Foreword

FOREWORD he passage of time will continually expose the inherent contradiction between the "old" — also known as the powerful, the establishment, the conservatives, the "haves," the privileged—and the "new"—the masses, the barbars, the plebians, the "have nots," the underclass. Whether Romans and Carthaginians or Jews and Palestinians, this conflict shall always exist in an imperfect world inhabited by imperfect individuals. The contradiction between the old and new is a timeless concept that covers every aspect of individual and state decisionmaking. The old and new essentially battle over the pace of change. The old, seeking to hold onto the status quo from which they have benefitted, fear those entities that expose and represent the inequities brought to fold in societies where privilege and access bring about security and prosperity. The new, although often from a privileged level of their own, seek to gain access to institutions and positions of power to which they were previously denied. The environment surrounding the contradiction and conflict between the old and new has reached a turning point. In what may be an unprecedented move in history, the superpowers have put a check on their own global power. Whether it is called strategic retrenchment or superpower decline, international relations is undergoing changes unlike any before. No longer do global powers have to possess both military and economic power. Unlike Spain in the seventeenth century and the United States since World War II, a disjunction exists between the military and economic powers of the world. Japan and the Pacific Rim nations possess extensive wealth, yet rely on the United States to guarantee their boundaries . The Soviet Union, under a reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev, has vi SAIS REVIEW also sought to bring its economic power up to par with its military capabilities. As the superpowers continually reshape their foreign and domestic policies, the growing influence ofJapan looms on the horizon. Harold Brown's "The United States and Japan: High Tech is Foreign Policy" approaches the issue of future Japanese foreign policy as a question of control over the development and movement of high technology. Brown looks into the issues of technology transfer, control of defense-related technologies , Japanese defense spending and foreign aid, and what the potential sale ofJapanese high-tech equipment to the Soviet Union and its allies could mean to the increasingly strained relationship between Washington and Tokyo. As would be expected, the notion of a world moving from bipolarity to multipolarity is prominent among the "informed sources" appearing on the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and The New York Times. Articles by Christopher Layne and Alan Tonelson debate the coming of a multipolar age. In "Realism Redux: Strategic Independence in a Multipolar World," Layne discusses the strategic significance of multipolarity , comparing and contrasting the judgments of realist and cold war internationalist theory as it applies to today's political jungle. Tonelson 's article, "America in a Multipolar World—Whatever That Is," warns the reader against jumping the gun with regard to the breakdown of bipolarism. Tonelson proposes an interest- rather than an analysis-based foreign policy. He specifically points to the absurdities that come out of "crystal-ball gazing" about future events. In a related article, Thomas Perry Thornton gives us a status report on countries deemed as "the new influentials" during the oil crisis-filled decade of the 1970s. In Thornton's "The Regional Influentials: Perception and Reality," the author projects a bleak picture for these countries, as their grandiose expectations of the 1970s have created nightmarish realities in the 1980s. Layne, Tonelson, and Thornton articulate that the passage of time for advocates of change—whether government officials or academics—runs on a substantially accelerated clock compared to the reality of global events. The SAIS Review offers another consensus report in conjunction with the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI). "Building A New Consensus: Congress and Foreign Policy" offers various proposals on how to recapture the initial post-World War II consensus, which guided U.S. cold war strategy. Of special significance is the section on restructuring the relationship between Congress and the intelligence gathering community. The consensus report proposes a significant restructuring of a relationship that allowed the Iran-Contra affair...