This book published by Pluto Press, London, 2001, was described as follows:
'Since the end of the Cold War, the ‘New World Order’ President Bush once described so glowingly during the West’s crushing of Iraq, continues to be racked by countless nationalist struggles, many led by guerrilla movements. The world community continues in disorder evident in many crises such as in the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, Chechenya and elsewhere with dire possible consequences for regional and even world peace. As a result some argue we have entered an age of competing ‘nationalisms’. But this phenomenon is not new. Throughout the Cold War, many revolutionary nationalist struggles ensued in the Third World albeit most were presented as expressions of the greater superpower rivalry with their true nature diminished or distorted. However, in the post-Cold War era their true nature can no longer be obscured. Also apparent in these post-Cold War years has been the continued use of a very effective de facto US strategy designed to combat those Third World revolutionary and post-revolutionary forces that are deemed threatening to Western interests. This strategy is best described as ‘Low Intensity Conflict’ (LIC). Originating during the Reagan era and used with great effect in the waning Cold War of the 1980s, LIC remains the foremost and most effective means by which the United States can combat threatening revolutionary nationalism when direct intervention is not an option. Or alternatively, it remains the pre-eminent strategy for preparing the ground for direct and ‘just’ US military intervention in foreign target states. As such, this most effective strategy has continued to be used either fully or partially by the United States, and indeed other countries, since the 1980s and its original emergence in the Philippines and Central America. Used to fight wars when ‘it is not fighting wars’, LIC remains one of the most enduring legacies of the Reagan era. Just as LIC was most effective in rolling back revolution and forcing the end of the Cold War, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the effectiveness of this strategy continues to be seen in many conflict situations around the world. It is indeed one of Reagan’s success stories, one however that has been relatively neglected or little told. This book aims to tell part of that story by investigating LIC’s emergence and outlining the part overt, part-covert ‘profile’ of what has proven to be a very effective de facto US national security strategy. In so doing this book also aims to assist the identification of LIC’s ‘footprint’ wherever it may appear in revolutionary conflicts around the globe today.'