Pas de Trois examines the impact of surprise on U.S. foreign-policy decisionmaking behavior during the 1945-1994 timeframe. Since surprise is seldom found in isolation in decisionmaking, the research design assesses surprise in combination with the nature of threat and amount of decision time—two exogenous variables found concomitant with surprise in situ as well as frequently in the literature on the situational context of decisionmaking. Surprise, nature of threat, and amount of decision time are all conceptualized as exogenous; U.S. foreign-policy decisionmaking behavior is conceptualized as a dependent variable. Pas de Trois uses International Crisis Bank data, employing a factor analysis to construct indicators for nature of threat and decision time as well as for constructing two indicators of foreignpolicy decisionmaking. A dummy variable is constructed for surprise using case studies. A subsequent regression analysis is employed to assess whether and to what degree surprise—in conjunction with threat and decision time— affects foreign-policy decisionmaking behavior. In testing two hypotheses. Pas de Tiois demonstrates that surprise interacts synergistically with nature of threat and response time to result ultimately in reactive U.S. foreign-policy behavior. However, in testing both hypotheses, Pas de Trois demonstrates a quite complex interaction between surprise, threat, and response time. The expectation, at the outset, was that surprise, threat, and response time would affect foreign-policy behavior in a similar manner: said variables would increase stress in decisionmaking and produce more reactive responses in behavior. In fact, this research demonstrates a much more complex interaction between these exogenous variables.

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Environmental historian Donald Worster opens his history of the great 1930s drought in the southern American plains known as the Dust Bowl with these words written by Karl Marx in Capital: "All progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil." 1 While researching his book, in 1977 Worster asked Helen Meairs, a wealthy Kansas farm widow: "But what happens when the irrigation water runs out?" She answered, "I don't think that in our time it can. And if it does we'll get more from someplace else. The Lord never intended for us to do without water." 2 2 Global climate change is the ultimate expression of "robbing the soil." It has increased both the risk of extreme drought and extreme flooding, as well as the impossibility of "getting more water from someplace else." Mark Reisner points out: "California's water infrastructure, built in the twentieth century, is being severely tested by the twentyfirst-century reality of long drought followed by extreme deluge." 3 Water management systems and the populations relying on them are in the twenty-first century overwhelmed throughout the world by the havoc wreaked by extreme drought and flooding, often in short order sequence and in the same geographic location. As for many authors of science fiction, historians of the environment are not surprised by the twenty-first century water-related disasters brought about by climate change. However, unlike the often dystopic views presented by authors of climate crisis fiction, environmental historians can not only find in examples from the past harbingers of today's crises but they can also conceptualize frameworks of analysis that may help lead to a better understand of present possibilities. In his classic Rivers of Empire, Worster remarks that the "historian has no doubt that big changes are always possible, even in the most stagnant circumstances. Indeed, they are at some point inevitable." 4

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