Over the last decade there has been an increasing volume of writing on the politics of the Indian Ocean and its littoral states. In Australia as elsewhere, it has become de rigueur for commentators to disaggregate the larger ’Indian Ocean Region’ into a large number of relatively autonomous ’sub-regions’ the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia, etc. This has allowed analysis to focus squarely upon the sub-regional sources of international conflict and to conjecture about the extent to which superpower policies towards these local conflicts do or do not come together to form a cloth of uniform warp and weft. Such an approach seems consistent with the reality of detente and the erosion of the bipolar balance of power which has hitherto regulated local conflicts more closely.