Uncertainty is the watchword of contemporary world politics. In the last decade of the century as in the first, the international system confronts transformation. During bipolarity and the Cold War, the markers for strategic policy were clear, containment worked, and Soviet expansion turned inward upon itself, feeding reform. But what are the guides for policy now? What is the threat? Is the Soviet Union acquiescing in decline with diminished foreign policy ambitions? Or is the Kremlin merely throwing out ballast in preparation for a new surge of growth in power and influence? Is Japan perhaps growing too fast, threatening its own, as well as the system's, ability to adjust when its ebullience suddenly bumps against the limits to relative power growth? How are China's awkward surges to be explained and to be assimilated? How far and how fast will Europe coalesce under the strains of structural adjustment occurring inside and outside West and East? Might the Cold War return? Clearly, the uncertainties of systems transformation are not the ordinary kind, but monumental structural uncertainties that reach deep into the core of cherished ideological preferences and domestic policy.

With systems change comes new hope but also new fear. The eagerness of some to accommodate domestic economic change and long-suppressed freedom is met with increased rigidities and opposition to social change by others.