ABSTRACT
The world is a less dangerous place today than it was a decade ago. The central adversary in the US system of world order – against whom the intelligence community operated for so long – no longer exists. Even though the Soviet target actually came to command less attention in the 1980s, the existence of communism helped to determine the importance of many other targets because monitoring and reacting to them were judged essential to the mission of containing the projection of the adversary's military and political power. Now, less than 15 per cent of the CIA's budget supports collection and analysis programs that focus on the former Soviet Union.
