Meeting the Challenges of Regional Security
Authored by Honorable Leonard Sullivan.
February 01, 1994
37 Pages
Brief Synopsis
The Honorable Leonard Sullivan, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, maintains that the disorder in the post-cold war world must be addressed in radically new and innovative ways. Old alliances, structured for containment, will not be adequate in a world where the challenges may be more appropriately addressed by police forces than by traditionally structured military forces.
This sweeping analysis suggests that, in the future, regional security apparatuses (RSAs) will be needed to deal with problems which issue from specific socio-cultural and economic conditions rather than from ideology or the pursuit of traditional national interests by the superpowers. Mr. Sullivan maintains that the United States can use its advantage in technology as a part of its approach to meeting the many challenges posed by "the new world disorder."
Summary
Cold war concepts of superpowers, alliance systems, nuclear deterrence and the accompanying military structures have lost their relevance. The problems and challenges of this diverse and disordered world might be better addressed by paramilitary or nonmilitary forces than by military institutions and forces structured and accoutered for traditional interstate conflict.
History may, indeed, record the 1990s as the beginning of the end of the supremacy of the nation-state as it has existed in western civilization since the French Revolution. Some states, like the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, have already dissolved into a number of ethnically-based nations. Germany and Yemen, on the other hand, have forsaken artificial political structures imposed by cold war necessities to unite into single nations.
Indeed, the world of the 21st century is most likely to experience further upward drift in sovereignty in which regional authorities enforce global laws of conduct over generally subnational organizations pursuing criminal activities.
The alternative to the United States as the world's policeman imposing a Pax Americana Technocratica is to establish a number of regional security apparatuses (RSAs). These RSAs will be charged with the collective enforcement of international laws and standards as well as those specific to the regions involved. Many of the technologies compelled and developed during the cold war may be useful when employed by appropriately structured RSA forces operating within new systems devised to meet a variety of challenges.
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