Violence or the potential for violence is a fact of human existence. Many societies, including our own, reward martial success or skill at arms. The ways in which members of a particular society use force reveal a great deal about the nature of authority within the group and about its members' priorities.
Martha Finnemore uses one type of force, military intervention, as a window onto the shifting character of international society. She examines the changes, over the past 400 years, in why countries intervene militarily as well as in the ways they have intervened. It is...
Violence or the potential for violence is a fact of human existence. Many societies, including our own, reward martial success or skill at arms. Th...
Barry R. Posen explores how military doctrine takes shape and the role it plays in grand strategy that collection of military, economic, and political means and ends with which a state attempts to achieve security. Posen isolates three crucial elements of a given strategic doctrine: its offensive, defensive, or deterrent characteristics, its integration of military resources with political aims, and the degree of military or operational innovation it contains. He then examines these components of doctrine from the perspectives of organization theory and balance of power theory, taking into...
Barry R. Posen explores how military doctrine takes shape and the role it plays in grand strategy that collection of military, economic, and politi...
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Barnhart tests this assumption by examining the events leading up to World War II in the context of Japan's quest for economic security, drawing on a wide array of Japanese and American sources.
Barnhart focuses on the critical years from 1938 to 1941 as he investigates the development of Japan's drive for national economic self-sufficiency and independence and the way in which this drive shaped its internal and external policies. He also...
The roots of Japan's aggressive, expansionist foreign policy have often been traced to its concern over acute economic vulnerability. Michael A. Ba...
Allied nations often stop each other from going to war. Some countries even form alliances with the specific intent of restraining another power and thereby preventing war. Furthermore, restraint often becomes an issue in existing alliances as one ally wants to start a war, launch a military intervention, or pursue some other risky military policy while the other ally balks. In Warring Friends, Jeremy Pressman draws on and critiques realist, normative, and institutionalist understandings of how alliance decisions are made.
Alliance restraint often has a role to play both in...
Allied nations often stop each other from going to war. Some countries even form alliances with the specific intent of restraining another power an...
Glenn H. Snyder creates a theory of alliances by deductive reasoning about the international system, by integrating ideas from neorealism, coalition formation, bargaining, and game theory, and by empirical generalization from international history. Using cases from 1879 to 1914 to present a theory of alliance formation and management in a multipolar international system, he focuses particularly on three cases Austria-Germany, Austria-Germany-Russia, and France-Russia and examines twenty-two episodes of intra-alliance bargaining. Snyder develops the concept of the alliance security dilemma as...
Glenn H. Snyder creates a theory of alliances by deductive reasoning about the international system, by integrating ideas from neorealism, coalition f...
Do some technologies provoke war? Do others promote peace? Offense-defense theory contends that technological change is an important cause of conflict: leaders will be tempted to launch wars when they believe innovation favors attackers over...
Do some technologies provoke war? Do others promote peace? Offense-defense theory contends that technological change is an important cause of conflict...
For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political and military profile of Asia is changing rapidly, however. Korea's nuclear program, China's rise, and the relative decline of U.S. power have commanded strategic review in Tokyo just as these matters have in Washington. What is the next step for Japan's security policy? Will confluence with U.S. interests and the alliance survive intact? Will the policy be transformed? Or will Japan become more autonomous?
Richard J. Samuels demonstrates...
For the past sixty years, the U.S. government has assumed that Japan's security policies would reinforce American interests in Asia. The political ...
Following the Allied victory in World War II, the United States turned its efforts to preventing the spread of Communism beyond Eastern Europe. Gregory Mitrovich argues, however, that the policy of containment was only the first step in a clandestine campaign to destroy Soviet power. Drawing on recently declassified U.S. documents, Mitrovich reveals a range of previously unknown covert actions launched during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Through the aggressive use of psychological warfare, officials sought to provoke political crisis among key Soviet leaders, to incite...
Following the Allied victory in World War II, the United States turned its efforts to preventing the spread of Communism beyond Eastern Europe. Gre...
Intelligence operations face the challenging task of predicting the shape of future wars. This task is hindered by their limited ability to warn of peacetime foreign military innovation. Using formerly classified sources in particular, the reports of military attaches and other diplomat-officers Thomas G. Mahnken sheds light on the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence-gathering, tracing how America learned of military developments in Japan, Germany, and Great Britain in the period between the two world wars.
The interwar period witnessed both a considerable shift in the balance of...
Intelligence operations face the challenging task of predicting the shape of future wars. This task is hindered by their limited ability to warn of...
In a vitally important book for anyone interested in nuclear proliferation, defense strategy, or international security, Matthew Kroenig points out that nearly every country with a nuclear weapons arsenal received substantial help at some point from a more advanced nuclear state. Why do some countries help others to develop nuclear weapons? Many analysts assume that nuclear transfers are driven by economic considerations. States in dire economic need, they suggest, export sensitive nuclear materials and technology and ignore the security risk in a desperate search for hard...
In a vitally important book for anyone interested in nuclear proliferation, defense strategy, or international security, Matthew Kroenig points out...