To speak of the ‘future’ of strategy is to reveal a deep tension in the way we commonly think about the subject. On the one hand we are confronted by revolutionary changes in the geo-political landscape. The transformation of Europe, the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, for example, encourage the belief that the Cold War—a term which has been almost synonymous with-strategy for nearly half a century—is now an historical artifact. These events, analyzed so intensively by leaders and commentators, open up significant questions about the future of strategy.

The creation of the Baghdad Pact, a regional defence organization linking Britain to Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, in 1955, has been surrounded by historiographical confusion. Much of this is explicable in terms of the impact of rapid international changes on long-term strategy, the importance of which has tended to be neglected by historians of the pact. So, one school of thought focuses on the American promotion of the ‘Northern Tier’ concept during the period 1953–4, and on the British preference for an organization based on her Suez Canal Zone Base in Egypt.1 Applyingthis concept to the year 1955, the Baghdad Pact can become ‘the United States’ final victory over Great Britain during the Cold War, a victory which the Suez Crisis of 1956 served to confirm.

New political thinking on international relations during the Gorbachev era of Soviet politics received considerable attention in the West from government agencies and academics. Much of the analysis was concerned with matters of immediate policy relevance, and the relatively few attempts to assess new thinking in more theoretical terms tended to assume that one state-directed ideology (or official belief system) was now giving way to another in order to justify the radical shifts in policy being dictated by domestic economic factors.

This article offers a sociological perspective on a major conceptual issue in international relations, the question of ‘security’, and it raises major issues to do with the role of sociological concepts in international studies. For some years now, the work of sociological writers such as Skocpol, Giddens and Mann1 has attracted some interest in international studies. International theorists such as Linklater and Halliday have seen their work as offering a theoretical advance both on realism and on Marxist alternatives. At the same time, these developments have involved the paradox that, as one critic puts it, ‘current sociological theories of the state are increasingly approaching a more traditional view of the state—the state as actor model—precisely at a time when the theory of international relations is getting away from this idea and taking a more sociological form.

There can be little doubt that the conflict between the UN-authorized and US-led Multinational Coalition and Iraq at the start of 1991, as a result of the Iraqi Ba'athist regime's decision in August 1990 to invade and annex Kuwait, has produced profound changes in the political and diplomatic environment of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Mashriqi and Maghribi political attitudes. The new atmosphere of confidence amongst the governments and peoples of the Arab states of the Gulf is clear evidence of these changes, as is the dejection felt in capitals such as Amman, Sanaa and Tunis where government support for the Coalition was less than wholehearted.