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A comment on Rule's article, "On Evils Abroad and America's New World Order" (1999), maintains that Rule is right to suggest US caution about using military force, but his assumption that maintaining peace should be substantially less expensive may be erroneous. Keeping the peace requires institutional schemes for deterrence, conflict resolution, & enforcement of global norms &, since the US is expected to lead in these areas, military expenditures may actually increase, rather than decrease. It is argued that a key reason for current military expenditures remaining at the Cold War level is that the US is maintaining the wrong type of military force. Ways US forces & procurement would have to change in order to meet the challenge of keeping the peace are described. In James B. Rule Responds, Rule contends that Roxborough's proposals involve both technical & political issues that assume future "peacekeeping missions" will be acceptable to thinking Americans, suggesting that reductions in outlandish military spending are more in line with acceptable principles. J. Lindroth

The politics of inflation in Latin AmericaIn recent years inflation has accelerated in Latin America to become a seemingly intractable problem. In many countries, even when high inflation or hyperinflation has been brought down, the inflationary 'floor' has remained high, with all the appearance of a series of upward and irreversible steps. The underlying average annual rate of inflation has tended to rise steadily, as can be seen in the table overleaf.The reasons for persisting high inflation and for the seeming inability of government policy to bring inflation down in a lasting manner are complex and controversial. Moreover, as a number of authors have noted,1 the reasons for the failure of anti-inflationary policy are often, in some measure, political as well as purely economic. For one thing, inflation, and efforts to control inflation, involve a redistributive struggle the political costs of which the government may be unable or unwilling to bear. In addition, the government simply may not have the administrative capacity to implement certain measures effectively. For example, one way of restoring fiscal balance may be to increase taxes on wealth-holders, but this may not be a politically feasible option for many governments. Central governments may have limited control over the spending of regional and local governments, or over state-owned corporations, and may therefore have difficulty in controlling expenditure. Moreover, effective anti-inflationary policy may require political conditions that may simply not be present in many Latin American political systems. For example, in September 1989, towards the end of the Sarney government in Brazil, inflation was running at 38% per month.

To consolidate the Left in Latin America, the neoliberalist strategies adopted by many of the new, democratically elected governments in the late 1980s must be defused. In an effort to curb the debt crisis, recession, & unemployment, these partly successful strategies to suppress state intervention in the economy & to attract foreign investment are merely games in the repertoire of demogogic populist presidents. While fundamental economic restructuring is necessary, certain measures to produce it may prove unpopular. The Latin American Left must also be careful not to endorse radical groups, eg, Peru's Sendero Luminoso.