or develop relations with local businesses.When the issue is large, such as when governments in low-income countries haveattempted to assure the availability of HIV-AIDS drugs in spite of patents heldby U.S. firms, Washington steps directly into the fray. On the broadest level,the U.S. government tries to shape the rules and institutions of the worldeconomy in ways that work well for U.S. firms. These rules are summed up underthe heading of "free trade," which in practice means free access ofU.S. firms to the markets and resources of the rest of the world. In normaltimes, Washington uses diplomacy and institutions like the InternationalMonetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization to shape therules of the world economy. But times are not always "normal." Whengovernments have attempted to remove their economies from the open system andbreak with the "rules of the game," the U.S. government has respondedwith overt or covert military interventions. Latin America has had a longhistory of such interventions, where Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Chile(1973) and Nicaragua (1980s) provide fairly recent examples. The Middle Eastalso provides several illustrations of this approach to foreign affairs, withU.S. interventions in Iran (1953), Lebanon (1958), Libya (1981), and now Iraq.These interventions are generally presented as efforts to preserve freedom anddemocracy, but, if freedom and democracy were actually the goals of U.S.interventions the record would be very different; both the Saudi monarchy andthe Shah of Iran, in an earlier era, would then have been high on the U.S. hitlist. (Also, as with maintaining the source of supply of oil, the U.S. governmentdid not intervene in Guatemala in 1954 to maintain our supply of bananas; theprofits of the United Fruit Company, however, did provide a powerful causalfactor.)The rhetoricalrationale of U.S. foreign policy has seen many alterations and adjustments overthe last century: at the end of the 19th century, U.S. officials spoke of theneed to spread Christianity; Woodrow Wilson defined the mission as keeping theworld safe for democracy; for most of the latter half of the 20th century, thefight against Communism was the paramount rationale; for a fleeting momentduring the Carter administration, the protection of human rights entered thegovernments vocabulary; in recent years we have seen the war against drugs;and now we have the current administrations war against terrorism. Whatdistinguishes the current administration in Washington is neither its approachtoward foreign affairs and U.S. business interests in general nor its policy inthe Middle East and oil interests in particular. Even its rhetoric builds onwell established traditions, albeit with new twists. What does distinguish theBush administration is the clarity and aggressiveness with which it has putforth its goal of maintaining U.S. domination internationally. The "BushDoctrine" that the administration has articulated claims legitimacy forpre-emptive action against those who might threaten U.S. interests, and it isclear from the statement of that doctrine in last Septembers issuance of The National Security Strategy of the UnitedStates of America that "U.S. interests" includes economicinterests.The economic story is never the whole story, and oil is never the whole economic story. In the particular application of U.S. power,numerous strategic and political considerations come into play. With theapplication