| Summary: | Part of a special section on technology and international policy in the information age. The rules of the game in international relations are changing and the origins of many of those changes can be traced to the Information Revolution. To better grasp the nature of the changes influencing the world's power structure, it is useful to consider three central conflicts that have an impact on each of the three basic pillars on which national power has traditionally been based: economic power, military power, and political power. Collectively, the conflicts between the private sector and the state sector; the doctrine of dominance versus the advantages of asymmetry; and political institutions versus electronic democracy and virtual communities reveal important similarities and features that, it can be argued, are essential to the way the world at large is being transformed by new information technologies. The challenges the new world power structure pose for the formulation of U.S. foreign policy are considered.
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