Abstract
Recent rhetoric not-withstanding, the dominant trend in world politics today is towards region-alization rather than globalization, towards fragmentation rather than unification. The weakening of the liberal economic order and the apparent emergence of embryonic trading blocs is only one indication of this larger tendency. The acceleration of technological progress and the intensification of international economic competition among the most advanced states are rendering large portions of the less developed “periphery” even more peripheral and isolated than they have been in the past. With the end of the Cold War, conflicts in areas where outside powers might once have felt their vital interests to be engaged are now left to proceed uninterrupted. In strategic terms, bipolarity is giving way, not to unipolarity (with the United States bestriding the world like a colossus) nor yet to simple multipolarity (with a group of roughly equal, globally engaged “great powers”), but to a set of regional subsystems in which clusters of contiguous states interact mainly with each other. This is nothing new. Despite advances in weapons and communications technology, most states have historically been concerned primarily with the capabilities and intentions of their neighbors. Those that could afford to worry about far-flung enemies and to inject themselves into distant conflicts have been the exception rather than the rule. With the end of the superpower rivalry, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and as seems likely, a substantial retraction of American power, those more traditional patterns of strategic interaction (always present, even during the Cold War) will again become dominant.
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