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.