Haass explicitly borrows the idea of deregulation from the domestic history of the United States, in which the Government has alternately regulated and deregulated broad areas of social, political and economic activity. He is correct in describing the cold war as a time of international regulation, when ''reflexes, understandings and agreements . . . But he may give too much credit to a designed system and not enough to dumb luck. Now, he argues, we have an age of international deregulation, just as we have deregulation in the domestic realm. Yet his analogy fails to take sufficient account of the differences.
Domestic deregulation is controlled and reversible.
Critics may say it has gone too far in some areas, but its purposes are to increase productivity, lower costs and provide for greater freedom. International deregulation is not measured or readily reversible. Too often it is deregulation through abdication of responsibility. The metaphor of sheriff derives, of course, from the stereotype of the American frontier, where turbulent early settlements had few organized police forces, enforceable legal codes or functioning courts. There was only the sheriff, and his appeal to the decent people of the community to form posses in times of emergency.