...attenuated. No longer was this a first objective. Instead, the guidance listed as the third goal of US policy "to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region...threat to the interests of the US and our allies." Former under secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and his deputy, I. Lewis Libby, the officials chiefly...

...and now accepted, threat supposedly posed by rogue powers. American forces, it stated, must be able to "preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests."16 Just as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait had essentially silenced those policymakers who...

...planning in the rewrite was deterrence of attack, followed by strengthening alliances and preventing "any hostile power from dominating a region critical...reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the United States and our allies." Cooperation was now the theme, although the rewrite also reserved the...

...response to preclude threats or, if necessary, to deal with them is a key feature of our regional defence strategy. The third goal is to preclude any hostile...threat to the interests of the US and our allies. One of the primary tasks we face today in shaping the future is carrying long-standing alliances into...

...from a focus on containment to a new "regional defense strategy" relying heavily on "forward presence" to "preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests." These regions were listed as Europe, East Asia/Pacific, Middle East/ Persian Gulf and South Asia, and...

...in his last year as secretary of defense for Bush's father, he had set out as one of America's goals "to preclude any hostile power from dominating a region critical to our interests." 34 The Mideast was one of those regions. "In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective...