ABSTRACT
The question is not whether international organized crime is bad. It is. Nor is the question whether the United States, government officials and private citizens alike, ought to worry about it. They should. The form of organized crime represented by drug trafficking has been on the security agenda. Now, trafficking plus economic integration and Communism’s disintegration create a new threat, one that puts the governance of key countries, like Russia, at risk and seems a menace stretching inside U.S. borders. Still, the issue is whether organized crime amounts to a threat to national security-not in the cold war’s expansive meaning, when virtually anything sought by any interest group, from highways to student loans got “national security” attached to it, but rather in an old-fashioned sense of posing a palpable threat to the nation’s territorial integrity, economic well-being, or core institutions.
