In this major new treatise on twenty-first-century global security, Jones, Pascual, and Stedman -- all experienced policy thinkers -- provide a conceptual framework and comprehensive agenda for U.S. foreign policy in a world of security interdependence.
Foreign policy mandarins are touting early intervention, or "preventive diplomacy," in regional crises as a farsighted strategy. But its risks and costs are understated.
A new doctrine for American foreign policy is gradually emerging from the tumult of the first post-Cold War years. Like the doctrine of containment that opened the crusade against communism, the new strategy of interventionism is inchoate in its first expressions, ill thought out in its implications and its chosen instruments. Neither the United Nations nor the United States has the necessary will or resources to bring peace in the dozens of civil wars that now mar the global landscape from Bosnia to Somalia, Liberia to Cambodia. Interventions driven even by moral or humanitarian impulses may actually prolong the civil strife they seek to resolve.
