The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States (Paperback)

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European communist eastern bloc in 1991, it was confidently assumed that the international system was on the threshold of an era of unprecedented peace and sta- bility. Politicians, academics, and diplomats alike increasingly began to forecast the imminent establishment of a new world order that would be managed by liberal democratic institutions and would develop within the context of an integrated global economy based on the principles of the free market. As this unprecedented interstate structure emerged and took root, destabilizing threats to national and international secu- rity were expected to decline commensurately.
However, the initial euphoria evoked by the end of the Cold War has been systematically replaced by a growing sense that global stabil- ity has not been achieved, and has in fact been decisively undermined by transnational security challenges, or "gray-area" phenomena. These threats, which cannot be readily defeated by the traditional defenses that states have erected to protect both their territories and populaces, reflect the remarkable fluidity that currently characterizes international politics—a setting in which it is no longer exactly apparent who can do what to whom with what means.