The United States spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined, and Western nations in general spend far more than developing nations around the globe. Yet when Western nations have found themselves in conflicts in recent decades, their military performance has been mixed at best. In this fully updated new edition of "The Art of Military Coercion," Rob de Wijk explains this discrepancy through a theory on the use of force. He argues that the key is a failure to use force decisively and to understand properly the dynamics of conflict and balance, means and ends. Without that...

We tend to think of ourselves as living in a time when nations, for the most part, obey the rule of law and where they certainly don t engage in the violent grabs for territory that have characterized so much of human history. But as Rob de Wijk shows in this book, power politics remains very much a force on the international scene. Offering analyses of such actions as Putin s annexation of the Crimea and China s attempts to claim large parts of the South China Sea, de Wijk explains why power politics never truly went away and why, as the West s position weakens, it s likely to play a bigger...