technical level, or that they can be kept isolated from the nonrational aspects of international debate. One of the major challenges facing the world today is whether its leaders can identify the common interest in and need for stable international regimes to be able to adapt various international agencies for the real work involved in bringing such regimes into being, or whether the stagnancy of ideological and political debates will prevent any constructive work being done within international organizations as they now exist. Whether countries can recognize the benefits to all of having a means for establishing rules of behavior, regulating specific activities in the common interest, and monitoring and/or enforcing rules protective of those interests is still open to question. Developments of the scope and centrality to human affairs of SPS represent the kind of challenge which will test that ability. At both the level of national policy and the level of international relationships, the kind of institution building and regime creating challenges posed by SPS are unlikely to admit easy solutions. If the promise of SPS is to be realized, not only technical challenges must be met. REFERENCE I. My discussion of these trends is an adaptation of the presentation in Harlan Cleveland's extremely thoughtful essay The Third Try at World Order (Aspen Institute, 1976).
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