"The notion that every state has an interest in the territorial integrity of every other state-no matter how distant they are and how slight their connections-is peculiar to the twentieth century. To be sure, poets and philosophers had perceived humanity's common interest in preventing wars, and statesmen had found that aggression from outside the community could be deterred by the mutual defense of those within it. But no one had ever tried to organize an all-embracing system that used the collective force of its members to prevent one of them from attacking another.
It took the wide...

As the Arab states come to grips with new realities in the Middle East - the shifts in political and economic power in the region, the growing ascendency of fundamentalist Islam over Nationalist and pan-Arab ideologies of the past and the changing dynamics of the Palestinian problem - the course that Mubarak charts for Egypt has become a factor of key importance. In this book, a career Foreign Service officer examines the changes that are taking place in Egyptian attitudes and policies toward the Arab world from three perspectives - the ways in which Egypt pursued its regional interests under...