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far-reaching weapons and technology. So the Defense
Department, and the US Government in general, has
quite an interest in this phenomenon and is trying to
understand it and construct a; strategy to address it.
In attempting to grapple with this issue, initial think-
ing on a Clinton national security strategy has focused
on three elements?
' Engagement. The United States is committed to
remaining engaged in international affairs.
~ Prevention. We want to prevent or contain the
effects of ethnic conflict. We want to use all the ele-
ments of national power, development assistance,
and trade assistance to prevent conflict, and, if that
does not work, we want to act early to keep the con-
flict small. ,
~ Partnership. We want to expand the core group of
like-minded democratic countries that we forged
during the Cold War and have this group work as a
I
1 In July 1994, the Clinton Administration published its first com-
prehensive national security strategy, which used as its concep-
tional framework the elements of "engagement" and
"enlargement." _
partnership to either prevent or to contain conflict.
We need to work together in a variety of multilateral
and bilateral ways to marshal all those resources
together as a partnership for addressing the issue.
The govemment needs much more analysis to under-
stand in a robust way the phenomenon of ethnic and
national conflict. We need academic researchers to
tum toward applied robust, rigorous, and predictive
research that we can bring inside the govemment in
testable ways and see if we can motivate policy. We
are not interested in sponsoring more original
research; as Dr. Ted Gurr wrote in his book on conflict
a few years ago, there are 686 books on the theory of
conflict—we do not want a 687th. What we want are
robust, testable, applied research and models that we
can bring inside the govemment. We take this problem
seriously. It is a critical issue of US national security.
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