10-9-95. NYPaper: "The Greening of U.S. Diplomacy: Focus on Ecology." A new concern over the long-term causes of wars and disasters of the environment are the issues deemed urgent today by American foreign policy makers in much the same manner as military threats like new surface-to-air missile sites alarmed policy makers several decades ago. So in addition to their traditional intelligence gathering -- arms, nuclear weapons programs, expansion of foreign armies -- American policy makers are looking more than ever before at natural phenomena in their search for the deeper roots of war and threats to global security. "During the cold war, most security threats stemmed from state-to-state aggression, so most of the analysis was of factors that could produce state-to-state aggression," said James Steinberg, the State Department's director of policy planning. "Now we're focusing more on internal factors that can destabilize governments and lead to civil wars and ethnic strife. Now we're paying much more attention to early warning factors, like famine and the environment." Angelo Codevilla, an intelligence expert who teaches at Boston University, said this new approach is misguided. "All this soft stuff is a silly idea," he said. HUG_kid (9 kb)