  We phenomenologically study whether partonic collisions responsible for the
growth of hadron-hadron cross sections at high energy can be ascribed to
instanton-induced processes. Although non-perturbative in nature, these
interactions occur at the semi-hard scale $Q\sim 1-2$ GeV, and should therefore
be described using information from deep inelastic leptonic scattering on the
partonic constituents in nucleons, pions, and photons. After considering
shadowing corrections in nucleon-nucleon scattering, we fix a free instanton
tail suppression parameter and determine the effective quark-quark cross
section. The resulting contributions to $NN$, $\pi N$, $\gamma N$, and
$\gamma\gamma$ cross sections all $increase$ with energy differently, but in
reasonable agreement with experimental data. We then proceed to an estimate of
the number of such processes present in high energy Au-Au collisions at RHIC,
finding that the amount of entropy produced by instanton/sphaleron events
matches the observed amount.
