2 - Change

Summary

We playwrights, who have to cram a whole human life or an entire historical era into a two-hour play, can scarcely understand this rapidity [of change] ourselves. And if it gives us trouble, think of the trouble it must give political scientists, who have less experience with the realm of the improbable.

Vaclav Havel

To break with conventional approaches to any subject demands considerable effort. One must be continuously alert to the danger of slipping back into old analytic habits and, even more, of doing so unknowingly. Even if they are no longer functional, the old habits are comfortable. They worked earlier, one tends to reason, so why abandon them when thinking afresh can as readily lead to dead-ends as down paths to greater understanding. Happily, several intellectual mechanisms are available for countering temptations to cling to the familiar, and they are briefly noted here as much to keep the author on track as to acquaint the reader with the core procedures that underlie much of what follows.

Puzzles

As the foregoing epigraph implies, and as the initial stanza of the nursery rhyme set forth at the outset of the previous chapter makes explicit, present-day world politics is bewildering and, more particularly, it is far from clear as to why the domestic-foreign Frontier is so porous even as it also seems so salient. And, indeed, this quandary pervades the ensuing analysis.