ABSTRACT
The political economy of the Indian Ocean has braided itself into a dynamic wreath of alignments with and against major external powers. India has much to gain from relinquishment of that external power, provided the general peace is somehow kept and that capital, technology, and markets somehow remain accessible. The nationalist alternative which transcended arrangements in India, Indonesia, and Tanzania encountered difficulty elsewhere in challenging the cosmopolitan security. Security policy in the imperial age was determined by the minimal requirements of a dominant power against both local resistance and external competition. Without actually firing a shot into the region, the Soviet Union and United States came eventually to re-enact some of the choreography of political clientage and selective economic privilege that had been staged over centuries by West Europeans in the Indian Ocean. In Soviet opinion, Washington has postponed the peace zone conference in order to increase its capacity for military intervention and space war in the unoffending region.
