Designing Defense for a New World Order

A policy of global intervention, whereby we adopt every country's threats as our own, is the strategic premise of the Bush administration's post-Persian Gulf defense program, argues former Pentagon official Earl C. Ravenal. Ravenal's alternative defense budget, based on a strategy of noninterventionism, would save American taxpayers more than $300 billion over the next five years. It would also phase out such increasingly irrelevant cold-war-era commitments as those to NATO, Japan and South Korea. Given the nature of the emerging international system, what is needed is not a vain effort to impose a global Pax Americana but a new U.S. security strategy appropraite for a "nation among nations" in the post-cold-war era. Ravenal's incisive analysis is certain to stimulate debate on the U.S. defense strategy and America's role in the world.