Webs of Interaction: A Philosophy of Statecraft for the 21st Century

While realists and liberals hold fundamentally different world views, there is one area in which they both agree: the interactions among states in the post-Cold War world will be extremely complex. It is this complexity which defies attempts by realists and liberals to simply make the world fit into existing paradigms and frameworks. The purpose of this essay is to introduce the concept of Webs of Interaction as an organizing framework for understanding the post-Cold War environment and examine the strategic implications of this framework as an alternative to existing realist and liberal paradigms.