sts or with the goals set out. We have not and cannot attempt to show this, because the actual U.S. policies followed in the Middle East, especially since 1967, have been impressively and consistantly NOT in accord with the model.
This is but a single instance of a broader reality: that nations in the real world often fail to articulate their interests, or to pursue them even if articulated. It may be said that much of the world's conflict and misery is, in fact, due to the persistant failure of nations to realistically define and follow their interests. Examples from the contemporary Middle East (and from other regions as well) abound.
By hasty and unthought out aggression against Iran in 1979, the government of Iraq mired itself in eight years of bloody and debilitating war. By hasty and unthought out aggression against Kuwait in 1990, the government of Iraq has mired itself in a conflict whose outcome cannot now be foreseen, but is unlikely to be more to Iraq's interest than more peaceful pursuit of its interests would have been. By adopting an attitude of intransigence and a policy of creeping annexation in the occupied territories after 1967, Israel threw away the opportunity to "trade land for peace" to improve its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors. Instead it drew itself deeper and deeper into confrontation.
By singlemindedly pursuing a "strategic relationship" with Israel since 1967, the United States frayed its relations with the Arab world, only to find in the Arabian Gulf crisis of 1990 that Israel is more a liability than an asset. It is Saddam Hussein, not George Bush, who finds in Israel a "wild card" he can play, or at least threaten to play, to advantage.
We thus find ourselves faced with two broad, unanswered questions which are posed by the Thesis of this study. The lesser of these is how, precisely, a nation analyses the "dimensionality" of its i...