La seguridad nacional de Estados Unidos: reconceptualización y tendencias

This article defines the elements of the new international security agenda developed by the United States at the end of the Cold War. It also analyzes the main proposals advanced for each aspect of the agenda, the meehanisms for implementing it, and the actors involved. In general, the new view of United States security, in addition to the military, economic and political aspeets, connects domestic problems with international ones, gives priority to the economic revitalization of the country, promotes democracy and the free market, and takes global threats (like drug trafficking or environmental deterioration) into account, incorporating them into is agenda. As Bermúdez Torres points out, with the aim of implementing its new agenda, the United States government has had to restructure bureaucratically. Notable in terms of the actors involved are the executive and the legislative branches, which have experienced serious discrepancies with respect to the priority topies of the agenda, a fact that has resulted in lack of implementational continuity and coherence. At the end, the author presents sorne of the security scenarios visualized at the dawn of the new millennium and highlights the need for the United States to take on a new strategie focus based on equilibrium in the situation and prospects of different regions, particularly as refers to China, Russia, Southeast Asia and Latin America. In the conclusions, Bermúdez Torres emphasizes how the many topies and actors involved, and the failure to rank priorities, have diminished the coherence of the American security policy.