatist State at the Crossroads," Rand Corporation Conference, September 1993. Being prepared for publication in an edited book.

20 For an elaboration of the preceding, see Cantori, "Political Trends in the Middle Eastern New Order" in Tareq and Jacqueline Ismael, eds. The Gulf War and the New World Order. (Florida: University of Florida Press, 1994), pp. 451-72.

21 For an excellent summary, see Martin Staniland, Getting to No: The Diplomacy of the Gulf Conflict, August 2, 1990-January 15, 1991. Part I: Background to the Conflict. Pew Case Studies. Case 449, Part 1. (Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, 1992).

22 For details, see Jillian Dickert, Twisting in the Wind? Ambassador Glaspie and the Persian Gulf Crisis, Parts A and B (Cambridge, MA: Kennedy School of Government, 1991). Ambassador Glaspie said much the same thing to the present author and a group of visiting American scholars in Baghdad the evening before her meeting with President Hussein. She has been unfairly criticized for being the White House's messenger. In fact, Glaspie's message was identical to that of Margaret Tutwiler, the State Department spokesperson, on July 25. Zachary Karabell, et al. Prelude to War: U.S. Policy to Iraq. Per Case Studies, Harvard University, 1994, p. 29. (This study was funded by the CIA.)

23 Staniland, Part 1.

24 I took part in a game-playing scenario at the U.S. State Department on exactly this eventuality in December 1990, where the leader of the American team committed the allied forces to an attack on the withdrawing Iraqi forces. The withdrawal was termed "a nightmare scenario." This was a term heard elsewhere in Washington in December 1990.

25 Staniland, Part 3, "The Making of Resolution 678."

26 Michael Hudson, "Middle East Challenges for President Clinton." In this revised version of an address at Swarthmore College, February 20, 1993, Hudson estimated the cost of American policy in southern and northern Iraq to be in effect several hundreds of million dollars, p. 12. In the current U.S. budget, the operating costs are said to be $450 million.

27 For a complete statement on "dual containment" by its author, see Martin Indyk's contribution in "U.S. Policy toward Iran and Iraq: Symposium on Dual Containment," Middle East Policy, vol. III, no. 1 (1994), pp. 1-7. More specifically, military measures and economic sanctions will continue vis-ii-vis Iraq and no normal U.S. relations with Iran. Ibid., pp. 4 and 6.

28 See James A. Bill, "The United States and Iran: Mutual Mythologies," Middle East Policy, vol. II, no. 3 (1993), pp. 98-106.

29 Henry A. Kissinger, "Balance of Power Sustained" in Allison and Treverton, pp. 238-48.