Hegemonies, alliances, and neutral areas continually change, Techniques of Systems Analysis warns:
We must keep our system sufficiently flexible to meet these changes. This means, for example, that we cannot rely on any particular set of foreign bases, though presumably we can place a fairly high reliance on having at least a portion of them available to us. It also means that we have to worry, for example, about the Russians taking over or influencing some countries which we have counted on as being allies or neutrals. We should not therefore make ourselves too dependent upon any particular group unless we have reason to believe that they are just about as reliable as one of the forty-eight states. (We presume that we can depend on Texas.)