Strategic Models for a Policentric World

IT IS BECOMING COMMONPLACE to state that a Western strategy that assumes or seeks to foster a bi-polar world is obsolescent. The four models upon which the combination of containment and deterrence which characterize the prevailing Western strategy, and upon which this strategy itself, draws, are increasingly viewed as inadequate. The two integrated camps, which the bi-polar balance-of-power concept underlying containment assumes, are disappearing from international reality; the balance c>f terror image, which underlies deterrence, according to which two nuclear giants check each other, is facing the proliferation of nuclear dwarfs; the zero-sum notions, borrowed from gametheory, are seen as having declining relevance by more and more strategists; and the psychology of frustration, on which containment draws, has been shown to be too narrow. To put it differently, every component of the Western strategic formula has changed since it was formed in the late Fortiesthe technology of weapons, the cohesion of the super-blocs, the nature of the USSR, and the composition of the UN. While the need for a basic strategic revision is recognized, actual policies are slow to change, and postures implemented after years of staff work, production of the necessary hardware, and negotiations with allies are not readily replaced like numbers in a mathematics model. A few measures taken indicate experimentation with new conceptions-such as the emergency communication link between the White House and the Kremlin, the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, simultaneous US and USSR assistance to India under Chinese attack, and the unanimous General Assembly resolution condemning the orbiting of weapons of mass destruction. But, by and large, the policies of the United States (and, for the most part, those of the USSR) are still under the spell of old conceptions. Instead of ac-