The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War

Haass, Richard N. The Reluctant Sheriff:

The United States after the Cold War.

New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1997.148pp. $24.95

Richard Haass continues with this book to advance clear thinking about and cogent analysis of U.S. foreign policy. His strong and authoritative prose has helped an entire generation to understand the Cold War and the end of the Cold War. In The Reluctant Sheriff, Haass first reviews U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War and then discusses the problematic and challenging nature of contemporary world affairs. He then takes the discussion from the problem stage to a suggested solution--a doctrine of "regulation."

The book's title does not sufficiently reflect the depth of Haass's thinking or the width of his prescriptions. Where The Reluctant Sheriff is both creative and provocative, the subtitle does not alert the unsuspecting reader to his proposal for a new theoretical framework, complete with appropriate conceptual development and policy implications.

In the first chapters, the reader's attention is directed to the doctrine of containment, which provides intellectual structure and framework for policy during the period of the Cold War. Haass emphasizes that it was a highly regulated world then, with a comfortable level of orderliness resulting from a remarkable degree of international consensus on the primacy of the general and global good over the particular and local.

The post-Cold War world (a phrase which the author remarks is redolent "of where people know they have been, not where they are now, much less where they are heading") is one of deregulation. It is an era of competing visions, simultaneous integration and fragmentation, uneven change, and instability. Haass identifies three problematic trends: (1) loosening of international relations, with new centers of decision making, corresponding diffusion of power, and absence of universally accepted norms;

(2) weakening of the nation-state; and

(3) the widespread appeal of democratic and market-oriented models. He concludes that while there are both positive and negative aspects to this period of deregulation, the post-Cold War era is not likely to be stable, due to a lack of regularized behavior. He advocates a new set of norms predicated on the assumption that parties "subscribe to a set of norms [because] they realize they are better off if they do, or because...