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Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2016
Infinity Journal
Page 10
places such as to present a consequential indirect risk.
Layer II.
Impunity:Worldterritories marked according to three
reasonably envisioned categories of offending behavior.
Impunity menaced.
‘X’ marks. Reasonably, these territorial
spaces might encompass sanctuaries for persons who will
have created a reasonable fear in many US persons of
impending traumatic harm to US persons or to nationals
of countries closely allied to the United States.
Impunity for in flagrante.
Slash lines. Reasonably, these
territorial spaces might encompass sanctuaries for
persons who will have perpetrated or abetted major,
ongoing felonious violations of US law or violations of US
citizens’ rights (illicit trade, computer hacking, kidnapping,
piracy).
Impunity for immane behavior.
Dot pattern. Reasonably,
these territorial spaces might encompass sanctuaries for
persons who will have perpetrated (or materially abetted)
atrocities.
[Unlike the impedance layer, the impunity layer
does
contemplate and categorize reasons why the US
government might determine to send coercive force into
a territorial space, but the layer does not presuppose that
the US government
will
send coercive force, only that a
threshold degree of impunity might reasonably exist in a
given territory. The timing of entry, amount or duration of
uninvited force that might be sent is also not contemplated.
In effect,perhaps,this layer offers a threshold set of national
interests stated in terms of intolerable impunity.]
Layer III.
Invitation and Invasion: Places to which regular
US military forces (an armored brigade) might reasonably
be invited correlate geographically with places where an
invasion by the regulars of a third partymight occur (although
to us these invasions seem less likely than the invitations).
Invitation.
Circles stars. Reasonably, the constituted and
internationally recognized governments extant in these
places might invite the United States to station heavy
military formations within their territories.
Invasion.
White arrows. It is feared (not unreasonably) by
autochthonous analysts that an invasion by a neighboring
country (to include the use of heavy military formations)
could occur in these or nearby territories.
[The invitation part of this layer contemplates places that
might extend to the United States a genuine invitation to
canton heavy or conventional US formations (perhaps
an armored brigade or equivalent, or more). Such an
invitation, we presuppose, would be a result of fears not
unreasonably held by a local government, along with
the existence of a formal defense treaty between that
government and the government of the United States.The
invasion part of the layer contemplates locations where
we believe that local populations might fear that an
invasion of their, or a nearby, territory might be perpetrated
and that such a perpetration would reasonably include
heavy military formations.]
Risk Distance
Geoffrey Demarest, Ivan B.Welch, and Charles K. Bartles
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