ABSTRACT
Shortly after the end of the Cold War, Clinton was elected to the US Presidency in place of Bush. Clinton proposed James Woolsey as the new Director of the CIA, and Woolsey was then questioned in Senate hearings on the changing threat environment facing the United States. He characterised it by saying that the US had slain the dragon (of the old Soviet Union) but now faced a jungle full of poisonous snakes.1 Although this comment was made in 1993, it remains an effective characterisation of US security attitudes, the nearuniversal view in security circles being that the United States is clearly the sole superpower, but its worldwide economic and political interests will be subject to diverse and unpredictable threats, not from a single superpower as in the Cold War era, but from a variety of states and sub-state actors, or to put it somewhat more crudely, rogue states and terrorists.
