NOTES

PREFACE

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 221.

CHAPTER ONE

1. The phrase “perpetual peace” was made famous by Immanuel Kant. See his “Perpetual Peace,” in Hans Reiss, ed., Kant’s Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 93–130. Also see John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Michael Mandelbaum, “Is Major War Obsolete?” Survival 40, No. 4 (Winter 1998–99), pp. 20–38; and Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3–18, which was the basis of Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

2. Charles L. Glaser, “Realists as Optimists: Cooperation as Self-Help,” International Security 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994–95), pp. 50–90.

3. The balance of power is a concept that has a variety of meanings. See Inis L. Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), chap. 2; and Ernst B. Haas, “The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept, or Propaganda?” World Politics 5, No. 4 (July 1953), pp. 442–77. I use it to mean the actual distribution of military assets among the great powers in the system.

4. Quoted in Lothar Gall, Bismarck: The White Revolutionary, vol. 1, 1851–1871, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Unwin Hyman, 1986), p. 59.

5. Nevertheless, the theory has relevance for smaller powers, although for some more than for others. Kenneth Waltz puts the point well when he writes, “A general theory of international politics…once written also applies to lesser states that interact insofar as their interactions are insulated from the intervention of the great powers of a system, whether by the relative indifference of the latter or by difficulties of communication and transportation.” Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), p. 73.

6. For other definitions of a great power, see Jack S. Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System, 1495–1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), pp. 10–19.

7. There is little disagreement among scholars about which states qualified as the great powers between 1792 and 1990. See Levy, War, chap. 2; and J. David Singer and Melvin Small, The Wages of War, 1816–1965: A Statistical Handbook (New York: Wiley, 1972), p. 23. I have accepted the conventional wisdom because it appears to be generally consistent with my definition of a great power, and to analyze each potential great power “on a case-by-case basis would be prohibitive in time and resources, and in the end it might make little difference.” Levy, War, p. 26. Russia (the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991) is the only state that was a great power for the entire period. The United Kingdom and Germany (Prussia before 1870) were great powers from 1792 to 1945, and France was a great power from 1792 until it was defeated and occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. Some scholars label the United Kingdom, France, and Germany as great powers after 1945 and classify the much more powerful Soviet Union and United States as superpowers. I do not find these labels useful. Although I sometimes refer to the United States and the Soviet Union as superpowers, they were the great powers in the system during the Cold War, when the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (as well as China and Japan) lacked the military capability to qualify as great powers. Italy is treated as a great power from 1861 until 1943, when it collapsed in World War II. Austria-Hungary (Austria before 1867) was a great power from 1792 until it disintegrated in 1918. Japan is considered a great power from 1895 until 1945, and the United States is usually designated a great power from 1898 until 1990. Regarding the period from 1991 to 2000, China (which is treated as a great power from 1991 onward), Russia, and the United States are considered great powers for reasons discussed in Chapter 10.

8. Quoted in Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 2.

9. William J. Clinton, “Commencement Address,” United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, May 31, 1997. Also see A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement (Washington, DC: The White House, February 1996).

10. Strobe Talbott, “Why NATO Should Grow,” New York Review of Books, August 10, 1995, pp. 27–28. Also see Strobe Talbott, “Democracy and the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs 75, No. 6 (November–December 1996), pp. 47–63.

11. Madeleine Albright, “A Presidential Tribute to Gerald Ford,” speech at Ford Museum Auditorium, Grand Rapids, MI, April 16, 1997. Also see Madeleine Albright, “Commencement Address,” Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, June 5, 1997; and Richard Holbrooke, “America, A European Power,” Foreign Affairs 74, No. 2 (March–April 1995), pp. 38–51.

12. On what constitutes a sound theory, see Stephen Van Evera, Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 17–21.

13. The key work on this subject is Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

14. Although NATO employed a defensive strategy vis-à-vis the Warsaw Pact throughout the Cold War, Samuel Huntington argued instead for an offensive strategy in an article that generated considerable controversy within the security community. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Conventional Deterrence and Conventional Retaliation in Europe,” International Security 8, No. 3 (Winter 1983–84), pp. 32–56.

15. This point is made clear in Michael W. Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1997); and Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).

16. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1962; the first edition was published in 1939); Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973; the first edition was published in 1948); and Waltz, Theory of International Politics.

17. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, chap. 4; Kenneth Waltz, “The Myth of National Interdependence,” in Charles P. Kindelberger, ed., The International Corporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 205–223; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics, chap. 7.

18. See Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, chaps. 14, 21; and Kenneth N. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus 93, No. 3 (Summer 1964), pp. 881–909.

19. For further evidence of those differences, see Security Studies 5, No. 2 (Winter 1995–96, special issue on “Roots of Realism,” ed. Benjamin Frankel); and Security Studies 5, No. 3 (Spring 1996, special issue on “Realism: Restatements and Renewal,” ed. Benjamin Frankel).

20. See F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations between States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pt. I; Torbjorn L. Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory: An Introduction (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), chap. 5; and F. Parkinson, The Philosophy of International Relations: A Study in the History of Thought (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977), chap. 4.

21. See Andrew Moravcsik, “Taking Preferences Seriously: A Liberal Theory of International Politics,” International Organization 51, No. 4 (Autumn 1997), pp. 513–53.

22. See Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978).

23. See inter alia Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage, 3d rev. and enl. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1912); Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); Edward D. Mansfield, Power, Trade, and War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Susan M. McMillan, “Interdependence and Conflict,” Mershon International Studies Review 41, Suppl. 1 (May 1997), pp. 33–58; and Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

24. Among the key works on democratic peace theory are Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pts. I and III; Michael Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, No. 4 (December 1986), pp. 1151–69; Fukuyama, “End of History?” John M. Owen IV, Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); James L. Ray, Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); and Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Some scholars argue that democracies are more peaceful than non-democracies, regardless of the regime type of their adversary. But the evidence for this proposition is weak; stronger evidence exists for the claim that the pacific effects of democracy are limited to relations between democratic states.

25. See inter alia David A. Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Robert O. Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); International Organization 36, No. 2 (Spring 1982, special issue on “International Regimes,” ed. Stephen D. Krasner); Lisa L. Martin and Beth A. Simmons, “Theories and Empirical Studies of International Institutions,” International Organization 52, No. 4 (Autumn 1998), pp. 729–57; and John G. Ruggie, Constructing the World Polity: Essays on International Institutionalization (New York: Routledge, 1998), chaps. 8–10. Regimes and international law are synonymous with institutions, since all are essentially rules that states negotiate among themselves.

26. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 10.

27. Although realists believe that the international system allows for little variation in the external conduct of great powers, they recognize that there are sometimes profound differences in how governments deal with their own people. For example, although the Soviet Union and the United States behaved similarly toward each other during the Cold War, there is no question that the leaders of each superpower treated their citizens in fundamentally different ways. Thus, one can rather easily distinguish between good and bad states when assessing internal conduct. Such distinctions, however, tell us relatively little about international politics.

28. Morgenthau is something of an exception regarding this second belief. Like other realists, he does not distinguish between good and bad states, and he clearly recognizes that external environment shapes state behavior. However, the desire for power, which he sees as the main driving force behind state behavior, is an internal characteristic of states.

29. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. and ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), esp. books 1, 8. Also see Richard K. Betts, “Should Strategic Studies Survive?” World Politics 50, No. 1 (October 1997), pp. 7–33, esp. p. 8; and Michael I. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, 3d ed. (London: Frank Cass, 2001).

30. Michael J. Smith notes in Realist Thought from Weber to Kissinger (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) that Carr does not “explain why politics always involves power, an explanation vital to any attempt to channel the exercise of power along lines compatible with an ordered social existence. Is a lust for power basic to human nature—the view of Niebuhr and Morgenthau—…[or] is it the result of a security dilemma?” (p. 93).

31. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Smith writes, “Kennan nowhere offers a systematic explanation of his approach to international politics or of his political philosophy in general: he is a diplomat turned historian, not a theologian or a political theorist, and he is concerned neither to propound a doctrine of human nature nor to set forth the recurring truths of international politics in a quasi-doctrinal way.” Smith, Realist Thought, p. 166.

32. Human nature realism lost much of its appeal in the early 1970s for a variety of reasons. The backlash against the Vietnam War surely contributed to its demise, since any theory that saw the pursuit of military power as inevitable was likely to be unpopular on university campuses by 1970. [Ironically, Morgenthau was an early and vocal critic of the Vietnam War. See Hans J. Morgenthau, Vietnam and the United States (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1965); and “Bernard Johnson’s Interview with Hans J. Morgenthau,” in Kenneth Thompson and Robert J. Myers, eds., Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), pp. 382–84.] Furthermore, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil shock of 1973, and the growing power of multinational corporations (MNCs) led many to think that economic issues had become more important than security issues, and that realism, especially Morgenthau’s brand, had little to say about questions of international political economy. Some even argued in the early 1970s that MNCs and other transnational forces were threatening the integrity of the state itself. “Sovereignty at bay” was a widely used phrase at the time. Finally, human nature realism was essentially a philosophical theory that was out of sync with the behavioral revolution that was overwhelming the study of international politics in the early 1970s. Morgenthau intensely disliked modern social science theories, but he was badly outnumbered in this war of ideas and his theory lost much of its legitimacy. For Morgenthau’s views on social science, see Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946). For a recent but rare example of human nature realism, see Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, No. 4 (Spring 1993), pp. 68–71. Also see Bradley A. Thayer, “Bringing in Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics,” International Security 25, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 124–51.

33. See Morgenthau, Politics among Nations; and Morgenthau, Scientific Man. Although Morgenthau is the most famous human nature realist, Reinhold Niebuhr was also a major intellectual force in this school of thought. See Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner’s, 1932). Friedrich Meinecke made the case for human nature realism at considerable length well before Morgenthau began publishing his views on international politics in the mid-1940s. See Meinecke’s Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), which was originally published in Germany in 1924 but was not published in English until 1957. Morgenthau, who was educated in Germany, was familiar with Machiavellism, according to his former student Kenneth W. Thompson. Correspondence with author, August 9, 1999. Also see Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), pp. 207–26.

34. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 194. Also see Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, p. 208.

35. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 192. Despite his claim that “the desire to attain a maximum of power is universal” (Politics among Nations, p. 208), Morgenthau distinguishes between status quo and revisionist powers in his writings. Politics among Nations, pp. 40–44, 64–73. But there is an obvious problem here: if all states have a “limitless aspiration for power” (Politics among Nations, p. 208), how can there be status quo powers in the world? Moreover, although Morgenthau emphasizes that the drive for power is located in human nature, he also recognizes that the structure of the international system creates powerful incentives for states to pursue offense. He writes, for example, “Since…all nations live in constant fear lest their rivals deprive them, at the first opportune moment, of their power position, all nations have a vital interest in anticipating such a development and doing unto the others what they do not want the others to do unto them” (Politics among Nations, p. 208). However, if all states have a vital interest in taking advantage of each other whenever the opportunity presents itself, how can there be status quo powers in the system? Indeed, this incentive structure would seem to leave no room for satiated powers. Again, Morgenthau provides no explanation for this apparent contradiction. Arnold Wolfers notes this same problem in Morgenthau’s work. See Wolfers’s Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 84–86.

36. Waltz’s other key works on realism include Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); “Theory of International Relations,” in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., The Handbook of Political Science, vol. 8, International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), pp. 1–85; “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 39–52; and “Reflections on Theory of International Politics: A Response to My Critics,” in Robert Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 322–45. Unlike Morgenthau’s Politics among Nations, Waltz’s Theory of International Politics clearly qualifies as a work of modern social science (esp. its chap. 1).

37. Structural theories emphasize that the configuration of the international system sharply constrains the behavior of the great powers and forces them to act in similar ways. Thus, we should expect to find common patterns of great-power behavior in anarchic systems. Nevertheless, anarchic systems themselves can be configured differently, depending on the number of great powers and how power is distributed among them. As discussed in subsequent chapters, those structural differences sometimes cause important variations in state behavior.

38. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 126. Also see ibid., pp. 118, 127; and Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization 42, No. 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 485–507, which builds directly on Waltz’s claim that states are mainly concerned with preserving their share of world power.

39. Randall L. Schweller, “Neorealism’s Status-Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?” Security Studies 5, No. 3 (Spring 1996, special issue), pp. 90–121. Also see Keith L. Shimko, “Realism, Neorealism, and American Liberalism,” Review of Politics 54, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 281–301.

40. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, chaps. 6, 8. The other key work emphasizing that states have a powerful tendency to balance against aggressors is Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

41. See Waltz, Theory of International Politics, chap. 8; and Waltz, “Origins of War.”

42. Waltz, “Origins of War,” p. 40.

43. The key works include Robert Jervis, “Cooperation under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 30, No. 2 (January 1978), pp. 167–214; Jack L. Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. chaps. 1–2; and Van Evera, Causes of War, esp. chap. 6. Also see Glaser, “Realists as Optimists” and Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. chap. 3. George Quester’s Offense and Defense in the International System (New York: Wiley, 1977) is an important book on the offense-defense balance, although he is generally not considered a defensive realist. For an overview of the literature on the subject, see Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics,” Security Studies 4, No. 4 (Summer 1995), pp. 660–91.

44. Jervis has a more qualified view on this point than either Snyder or Van Evera. See Snyder, Myths of Empire, pp. 22–24; Van Evera, Causes of War, pp. 118, 191, 255.

45. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation,” p. 500.

46. Some defensive realists emphasize that great powers seek to maximize security, not relative power. “The ultimate concern of states,” Waltz writes, “is not for power but for security.” Waltz, “Origins of War,” p. 40. There is no question that great powers maximize security, but that claim by itself is vague and provides little insight into actual state behavior. The important question is, How do states maximize security? My answer: By maximizing their share of world power. Defensive realists’ answer: By preserving the existing balance of power. Snyder puts the point well in Myths of Empire when he writes that both offensive and defensive realists “accept that security is normally the strongest motivation of states in international anarchy, but they have opposite views about the most effective way to achieve it” (pp. 11–12).

47. G. Lowes Dickinson, The European Anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1916). Also see G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (New York: Century Company, 1926), esp. chap. 1.

48. Dickinson, European Anarchy, pp. 14, 101.

49. Eric Labs, Nicholas Spykman, and Martin Wight also make the case for offensive realism in their writings, although none lays the theory out in any detail. See Eric J. Labs, “Offensive Realism and Why States Expand Their War Aims,” Security Studies 6, No. 4, pp. 1–49; Nicholas J. Spykman, America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942), introduction and chap. 1; and Martin Wight, Power Politics, eds. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), chaps. 2, 3, 9, 14, 15. One also catches glimpses of the theory in Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (New York: Scribner’s, 1950), pp. 89–91; Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), passim; Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 87–88; John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, No. 2 (January 1950), p. 157; John H. Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 14–15, 23–25, 206; A.F.K. Organski, World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 274, 279, 298; Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), pp. 512–19; and Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), passim. Finally, aspects of Randall Schweller’s important work are consistent with offensive realism. See Schweller, “Neorealism’s Status-Quo Bias” Randall L. Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 72–107; and Randall L. Schweller, Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). However, as Gideon Rose makes clear, it is difficult to classify Schweller as an offensive realist. See Gideon Rose, “Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy,” World Politics 51, No. 1 (October 1998), pp. 144–72.

50. See Inis L. Claude, Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962); August Heckscher, ed., The Politics of Woodrow Wilson: Selections from His Speeches and Writings (New York: Harper, 1956); and James Brown Scott, ed., President Wilson’s Foreign Policy: Messages, Addresses, Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918).

51. Quoted in Wight, Power Politics, p. 29.

52. William J. Clinton, “American Foreign Policy and the Democratic Ideal,” campaign speech, Pabst Theater, Milwaukee, WI, October 1, 1992.

53. “In Clinton’s Words: ‘Building Lines of Partnership and Bridges to the Future,’“ New York Times, July 10, 1997.

54. See Shimko, “Realism, Neorealism, and American Liberalism.”

55. See Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 51–52, 237. Also see Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (New York: Praeger, 1968), pp. 50–51.

56. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, trans. Henry Reeve (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), p. 38.

57. Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 201.

58. See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (New York: Scribner’s, 1944), esp. pp. 153–90.

59. Lipset, American Exceptionalism, p. 63.

60. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Practice of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

61. For example, it is apparent from archival-based studies of the early Cold War that American policymakers thought largely in terms of power politics, not ideology, when dealing with the Soviet Union. See H. W. Brands, The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization, and Sino-American Conflict, 1947–1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); and Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace. Also see Keith Wilson, “British Power in the European Balance, 1906–14,” in David Dilks, ed., Retreat from Power: Studies in Britain’s Foreign Policy of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, 1906–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 21–41, which describes how British policymakers “constantly and consistently employed the concept of the balance of power” (p. 22) in private but employed more idealistic rhetoric in their public utterances.

62. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 82. For examples of other realists emphasizing this theme, see Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943); Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York: Knopf, 1951); Norman A. Graebner, America as a World Power: A Realist Appraisal from Wilson to Reagan (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1984); and Norman A. Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy: American Foreign Policy, 1945–1975, 2d ed. (New York: Van Nostrand, 1977).

63. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 79. For evidence that this kind of hypocrisy is not limited to Anglo-Saxons, see Markus Fischer, “Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices,” International Organization 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 427–66.

64. The key work on this subject is Ido Oren, “The Subjectivity of the ‘Democratic’ Peace: Changing U.S. Perceptions of Imperial Germany,” International Security 20, No. 2 (Fall 1995), pp. 147–84. For additional evidence on the examples discussed in this paragraph and the next, see Konrad H. Jarausch, “Huns, Krauts, or Good Germans? The German Image in America, 1800–1980,” in James F. Harris, ed., German-American Interrelations: Heritage and Challenge (Tubingen: Tubingen University Press, 1985), pp. 145–59; Frank Trommler, “Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural Relations, 1900–1917,” in Hans-Jurgen Schroder, ed., Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924 (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1993), pp. 99–125; and John L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), chap. 2. For discussions of how British policymakers worked to clean up Russia’s image during both world wars, see Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894–1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), pp. 342–43; and P.M.H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1990).

65. The classic statement on the profound impact of liberal ideas on American thinking is Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).

CHAPTER TWO

1. Most realist scholars allow in their theories for status quo powers that are not hegemons. At least some states, they argue, are likely to be satisfied with the balance of power and thus have no incentive to change it. See Randall L. Schweller, “Neorealism’s Status-Quo Bias: What Security Dilemma?” Security Studies 5, No. 3 (Spring 1996, special issue on “Realism: Restatements and Renewal,” ed. Benjamin Frankel), pp. 98–101; and Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), pp. 84–86, 91–92, 125–26.

2. Milton Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 14. Also see Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 5–6, 91, 119.

3. Terry Moe makes a helpful distinction between assumptions that are simply useful simplifications of reality (i.e., realistic in themselves but with unnecessary details omitted), and assumptions that are clearly contrary to reality (i.e., that directly violate well-established truths). See Moe, “On the Scientific Status of Rational Models,” American Journal of Political Science 23, No. 1 (February 1979), pp. 215–43.

4. The concept of anarchy and its consequences for international politics was first articulated by G. Lowes Dickinson, The European Anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1916). For a more recent and more elaborate discussion of anarchy, see Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 88–93. Also see Robert J. Art and Robert Jervis, eds., International Politics: Anarchy, Force, Imperialism (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), pt. 1; and Helen Milner, “The Assumption of Anarchy in International Relations Theory: A Critique,” Review of International Studies 17, No. 1 (January 1991), pp. 67–85.

5. Although the focus in this study is on the state system, realist logic can be applied to other kinds of anarchic systems. After all, it is the absence of central authority, not any special characteristic of states, that causes them to compete for power. Markus Fischer, for example, applies the theory to Europe in the Middle Ages, before the state system emerged in 1648. See Fischer, “Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and Conflictual Practices,” International Organization 46, No. 2 (Spring 1992), pp. 427–66. The theory can also be used to explain the behavior of individuals. The most important work in this regard is Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986). Also see Elijah Anderson, “The Code of the Streets,” Atlantic Monthly, May 1994, pp. 80–94; Barry R. Posen, “The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35, No. 1 (Spring 1993), pp. 27–47; and Robert J. Spitzer, The Politics of Gun Control (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1995), chap. 6.

6. Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 4th ed. (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 14.

7. The claim that states might have benign intentions is simply a starting assumption. I argue subsequently that when you combine the theory’s five assumptions, states are put in a position in which they are strongly disposed to having hostile intentions toward each other.

8. My theory ultimately argues that great powers behave offensively toward each other because that is the best way for them to guarantee their security in an anarchic world. The assumption here, however, is that there are many reasons besides security for why a state might behave aggressively toward another state. In fact, it is uncertainty about whether those non-security causes of war are at play, or might come into play, that pushes great powers to worry about their survival and thus act offensively. Security concerns alone cannot cause great powers to act aggressively. The possibility that at least one state might be motivated by non-security calculations is a necessary condition for offensive realism, as well as for any other structural theory of international politics that predicts security competition. Schweller puts the point well: “If states are assumed to seek nothing more than their own survival, why would they feel threatened? Why would they engage in balancing behavior? In a hypothetical world that has never experienced crime, the concept of security is meaningless.” Schweller, “Neorealism’s Status-Quo Bias,” p. 91. Herbert Butterfield makes essentially the same point when he writes, “Wars would hardly be likely to occur if all men were Christian saints, competing with one another in nothing, perhaps, save self-renunciation.” C. T. McIntire, ed., Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 73. Also see Jack Donnelly, Realism and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 2.

9. Quoted in Jon Jacobson, When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 271.

10. See Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), chap. 12; Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), chaps. 25–26; and Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 4.

11. Frederick Schuman introduced the concept of self-help in International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), pp. 199–202, 514, although Waltz made the concept famous in Theory of International Politics, chap. 6. On realism and alliances, see Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

12. Quoted in Martin Wight, Power Politics (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946), p. 40.

13. If one state achieves hegemony, the system ceases to be anarchic and becomes hierarchic. Offensive realism, which assumes international anarchy, has little to say about politics under hierarchy. But as discussed later, it is highly unlikely that any state will become a global hegemon, although regional hegemony is feasible. Thus, realism is likely to provide important insights about world politics for the foreseeable future, save for what goes on inside in a region that is dominated by a hegemon.

14. Although great powers always have aggressive intentions, they are not always aggressors, mainly because sometimes they do not have the capability to behave aggressively. I use the term “aggressor” throughout this book to denote great powers that have the material wherewithal to act on their aggressive intentions.

15. Kenneth Waltz maintains that great powers should not pursue hegemony but instead should aim to control an “appropriate” amount of world power. See Waltz, “The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory,” in Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds., The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 40.

16. The following hypothetical example illustrates this point. Assume that American policymakers were forced to choose between two different power balances in the Western Hemisphere. The first is the present distribution of power, whereby the United States is a hegemon that no state in the region would dare challenge militarily. In the second scenario, China replaces Canada and Germany takes the place of Mexico. Even though the United States would have a significant military advantage over both China and Germany, it is difficult to imagine any American strategist opting for this scenario over U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

17. John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2, No. 2 (January 1950), pp. 157–80. Although Dickinson did not use the term “security dilemma,” its logic is clearly articulated in European Anarchy, pp. 20, 88.

18. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism,” p. 157.

19. See Joseph M. Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation: A Realist Critique of the Newest Liberal Institutionalism,” International Organization 42, No. 3 (Summer 1988), pp. 485–507; Stephen D. Krasner, “Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier,” World Politics 43, No. 3 (April 1991), pp. 336–66; and Robert Powell, “Absolute and Relative Gains in International Relations Theory,” American Political Science Review 85, No. 4 (December 1991), pp. 1303–20.

20. See Michael Mastanduno, “Do Relative Gains Matter? America’s Response to Japanese Industrial Policy,” International Security 16, No. 1 (Summer 1991), pp. 73–113.

21. Waltz maintains that in Hans Morgenthau’s theory, states seek power as an end in itself; thus, they are concerned with absolute power, not relative power. See Waltz, “Origins of War,” pp. 40–41; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 126–27. Although Morgenthau occasionally makes statements that appear to support Waltz’s charge, there is abundant evidence in Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973) that states are concerned mainly with the pursuit of relative power.

22. Quoted in Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 36.

23. In short, the key issue for evaluating offensive realism is not whether a state is constantly trying to conquer other countries or going all out in terms of defense spending, but whether or not great powers routinely pass up promising opportunities to gain power over rivals.

24. See Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1982); James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 390–401; Robert Jervis, The Logic of Images in International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); and Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 45–51, 83, 137–42.

25. See Joel Achenbach, “The Experts in Retreat: After-the-Fact Explanations for the Gloomy Predictions,” Washington Post, February 28, 1991; and Jacob Weisberg, “Gulfballs: How the Experts Blew It, Big-Time,” New Republic, March 25, 1991.

26. Jack Snyder and Stephen Van Evera make this argument in its boldest form. See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 1, 307–8; and Van Evera, Causes of War, esp. pp. 6, 9.

27. Relatedly, some defensive realists interpret the security dilemma to say that the offensive measures a state takes to enhance its own security force rival states to respond in kind, leaving all states no better off than if they had done nothing, and possibly even worse off. See Charles L. Glaser, “The Security Dilemma Revisited,” World Politics 50, No. 1 (October 1997), pp. 171–201. Given this understanding of the security dilemma, hardly any security competition should ensue among rational states, because it would be fruitless, maybe even counterproductive, to try to gain advantage over rival powers. Indeed, it is difficult to see why states operating in a world where aggressive behavior equals self-defeating behavior would face a “security dilemma.” It would seem to make good sense for all states to forsake war and live in peace. Of course, Herz did not describe the security dilemma this way when he introduced it in 1950. As noted, his original rendition of the concept is a synoptic statement of offensive realism.

28. Although threatened states sometimes balance efficiently against aggressors, they often do not, thereby creating opportunities for successful offense. This matter will be discussed at length in Chapters 8 and 9. Snyder appears to be aware of this problem, as he adds the important qualifier “at least in the long run” to his claim that “states typically form balancing alliances to resist aggressors.” Myths of Empire, p. 11. Aggressors, however, will be tempted to win victory in the short term, hoping they can use their success to shape the long term to their advantage. Regarding the offense-defense balance, it is an amorphous concept that is especially difficult for scholars and policymakers to define and measure. See “Correspondence: Taking Offense at Offense-Defense Theory,” International Security 23, No. 3 (Winter 1998–99), pp. 179–206; Jack S. Levy, “The Offensive/Defensive Balance of Military Technology: A Theoretical and Historical Analysis,” International Studies Quarterly 28, No. 2 (June 1984), pp. 219–38; Kier A. Lieber, “Grasping the Technological Peace: The Offense-Defense Balance and International Security,” International Security 25, No. 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 71–104; Sean M. Lynn-Jones, “Offense-Defense Theory and Its Critics,” Security Studies 4, No. 4 (Summer 1995), pp. 672–74; John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 24–27; and Jonathan Shimshoni, “Technology, Military Advantage, and World War I: A Case for Military Entrepreneurship,” International Security 15, No. 3 (Winter 1990–91), pp. 187–215. More important, there is little evidence that defense invariably has a crushing advantage over offense. As discussed in the remainder of this paragraph, states sometimes attack and lose, whereas at other times they attack and win.

29. John Arquilla, Dubious Battles: Aggression, Defeat, and the International System (Washington, DC: Crane Russak, 1992), p. 2. Also see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 21–22; and Kevin Wang and James Ray, “Beginners and Winners: The Fate of Initiators of Interstate Wars Involving Great Powers since 1495,” International Studies Quarterly 38, No. 1 (March 1994), pp. 139–54.

30. Although Snyder and Van Evera maintain that conquest rarely pays, both concede in subtle but important ways that aggression sometimes succeeds. Snyder, for example, distinguishes between expansion (successful offense) and overexpansion (unsuccessful offense), which is the behavior that he wants to explain. See, for example, his discussion of Japanese expansion between 1868 and 1945 in Myths of Empire, pp. 114–16. Van Evera allows for variation in the offense-defense balance, to include a few periods where conquest is feasible. See Causes of War, chap. 6. Of course, allowing for successful aggression contradicts their central claim that offense hardly ever succeeds.

31. See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 29; and William C. Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 12–14.

32. In subsequent chapters, the power-projection problems associated with large bodies of water are taken into account when measuring the distribution of power (see Chapter 4). Those two factors are treated separately here, however, simply to highlight the profound influence that oceans have on the behavior of great powers.

33. For an opposing view, see David M. Edelstein, “Choosing Friends and Enemies: Perceptions of Intentions in International Relations,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, August 2000; Andrew Kydd, “Why Security Seekers Do Not Fight Each Other,” Security Studies 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 114–54; and Walt, Origins of Alliances.

34. See note 8 in this chapter.

35. Jacob Viner, “Power versus Plenty as Objectives of Foreign Policy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” World Politics 1, No. 1 (October 1948), p. 10.

36. See Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (London: Penguin, 1999); Alison Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), pp. 623–25; and Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 274–75.

37. See Scott R. Feil, Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1998); and John Mueller, “The Banality of ‘Ethnic War,’“ International Security 25, No. 1 (Summer 2000), pp. 58–62. For a less sanguine view of how many lives would have been saved had the United States intervened in Rwanda, see Alan J. Kuperman, “Rwanda in Retrospect,” Foreign Affairs 79, No. 1 (January–February 2000), pp. 94–118.

38. See David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), chaps. 4–6; Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Stephen Van Evera, “Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn’t: American Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, No. 2 (June 1990), pp. 25–30.

39. Quoted in John M. Carroll and George C. Herring, eds., Modern American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), p. 122.

40. Nikita Khrushchev makes a similar point about Stalin’s policy toward Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek during World War II: “Despite his conflict with the Chinese Communist Party, Chiang Kai-shek was fighting against Japanese imperialism. Therefore, Stalin—and consequently the Soviet government—considered Chiang a progressive force. Japan was our number one enemy in the East, so it was in the interests of the Soviet Union to support Chiang. Of course, we supported him only insofar as we didn’t want to see him defeated by the Japanese—in much the same way that Churchill, who had been our enemy since the first days of the Soviet Union, was sensible enough to support us in the war against Hitler.” Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament, trans. and ed. Strobe Talbott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 237–38.

41. See Walt, Origins of Alliances, pp. 5, 266–68.

42. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), Vol. 1, p. 487. All the quotes in this paragraph are from pp. 484–87 of that book.

43. For an overview of the Anglo-Dutch rivalry, see Jack S. Levy, “The Rise and Decline of the Anglo-Dutch Rivalry, 1609–1689,” in William R. Thompson, ed., Great Power Rivalries (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 172–200; and Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976), chap. 2. This example has direct bearing on the earlier discussion of relative versus absolute power. Specifically, without the Navigation Act, both England and Holland probably would have made greater absolute gains, because their economies would have benefited from open trade. England, however, probably would not have gained much of a relative advantage over Holland. With the Navigation Act, England gained a significant relative advantage over Holland, but both sides suffered in terms of absolute gains. The bottom line is that relative power considerations drive great-power behavior.

44. William J. Clinton, “Address by the President to the 48th Session of the United Nations General Assembly,” United Nations, New York, September 27, 1993. Also see George Bush, “Toward a New World Order: Address by the President to a Joint Session of Congress,” September 11, 1990.

45. Bradley Thayer examined whether the victorious powers were able to create and maintain stable security orders in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II, or whether they competed among themselves for power, as realism would predict. In particular, he looked at the workings of the Concert of Europe, the League of Nations, and the United Nations, which were purportedly designed to limit, if not eliminate, realist behavior by the great powers. Thayer concludes that the rhetoric of the triumphant powers notwithstanding, they remained firmly committed to gaining power at each other’s expense. See Bradley A. Thayer, “Creating Stability in New World Orders,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, August 1996. Also see Korina Kagan, “The Myth of the European Concert,” Security Studies 7, No. 2 (Winter 1997–98), pp. 1–57. She concludes that the Concert of Europe “was a weak and ineffective institution that was largely irrelevant to great power behavior” (p. 3).

46. See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

47. For a discussion of American efforts to undermine Soviet control of Eastern Europe, see Peter Grose, Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War behind the Iron Curtain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); and Gregory Mitrovich, Undermining the Kremlin: America’s Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947–1956 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

48. For a synoptic discussion of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union in the late 1980s that cites most of the key sources on the subject, see Randall L. Schweller and William C. Wohlforth, “Power Test: Evaluating Realism in Response to the End of the Cold War,” Security Studies 9, No. 3 (Spring 2000), pp. 91–97.

49. The editors of a major book on the Treaty of Versailles write, “The resulting reappraisal, as documented in this book, constitutes a new synthesis of peace conference scholarship. The findings call attention to divergent peace aims within the American and Allied camps and underscore the degree to which the negotiators themselves considered the Versailles Treaty a work in progress.” Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1.

50. This paragraph draws heavily on Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace; and Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), chaps. 4–5. Also see G. John Ikenberry, “Rethinking the Origins of American Hegemony,” Political Science Quarterly 104, No. 3 (Autumn 1989), pp. 375–400.

51. The failure of American policymakers during the early Cold War to understand where the security competition in Europe was leading is summarized by Trachtenberg, who asks the rhetorical question, “Had anyone predicted that a system of this sort would emerge, and that it would provide the basis for a very durable peace?” His answer: “The predictions that were made pointed as a rule in the opposite direction: that Germany could not be kept down forever; that the Federal Republic would ultimately…want nuclear forces of her own; that U.S. troops could not be expected to remain in…Europe…. Yet all these predictions—every single one—turned out to be wrong.” Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, pp. 231–32. Also see Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, pp. vii–viii.

52. For more discussion of the pitfalls of collective security, see John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of International Institutions,” International Security 19, No. 3 (Winter 1994–95), pp. 26–37.

53. See Grieco, “Anarchy and the Limits of Cooperation,” pp. 498, 500.

54. For evidence of relative gains considerations thwarting cooperation among states, see Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), chap. 3.

55. Charles Lipson, “International Cooperation in Economic and Security Affairs,” World Politics 37, No. 1 (October 1984), p. 14.

56. See Randall L. Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 72–107. See also the works cited in note 59 in this chapter.

57. See Misha Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War, 3d rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 149; Philip Sherwell and Alina Petric, “Tudjman Tapes Reveal Plans to Divide Bosnia and Hide War Crimes,” Sunday Telegraph (London), June 18, 2000; Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 131–32, 213; and Warren Zimmerman, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers—America’s Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why (New York: Times Books, 1996), pp. 116–17.

58. See John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Penguin, 1988), chap. 2; and J. M. Roberts, Europe, 1880–1945 (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 239–41.

59. For information on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the ensuing cooperation between those states, see Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1991), chaps. 14–15; I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 780–82; Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–1941 (New York: Norton, 1988); Geoffrey Roberts, The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), chaps. 8–10; and Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), chap. 6.

60. Waltz maintains that structural theories can explain international outcomes—i.e., whether war is more likely in bipolar or multipolar systems—but that they cannot explain the foreign policy behavior of particular states. A separate theory of foreign policy, he argues, is needed for that task. See Theory of International Politics, pp. 71–72, 121–23. Colin Elman challenges Waltz on this point, arguing that there is no logical reason why systemic theories cannot be used as a theory of foreign policy. The key issue, as Elman notes, is whether the particular structural theory helps us understand the foreign policy decisions that states make. I will attempt to show that offensive realism can be used to explain both the foreign policy of individual states and international outcomes. See Colin Elman, “Horses for Courses: Why Not Neorealist Theories of Foreign Policy?” Kenneth N. Waltz, “International Politics Is Not Foreign Policy” and Colin Elman, “Cause, Effect, and Consistency: A Response to Kenneth Waltz,” in Security Studies 6, No. 1 (Autumn 1996), pp. 7–61.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Power can be defined in different ways, raising the question of which definition is correct. A scholar’s theory, in fact, determines the appropriate definition. Whether my definition makes good sense depends on how well offensive realism explains international politics.

2. For elaboration of these two ways of thinking about power, see Bruce Russett and Harvey Starr, World Politics: The Menu for Choice (New York: Freeman, 1989), chap. 6; and William C. Wohlforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 3–5. Furthermore, some scholars (such as Wohlforth) maintain that there is a sharp distinction between how policymakers perceive the balance of power and the actual balance itself, and that what really matters for understanding international politics is the picture of the balance that policymakers have in their heads. I disagree with this line of argument. As will become clear in subsequent chapters, policymakers usually have a good sense of the actual balance of power, although they occasionally miscalculate the power of rival states. Therefore, one need not focus on perceptions of power to explain how states behave.

3. Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” Behavioral Science 2, No. 3 (July 1957), pp. 202–3. Also see David A. Baldwin, Paradoxes of Power (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989); and Karl W. Deutsch, The Analysis of International Relations (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), chap. 3.

4. A good example of this literature is A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 3. Also see Jacek Kugler and William Domke, “Comparing the Strength of Nations,” Comparative Political Studies 19, No. 1 (April 1986), pp. 39–70; and Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds., Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of the War Ledger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

5. Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War (New York: Free Press, 1973), chap. 8. The quote is from p. 119. Also see James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49, No. 3 (Summer 1995), pp. 379–414.

6. See Zeev Maoz, “Power, Capabilities, and Paradoxical Conflict Outcomes,” World Politics 41, No. 2 (January 1989), pp. 239–66. As discussed in the next chapter, military power incorporates the number of fighting forces as well as their quality.

7. John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 33–35, 58–60. Also see Mark Harrison, “The Economics of World War II: An Overview,” in Mark Harrison, ed., The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2.

8. See Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence; T. V. Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Dan Reiter, “Military Strategy and the Outbreak of International Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, No. 3 (June 1999), pp. 366–87.

9. Brian Bond, France and Belgium, 1939–1940 (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975); Phillip A. Karber et al., Assessing the Correlation of Forces: France 1940, Report No. BDM/W-79-560-TR (McLean, VA: BDM Corporation, June 18, 1979); and Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 82–94.

10. On the details of the Schlieffen Plan, see Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan, trans. Andrew and Eva Wilson (London: Oswald Wolff, 1958). Regarding the claim that Schlieffen’s original version probably would have worked, see Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 279–80; Walter Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff, 1657–1945, trans. Brian Battershaw (New York: Praeger, 1953), p. 135; and L.C.F. Turner, “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 8, No. 1 (April 1967), pp. 52–53, 59–63.

11. During the latter half of the Cold War, there was much interest in doing net assessments of the conventional balance in Europe to determine whether the Warsaw Pact was likely to score a quick and decisive victory against NATO. It was commonplace for analysts of that balance (and others) to focus on the material assets available to each side while paying little attention to the likely strategies that the opposing sides would employ. The underlying assumption was that the balance of power alone would determine the result. However, the outcome of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would surely have depended on strategy as well as numbers. Thus, net assessments of the European balance (and others) should have considered both strategy and the balance of material assets. See John J. Mearsheimer, “Numbers, Strategy, and the European Balance,” International Security 12, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 174–85.

12. This discussion of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia is based largely on David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Macmillan, 1996), pts. 13–14; Christopher Duffy, Borodino and the War of 1812 (New York: Scribner’s, 1973); Vincent J. Esposito and John R. Elting, A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars (New York: Praeger, 1965); and Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon: From Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807–1815, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), chap. 9.

13. The numbers in this paragraph are from Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 750, 754–55, 852–53. Also see the numbers on the size of the French and Russian armies in Table 8.2 of this book.

14. It appears that Russia’s strategy was not the result of a conscious policy decision but was forced on it by the unfolding campaign. See Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 764–65, 859; and Lefebvre, Napoleon, p. 313. Regardless of the reasons behind it, the strategy worked brilliantly.

15. For an excellent statistical graphic of the disintegration of Napoleon’s army, see Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1983), pp. 41, 176.

16. See Jonathan Kirshner, “Rationalist Explanations for War?” Security Studies 10, No. 1 (Autumn 2000), pp. 153–61. Also see Alan Beyerchen, “Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War,” International Security 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992–93), pp. 59–90, which overstates the difficulty of predicting which side will win a war but nevertheless makes some important points on the matter.

17. See Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), pp. 191–92; and Wohlforth, Elusive Balance, p. 4.

18. See Klaus Knorr, The War Potential of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956); and Klaus Knorr, Military Power and Potential (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1970).

19. Among the best works on population and military capability are Kingsley Davis, “The Demographic Foundations of National Power,” in Morroe Berger, Theodore Abel, and Charles H. Page, eds., Freedom and Control in Modern Societies (New York: Van Nostrand, 1954), pp. 206–42; Katherine Organski and A.F.K. Organski, Population and World Power (New York: Knopf, 1961); and Michael S. Teitelbaum and Jay M. Winter, The Fear of Population Decline (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985).

20. The Chinese and Russian figures are from World Bank Atlas, 2000 (Washington, DC: World Bank, April 2000), pp. 24–25. The U.S. figure is from the Census Bureau.

21. Simon Kuznets, Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), chap. 2.

22. On the importance of wealth for military might, see Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976); Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987); A.F.K. Organski, World Politics, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1968); and Organski and Kugler, War Ledger.

23. On the cost of World War I, see Ernest L. Bogart, Direct and Indirect Costs of the Great World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919), p. 299; Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) p. 195; Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 322–23; and Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 153. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that the cost of World War I—measured in 1995 dollars—was about $4.5 trillion, and that World War II cost a staggering $13 trillion. See “The 2000 Chart of Armed Conflict,” insert to IISS, The Military Balance, 2000/2001 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, October 2000).

24. America’s GNP in 1940 was $101 billion. These figures are from I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 1059, 1182. For a more general discussion of the costs of World War II, see Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 3.

25. One might seek to remedy this problem by relying on per capita GNP, since it neutralizes the effect of differences in population size between states. But, as emphasized, it is imperative to account for population size, because it is an important ingredient of latent power. For example, relying only on per capita GNP, one would conclude that Singapore has much more latent power than China does today, because Singapore has a much higher per capita GNP than China. This conclusion obviously makes little sense.

26. See Bernard Brodie, “Technological Change, Strategic Doctrine, and Political Outcomes,” in Klaus Knorr, ed., Historical Dimensions of National Security Problems (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976), pp. 263–306; Karl Lautenschlager, “Technology and the Evolution of Naval Warfare,” International Security 8, No. 2 (Fall 1983), pp. 3–51; William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of War: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chaps. 6–10; and Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). Differences in industrial might sometimes have other consequences that affect the balance of latent power. Advanced industrial states usually can build the logistical capacity (roads, trucks, railroads, transport ships, cargo planes) to support large military forces. Industrially backward states invariably cannot create these ingredients of military success. Modern industrial states are also likely to have better-educated populations than do semi-industrialized states, and higher education levels tend to correlate with better military performance. Finally, modern militaries are large and complex organizations that need to be managed, which is why general staffs are indispensable. Highly industrialized states tend to have considerable expertise in managing large organizations, because they are populated with large economic institutions. During World War I, for example, semi-industrialized Russia was plagued with significant logistical problems, poorly educated soldiers, and an inadequate staff system. Highly industrialized Germany, on the other hand, had excellent logistics, well-educated soldiers, and the best staff system among the warring powers.

27. A problem with The War Ledger is that Organski and Kugler use GNP to measure power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See William B. Moul, “Measuring the ‘Balances of Power’: A Look at Some Numbers,” Review of International Studies 15, No. 2 (April 1989), pp. 107–15. They also equate latent power with actual power, which are not always commensurate, as discussed later in this chapter.

28. Although the United Kingdom was an economic colossus during this period, it did not build formidable military forces, for reasons discussed later in this chapter.

29. See William C. Fuller, Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600–1914 (New York: Free Press, 1992), chaps. 6–9.

30. The numbers in this paragraph are from World Bank Atlas, 2000, pp. 42–43; and World Bank, Knowledge for Development: World Development Report 1998/1999 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 212. The 1980 figure is for gross domestic product (GDP), which roughly approximates GNP in these cases.

31. On the importance of energy for measuring wealth, see Oskar Morgenstern, Klaus Knorr, and Klaus P. Heiss, Long Term Projections of Power: Political, Economic, and Military Forecasting (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1973), esp. chap. 6. Regarding steel, see Ray S. Cline, World Power Assessment, 1977: A Calculus of Strategic Drift (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977), pp. 68–69.

32. It might seem unusual to switch indicators of latent power, but as Moul notes, “to test a theory in various historical and temporal contexts requires equivalent, not identical, measures.” Moul, “Measuring,” p. 103.

33. See William T. Hogan, Global Steel in the 1990s: Growth or Decline? (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1991); Paul A. Tiffany, “The American Steel Industry in the Postwar Era: Dominance and Decline,” in Etsuo Abe and Yoshitaka Suzuki, eds., Changing Patterns of International Rivalry: Some Lessons from the Steel Industry (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1991), pp. 245–65. It is worth noting that when Cline updated World Power Assessment, 1977 in the early 1990s, steel was no longer considered a key indicator of economic might. See Ray S. Cline, The Power of Nations in the 1990s: A Strategic Assessment (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), pp. 51–68.

34. There is no good comparative data on American and Soviet GNP for every year of the Cold War. The data set I used, which begins in 1960 and covers each remaining year of the Cold War, is from the World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Database of the former U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). For the post–Cold War period, I use GNP numbers from the World Bank.

35. There is good reason to think that switching indicators in 1960 does not distort my analysis of the balance of latent power between the superpowers. In 1968 and again in 1976, the Joint Economic Committee of Congress published comparative data on American and Soviet GNP for scattered years of the Cold War. The 1968 publication provides GNP figures for 1950, 1955, 1961, and 1965, and the 1975 study gives GNP figures for 1948, 1950, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1970, and 1975. In each publication, the relative share of GNP that the United States and the Soviet Union control for the relevant years is hardly different from the percentages described in Table 3.5. See U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economic Performance, 1966–67, 90th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, May 1968), p. 16; U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, Soviet Economy in a New Perspective, 94th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 14, 1976), p. 246.

36. See J. David Singer and Melvin Small, National Material Capabilities Data, 1816–1985 (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, February 1993), pp. 108-1, 132-1.

37. These figures are from ibid., p. 132-1.

38. Steven T. Ross, European Diplomatic History, 1789–1815: France against Europe (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969), chap. 11.

39. Roughly 200,000 French troops were fighting in Spain when Napoleon attacked Russia in June 1812. Nevertheless, Napoleon still had 674,000 troops available for the attack on Russia. Chandler, Campaigns of Napoleon, pp. 754–55. About 70 percent of Germany’s divisions were on the eastern front in June 1941, including almost all of the Wehrmacht’s best units. That ratio remained largely unchanged until late 1943, when Germany began building up its forces in France in anticipation of the Normandy invasion, which came on June 6, 1944. See Jonathan R. Adelman, Prelude to the Cold War: The Tsarist, Soviet, and U.S. Armies in the Two World Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988), pp. 130–31; and Jonathan R. Adelman, Revolution, Armies, and War: A Political History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1985), pp. 71–72.

40. Adelman, Prelude, p. 40; and Adelman, Revolution, pp. 69–70. One might argue that this analysis does not account for the fact that the Austro-Hungarian army fought in the east with Germany in World War I but not in World War II. It is clear from what transpired on the battlefield during World War I, however, that the feeble Austro-Hungarian army was probably more of a liability than an asset for the Germans. See Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (New York: Arnold, 1997). Furthermore, a substantial number of Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, and Romanian forces were fighting with Germany on the eastern front in World War II. See Adelman, Revolution, pp. 71–72.

41. Norman Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919–20 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972); Thomas C. Fiddick, Russia’s Retreat from Poland, 1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); Piotr S. Wandycz, Soviet-Polish Relations, 1917–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); and Adam Zamoyski, The Battle for the Marchlands, Eastern European Monograph No. 88 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

42. See Francois Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24, No. 4 (December 1964), pp. 567–90; and Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780–1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978), chap. 3. Also see the figures for 1816 in Table 3.3.

43. See Paul Bairoch, “International Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History 11, No. 2 (Fall 1982), pp. 281, 292, 294, 296 (some of Bairoch’s data is reprinted in Kennedy, Great Powers, p. 149); Fuller, Strategy and Power, pp. 151–53; Arcadius Kahan, The Plow, the Hammer, and the Knout: An Economic History of Eighteenth-Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and W. W. Rostow, “The Beginnings of Modern Growth in Europe: An Essay in Synthesis,” Journal of Economic History 33, No. 3 (September 1973), p. 555.

44. See David R. Jones, “The Soviet Defense Burden through the Prism of History,” in Carl G. Jacobsen, ed., The Soviet Defense Enigma: Estimating Costs and Burdens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 154–61; Walter M. Pintner, “Russia as a Great Power, 1709–1856: Reflections on the Problem of Relative Backwardness, with Special Reference to the Russian Army and Russian Society,” Occasional Paper No. 33 (Washington, DC: Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, July 18, 1978); and Walter M. Pintner, “The Burden of Defense in Imperial Russia, 1725–1914,” Russian Review 43, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 231–59.

45. D. N. Collins, “The Franco-Russian Alliance and Russian Railways, 1891–1914,” Historical Journal 16, No. 4 (December 1973), pp. 777–88.

46. On the weakness of the Russian economy before World War I, see Raymond W. Goldsmith, “The Economic Growth of Tsarist Russia, 1860–1913,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 9, No. 3 (April 1961), pp. 441–75; Paul R. Gregory, Russian National Income, 1885–1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), chap. 7; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR, 1917–1991, 3d ed. (New York: Penguin, 1992), chap. 1; and Clive Trebilcock, The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, 1780–1914 (New York: Longman, 1981), chaps. 4, 7.

47. All of the quotes and figures in this paragraph are from Adelman, Revolution, pp. 88–92. Also see ibid., pp. 85–86; Adelman, Prelude, pp. 32–37, 44–45; and Peter Gatrell and Mark Harrison, “The Russian and Soviet Economies in Two World Wars: A Comparative View,” Economic History Review 46, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 425–52.

48. For a graphic depiction of the effects of Stalin’s economic policies, see the table titled “Soviet Heavy Industry Output, 1928–1945,” in Mark Harrison, Soviet Planning in Peace and War, 1938–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 253. For a more general discussion, see R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison, and S. G. Wheatcroft, eds., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

49. These numbers are from Adelman, Revolution, p. 92; Adelman uses slightly different numbers in Prelude, p. 219. Also see David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 306; Harrison, “Economics of World War II,” pp. 15–17; and Richard J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 331–32.

50. The Soviet Union did not defeat Nazi Germany simply by building more weapons. The fighting skills of the Red Army also improved markedly between 1941 and 1945. During the first two years of the conflict, for example, the Soviets lost between six and seven armored vehicles for every German one. By the fall of 1944, however, the ratio was approximately 1:1. See Overy, Why the Allies Won, p. 212. Also see Glantz, When Titans Clashed, esp. pp. 286–89; and F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War, trans. H. Betzler (New York: Ballantine, 1976), pp. 349–67.

51. The Soviet Union’s only serious competitor was the United Kingdom, which produced less steel and consumed less energy than the Soviet Union for every year from 1946 to 1950. See Singer and Small, National Material Capabilities Data, 1816–1985, pp. 91-1, 188-1. Also see Chapter 8 of this book.

52. Addressing Western diplomats on November 18, 1956, Khrushchev said, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” Quoted in William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), p. 171.

53. Gus Ofer, “Soviet Economic Growth: 1928–1985,” Journal of Economic Literature 25, No. 4 (December 1987), pp. 1767–833.

54. William E. Odom, “Soviet Force Posture: Dilemmas and Directions,” Problems of Communism 34, No. 4 (July–August 1985), pp. 1–14; and Notra Trulock III, “Emerging Technologies and Future War: A Soviet View,” in Andrew W. Marshall and Charles Wolf, eds., The Future Security Environment, report submitted to the Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, October 1988), pp. 97–163. It is commonplace in the post–Cold War world to emphasize the former Soviet Union’s inefficiencies, and there were many for sure. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that the Soviet Union was good at employing draconian measures to harness underutilized resources, as Stalin showed in the 1930s, and it was good at mobilizing resources under emergency conditions, as happened between 1941 and 1945.

55. This point is made by Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 273–81.

56. Students of international political economy sometimes refer to the nineteenth-century United Kingdom as a hegemon. See Stephen D. Krasner, “State Power and the Structure of International Trade,” World Politics 28, No. 3 (April 1976), pp. 317–47. But this is because they usually focus their attention on economic issues and pay little attention to military power. Students who emphasize the importance of security competition, on the other hand, usually describe Europe in the 1800s as multipolar.

57. See J. M. Hobson, “The Military-Extraction Gap and the Wary Titan: The Fiscal-Sociology of British Defence Policy, 1870–1913,” Journal of European Economic History 22, No. 3 (Winter 1993), pp. 461–503; Paul M. Kennedy, “The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846–1914,” Past and Present, No. 125 (November 1989), pp. 186–92; Jacek Kugler and Marina Arbetman, “Choosing among Measures of Power: A Review of the Empirical Record,” in Richard J. Stoll and Michael D. Ward, eds., Power in World Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1989), p. 76; and Quincy Wright, A Study of War, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), pp. 670–71.

58. Some of Germany’s leading scholars in the early twentieth century (e.g., Hans Delbruck and Otto Hintze) mistakenly believed that Wilhelmine Germany would lead a balancing coalition against the United Kingdom, because the United Kingdom was especially wealthy and had a powerful navy. Instead, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia allied against Germany. See Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century, trans. Dieter Pevsner (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 45–47, 51–55. As discussed later in this chapter, Europe’s great powers balanced against Germany and not the United Kingdom because Germany had a large army with significant offensive capability, whereas the United Kingdom had a small army with hardly any offensive capability against another great power.

59. Paul Kennedy’s Great Powers has various tables (pp. 149, 154, 199–203, 243) that illustrate the great wealth as well as the military weakness of the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century. Also see Hobson, “The Military-Extraction Gap,” pp. 478–80; and Table 6.2 in this book.

60. R.A.C. Parker, “Economics, Rearmament, and Foreign Policy: The United Kingdom before 1939—A Preliminary Study,” Journal of Contemporary History 10, No. 4 (October 1975), pp. 637–47; G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury: 1932–1939 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979); and Robert P. Shay, Jr., British Rearmament in the Thirties: Politics and Profits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).

61. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), esp. chaps. 4, 6; Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and Its Cold War Grand Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 93–98, 127–39; John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), chaps. 5–6; and Glenn H. Snyder, “The ‘New Look’ of 1953,” in Warner R. Schilling, Paul Y. Hammond, and Glenn H. Snyder, Strategy, Politics, and Defense Budgets (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 379–524.

62. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency usually estimated that the Soviets spent roughly three times as much of their GNP on defense as did the United States, although this number was criticized by some for being too low, and by others for being too high. Nevertheless, almost all the experts agreed that the Soviets spent a larger share of their GNP on defense than did the United States.

63. See Walt, Origins of Alliances, pp. 289–91.

64. Japan’s GNP in 1979 was $2.076 trillion, while Soviet GNP was $2.445 trillion. Japan closed the gap over the next seven years, so that in 1987, its GNP was $2.772 trillion, while Soviet GNP was $2.75 trillion. All figures are from ACDA’s World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Database.

65. Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), chap. 3; and Milward, War, Economy, and Society, chap. 5.

66. Harrison, Soviet Planning, pp. 64, 125. Also see Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 182–83.

67. Mark Harrison, “Resource Mobilization for World War II: The USA, UK, USSR, and Germany, 1938–1945,” Economic History Review 2d Ser., Vol. 41, No. 2 (May 1988), p. 185. Also see Dear, ed., Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 1218.

68. Overy, Why the Allies Won, p. 332.

69. Adelman, Revolution, pp. 106–7. These numbers should be considered rough approximations. In fact, Adelman writes in Prelude (p. 174) that the Soviets had 488 divisions by January 1945. Furthermore, at least two sources credit the Germans with slightly more than 300 divisions by early 1945. See Dear, ed., Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 471; and N. I. Anisimov, Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941–1945: A General Outline (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), p. 437. Regarding the equipment differences inside the opposing divisions, see R. L. DiNardo, Mechanized Juggernaut or Military Anachronism? Horses and the German Army of World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991).

70. Harrison, “Economics of World War II,” p. 21.

71. One widely cited Soviet study estimates that Lend-Lease accounted for 4 percent of Soviet output during the war. But that figure is probably too low; Adelman estimates that the figure should be 10 percent. See Adelman, Prelude, pp. 223–24; Mark Harrison, “The Second World War,” in Davies et al., eds., Economic Transformation, pp. 250–52; and Boris K. Sokolov, “The Role of Lend-Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941–1945,” trans. David M. Glantz, Journal of Slavic Military Studies 7, No. 3 (September 1994), pp. 567–86.

72. See Werner Abelshauser, “Germany: Guns, Butter, and Economic Miracles,” in Harrison, ed., Economics of World War II, pp. 151–70; Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944–1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), chap. 1; Richard J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); and Overy, Why the Allies Won, chaps. 6–7.

73. See Wright, A Study of War, vol. 1, pp. 670–71, tables 58, 59. As noted, the United Kingdom also spent a smaller percentage of its wealth on defense than did its continental rivals, because it is separated from the continent by a large body of water.

74. Quoted in Hobson, “The Military-Extraction Gap,” p. 495. For general discussions of the British army between 1870 and 1914, see Correlli Barnett, Britain and Her Army, 1509–1970: A Military, Political, and Social Survey (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1974), chaps. 13–15; David French, The British Way in Warfare, 1688–2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), chaps. 5–6; and Edward M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868–1902 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1992). Also see A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1954), introduction.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Alfred T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, 12th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918).

2. Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (New York: Coward-McCann, 1942).

3. This is not to deny that the United States and its allies maintained formidable ground forces in Europe during most of the Cold War, which is why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stood a good chance of thwarting a Soviet conventional attack. See John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Soviets Can’t Win Quickly in Central Europe,” International Security 7, No. 1 (Summer 1982), pp. 3–39; and Barry R. Posen, “Measuring the European Conventional Balance: Coping with Complexity in Threat Assessment,” International Security 9, No. 3 (Winter 1984–85), pp. 47–88. Nevertheless, unlike the Soviet army, the U.S. army was never in a position to overrun Europe. In fact, it was probably only the third most powerful standing army on the continent, behind the Soviet and West German armies. On or near the central front of the Cold War were roughly 26 Soviet divisions, 12 West German divisions, and slightly fewer than 6 American divisions. U.S. divisions, however, were bigger and more formidable than their West German and Soviet counterparts. But even allowing for these differences, the American army was still the third most powerful fighting force in Europe. Regarding the relative combat potential of American, West German, and Soviet divisions, see William P. Mako, U.S. Ground Forces and the Defense of Central Europe (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1983), pp. 105–25.

4. And marines are essentially small armies that go by a different name.

5. Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (1911; rpt., Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1988), p. 16. Corbett also writes that “it scarcely needs saying that it is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone” (p. 15).

6. See John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), esp. chap. 2.

7. On command of the sea, see Corbett, Principles of Maritime Strategy, pp. 91–106. For a good primer on naval strategy, see Geoffrey Till et al., Maritime Strategy and the Nuclear Age (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982).

8. States also aim to command the sea and the air so they can protect their own homeland from attack by the enemy.

9. Not surprisingly, Mahan, who was a staunch advocate of independent naval power, disliked amphibious operations, which required the navy to support the army. See Jon T. Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 45.

10. This distinction between amphibious assaults and amphibious landings is taken from Jeter A. Isely and Philip A. Crowl, The U.S. Marines and Amphibious War: Its Theory and Its Practice in the Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 8, although I define the concepts somewhat differently than they do.

11. Raids are a fourth kind of amphibious operation. Raids are where a navy briefly places troops on an enemy’s coast to destroy particular targets but then takes them back to sea when the mission is completed (or fails). The disastrous Allied landing along the French coast at Dieppe in August 1942 is an example of a raid. See Brian L. Villa, Unauthorized Action: Mountbatten and the Dieppe Raid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Another example is the British operation at Zeebrugge in April 1918. See Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1994), pp. 411–16. I largely ignore raids, not because they usually fail, but because they are trivial operations that have little influence on the outcomes of wars.

12. Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1991), p. 81.

13. Quoted in Brian R. Sullivan, “Mahan’s Blindness and Brilliance,” Joint Forces Quarterly, No. 21 (Spring 1999), p. 116.

14. John Lehman, who was secretary of the navy in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, frequently asserted that, in the event of war with the Soviet Union, American aircraft carriers would move close to the Soviet mainland, specifically the Kola Peninsula, and strike important military targets. But hardly an admiral could be found to support that idea. Adm. Stansfield Turner wrote that Lehman “advocates a strategy for the Navy of ‘maneuver, initiative, and offense.’ Presumably, he is reaffirming his many public statements that our Navy is going to be capable of carrying the war right to the Soviets’ home bases and airfields. This sounds stirring and patriotic. The only problem is that I have yet to find one admiral who believes that the U.S. Navy would even attempt it.” Letter to the editor, Foreign Affairs 61, No. 2 (Winter 1982–83), p. 457. Submarines, however, can now deliver conventionally armed cruise missiles to a rival’s homeland with relative impunity. See Owen R. Cote, Jr., Precision Strike from the Sea: New Missions for a New Navy, Security Studies Program Conference Report (Cambridge: MIT, July 1998); and Owen R. Cote, Jr., Mobile Targets from under the Sea: New Submarine Missions in the New Security Environment, Security Studies Program Conference Report (Cambridge: MIT, April 2000).

15. Quoted in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 253. Also see Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy, pp. 45–47; and Allan Westcott, Mahan on Naval Warfare: Selections from the Writings of Rear Admiral Alfred T. Mahan (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1919), pp. 91–99, 328–41. For Corbett’s views on blockade, see Principles of Maritime Strategy, pp. 95–102, 183–208. Although Mahan believed that independent sea power, not land power, was the decisive military instrument, it is widely recognized that there are fatal flaws in his analysis. See Philip A. Crowl, “Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian,” in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 444–77; Gerald S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy: Studies in British Maritime Ascendancy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); and Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, esp. introduction and chap. 7.

16. Two other cases rarely mentioned in the literature on blockade but that might be included in this list are Germany’s efforts in World Wars I and II to use its geographic advantage and its navy to stop Russian/Soviet trade with the outside world. I did not include these cases, however, because Germany made only a minor effort to isolate Russia in both conflicts. Nevertheless, the German blockades had little effect on the outcome of either war, and thus they support my argument about the limited utility of independent sea power.

17. Among the best sources on the Continental System are Geoffrey Ellis, Napoleon’s Continental Blockade: The Case of Alsace (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981); Eli F. Heckscher, The Continental System: An Economic Interpretation, trans. C. S. Fearenside (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922); Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon, vol. 2, From Tilsit to Waterloo, 1807–1815, trans. J. E. Anderson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), chap. 4; and Mancur Olson, Jr., The Economics of the Wartime Shortage: A History of British Food Supplies in the Napoleonic War and in World Wars I and II (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963), chap. 3.

18. Concerning the United Kingdom’s blockade of France between 1792 and 1815, see Francois Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade, and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24, No. 4 (December 1964), pp. 567–90; Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, chap. 5; and Herbert W. Richmond, Statesmen and Seapower (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), pp. 170–257. In its various wars with France during the eighteenth century, the United Kingdom tried to bring its rival to its knees by cutting French overseas commerce. See Graham, Politics of Naval Supremacy, pp. 19–20. But as Graham notes, “There is no evidence to suggest that the denial of colonial commerce materially altered the French strategic position on the Continent” (p. 19). Also see Michael Howard, The British Way in Warfare: A Reappraisal, 1974 Neale Lecture in English History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), pp. 15–20.

19. Regarding the French blockade of Prussia, see Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France, 1870–1871 (London: Dorset Press, 1961), pp. 74–76; and Theodore Ropp, The Development of a Modern Navy: French Naval Policy, 1871–1904, ed. Stephen S. Roberts (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1987), pp. 22–25.

20. Some of the best sources on Germany’s blockade of Britain in World War I are Olson, Economics of the Wartime Shortage, chap. 4; E. B. Potter and Chester W. Nimitz, Sea Power: A Naval History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), chap. 25; John Terraine, The U-Boat Wars, 1916–1945 (New York: Putnam, 1989), part 1; and V. E. Tarrant, The U-Boat Offensive, 1914–1945 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1989), pp. 7–76.

21. On the Allied blockade of Germany and Austria in World War I, see A. C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, 1914–1918 (1937; rpt., London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961); Louis Guichard, The Naval Blockade, 1914–1918, trans. Christopher R. Turner (New York: Appleton, 1930); Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (London: Arnold, 1997), pp. 271–83; and C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger: The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915–1919 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985). Also see Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 23–78, which provides a detailed description of the effects of the blockade but ascribes too much importance to its impact on the war’s outcome.

22. On Germany’s blockade of the United Kindom in World War II, see Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942 (New York: Random House, 1996); Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945 (New York: Random House, 1998); Jurgen Rohwer, “The U-Boat War against the Allied Supply Lines,” in H. A. Jacobsen and J. Rohwer, eds., Decisive Battles of World War II: The German View, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Putnam, 1965), pp. 259–312; Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, pp. 81–144; and Terraine, U-Boat Wars, pt. 3.

23. For discussions of the Allied blockade of Germany and Italy in World War II, see Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, chap. 11; W. N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952, 1959); and Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 9.

24. On the American Civil War, see Bern Anderson, By Sea and by River: The Naval History of the Civil War (New York: De Capo, 1989), pp. 26, 34–37, 65–66, 225–34; Richard E. Beringer et al., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), chap. 3; and Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, chaps. 13–17.

25. Among the best sources on the American blockade of Japan are Clay Blair, Silent Victory: The U.S. Submarine War against Japan (New York: Lippincott, 1975); U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), The War against Japanese Transportation, 1941–1945, Pacific War Report 54 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947); and Theodore Roscoe, United States Submarine Operations in World War II (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1956).

26. My analysis of Japan’s decision to surrender relies heavily on Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), chap. 4, although I assign greater importance than Pape does to the dropping of the two atomic bombs. I also relied in part on Barton J. Bernstein, “Compelling Japan’s Surrender without the A-bomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the US Bombing Survey’s Early-Surrender Conclusions,” Journal of Strategic Studies 18, No. 2 (June 1995), pp. 101–48; Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House, 1999); and Leon V. Sigal, Fighting to a Finish: The Politics of War Termination in the United States and Japan, 1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

27. See Olson, Economics of the Wartime Shortage. Also see L. Margaret Barnett, British Food Policy during the First World War (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1985); Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), chap. 5; and Milward, War, Economy, and Society, chap. 8.

28. See Milward, War, Economy, and Society, p. 179.

29. The quotations in this and the next paragraph are from pp. 132–33 and 142 of Olson, Economics of the Wartime Shortage.

30. Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 21–27.

31. Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 25.

32. See Pape, Bombing to Win, chap. 4; and USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on Japanese Morale, Pacific War Report 14 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1947).

33. On this basic logic, see Hein E. Goemans, War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

34. See Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983), Vol. 2, pp. 681–87, 695–714; Thomas M. Coffey, Decision over Schweinfurt: The U.S. 8th Air Force Battle for Daylight Bombing (New York: David McKay, 1977); and John Sweetman, Schweinfurt: Disaster in the Skies (New York: Ballantine, 1971).

35. See Trevor N. Dupuy, Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974 (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 550–53, 555–56; Insight Team of the London Sunday Times, The Yom Kippur War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 184–89; Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement, October 1973 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975), pp. 256–61; Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz, The Israeli Army (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 347–52, 374; and Eliezer Cohen, Israel’s Best Defense: The First Full Story of the Israeli Air Force, trans. Jonathan Cordis (New York: Orion, 1993), pp. 321–68, 386, 391.

36. The line between interdiction operations that reach far behind an adversary’s front lines (deep interdiction) and strategic bombing is sometimes murky. Air forces can also help navies implement a blockade.

37. Carl H. Builder, The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), passim; Morton H. Halperin, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1974), pp. 28–32, 43–46, 52; and Perry M. Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace, 1943–1945 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), chaps. 1–3.

38. There are two main differences between blockade and strategic bombing. First, blockades are indiscriminate in the sense that they aim to cut off all of an enemy’s imports and exports. Strategic bombers, as noted earlier, can be employed more selectively: they can strike directly at specific industries and ignore others. Second, if the aim is to punish an adversary’s civilian population, blockades can do that only indirectly by wrecking the enemy’s economy, which would eventually hurt the civilian population. Airpower, on the other hand, can perform that task directly by targeting civilians.

39. See, for example, John A. Warden III, “Employing Air Power in the Twenty-first Century,” in Richard H. Schultz, Jr., and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., eds., The Future of Air Power in the Aftermath of the Gulf War (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, July 1992), pp. 57–82.

40. For an interesting discussion of how the strategic bombing mission has changed since 1945, see Mark J. Conversino, “The Changed Nature of Strategic Attack,” Parameters 27, No. 4 (Winter 1997–98), pp. 28–41. Also see Phillip S. Meilinger, “The Problem with Our Airpower Doctrine,” Airpower Journal 6, No. 1 (Spring 1992), pp. 24–31.

41. On World War I, see H. A. Jones, The War in the Air, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), chaps. 2–3; H. A. Jones, The War in the Air, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), chaps. 1–2; and George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy (New York: John Wiley, 1966), chap. 3. The Allies mounted a minor bombing campaign against Germany late in World War I, but it was of no strategic consequence. See H. A. Jones, The War in The Air, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937), chaps. 1–4; and Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima, chap. 4. On World War II, see Matthew Cooper, The German Air Force, 1933–1945: An Anatomy of Failure (London: Jane’s, 1981), chaps. 5–6; and John Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1939–1945 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), chaps. 16–25, 77.

42. Richard J. Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 124.

43. See Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp. 72–73; Barrie Pitt, The Crucible of War: Western Desert 1941 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), passim; and Jonathan Steinberg, All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941–1943 (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 15–25.

44. These figures are from Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 254–55. In addition to Pape (chap. 8), see Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, vol. 3, chaps. 20–22; Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Touchstone, 1989); Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgement: American Bombing in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 4–5; and Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945, vols. 1–4 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961).

45. See Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front, 1942–1945 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986).

46. See Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, vol. 2, sec. 4, and vol. 3, secs. 1, 2, 4–6; Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Strategic Air War against Germany and Japan: A Memoir (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1986), chaps. 2–3; Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944–1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on the German War Economy, European War Report 3 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, October 1945).

47. Overy emphasizes that the air war played a key role in defeating Nazi Germany by forcing Hitler to divert precious resources away from the ground war against the Allies and especially the Red Army. See Overy, Why the Allies Won, pp. 20, 127–33. The Allies, however, also had to divert enormous resources away from the ground war to the air war. See General Marshall’s Report: The Winning of the War in Europe and the Pacific, Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States Army to the Secretary of War, July 1, 1943, to June 30, 1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 101–7. There is no evidence that the Allies diverted fewer resources to fighting the air war than did the Germans. In fact, I believe a convincing case can be made that the Allies diverted greater resources to the air war than did the Germans.

48. Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, vol. 2, chaps. 13–17; Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender, chap. 4; Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 344–45; Philip A. Smith, “Bombing to Surrender: The Contribution of Air Power to the Collapse of Italy, 1943,” thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, March 1997; and Peter Tompkins, Italy Betrayed (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).

49. The Allied air forces compounded the Italian army’s problems with an interdiction campaign against the transportation network that supported its front-line forces.

50. See Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, vol. 5, pp. 507–614; Hansell, Strategic Air War, chaps. 4–6; and Schaffer, Wings of Judgement, chap. 6.

51. See Martin Caidin, A Torch to the Enemy: The Fire Raid on Tokyo (New York: Ballantine, 1960); Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces, Vol. 5, chaps. 1–5, 17–23; Schaffer, Wings of Judgement, chaps. 6–8; and Kenneth P. Werrell, Blankets of Fire: U.S. Bombers over Japan during World War II (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996).

52. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reports that the entire air campaign (conventional and nuclear) destroyed about 43 percent of Japan’s 66 largest cities, killed roughly 900,000 civilians, and forced the evacuation of more than 8.5 million people from urban areas. USSBS, Japanese Morale, pp. 1–2. Two of those 66 cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) were destroyed by atomic bombs, not conventional attacks. Moreover, a total of about 115,000 civilians died in the two nuclear attacks. Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 105. The firebombing also hurt the Japanese economy somewhat, although the blockade had effectively devastated it by the time the bombers began torching Japan’s cities.

53. Angelo Del Boca, The Ethiopian War, 1935–1941, trans. P. D. Cummins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969); J.F.C. Fuller, The First of the League Wars: Its Lessons and Omens (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936); and Thomas M. Coffey, Lion by the Tail: The Story of the Italian-Ethiopian War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974).

54. Takejiro Shiba, “Air Operations in the China Area, July 1937–August 1945,” in Donald S. Detwiler and Charles B. Burdick, eds., War in Asia and the Pacific, 1937–1949, Vol. 9 (New York: Garland, 1980), pp. 1–220; and H. J. Timperley, ed., Japanese Terror in China (New York: Modern Age, 1938), chaps. 6–7.

55. Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989), chaps. 2–4; and Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 176–95.

56. Scott R. McMichael, Stumbling Bear: Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan (London: Brassey’s, 1991), chap. 9; Denny R. Nelson, “Soviet Air Power: Tactics and Weapons Used in Afghanistan,” Air University Review, January–February 1985, pp. 31–44; Marek Sliwinski, “Afghanistan: The Decimation of a People,” Orbis 33, No. 1 (Winter 1989), pp. 39–56; and Edward B. Westermann, “The Limits of Soviet Airpower: The Bear versus the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, 1979–1989,” thesis, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, June 1997.

57. Eliot A. Cohen et al., Gulf War Air Power Survey, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993); and Pape, Bombing to Win, chap. 7. The strategic bombing campaign was directed at targets in Iraq such as the city of Baghdad and is distinct from the air attacks directed against Iraqi military targets in Kuwait. The latter campaign inflicted heavy losses on Iraq’s army and helped the Allied ground forces win a quick and decisive victory in late February 1991.

58. The U.S. air force’s own study of its attacks on Iraqi leadership targets concludes, “The results of these attacks clearly fell short of fulfilling the ambitious hope, entertained by at least some airmen, that bombing the L [leadership] and CCC [command, control, and communications] target categories might put enough pressure on the regime to bring about its overthrow and completely sever communications between the leaders in Baghdad and their military forces.” Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), p. 70. Also see Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 221–23, 226–40, 250–53.

59. Allen F. Chew, The White Death: The Epic of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971), chap. 5; Eloise Engle and Lauri Paananen, The Winter War: The Russo-Finnish Conflict, 1939–40 (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), chaps. 3, 7, 8; and William R. Trotter, A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1991), chap. 15.

60. The best analysis of this case is Pape, Bombing to Win, chap. 5. For detailed descriptions of the bombing campaign, see Conrad C. Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950–1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); and Robert F. Futrell, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950–1953, rev. ed. (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1983).

61. Clodfelter, Limits of Air Power, chaps. 5–6; Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 195–210.

62. John E. Mueller, “The Search for the ‘Breaking Point’ in Vietnam: The Statistics of a Deadly Quarrel,” International Studies Quarterly 24, No. 4 (December 1980), pp. 497–519.

63. The best available description of the air campaign over Kosovo is the U.S. air force’s official study of the offensive. See The Air War over Serbia: Aerospace Power in Operation Allied Force, Initial Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, 2001). NATO air forces also attacked Yugoslav ground troops in Bosnia during the late summer of 1995, but that was not a strategic bombing campaign. See Robert C. Owen, ed., Deliberate Force: A Case Study in Effective Air Campaigning (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, January 2000).

64. The best available sources include Daniel A. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate,” International Security 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 5–38; Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO’s War to Save Kosovo (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); Doyle McManus, “Clinton’s Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was; Yugoslavia: After 71 Days of Air War, White House Had in Place a Memo to Send in 175,000 NATO Troops,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2000; and Barry R. Posen, “The War for Kosovo: Serbia’s Political-Military Strategy,” International Security 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 39–84.

65. William H. Arkin, “Smart Bombs, Dumb Targeting?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, No. 3 (May–June 2000), p. 49. The Yugoslav government claims that the number of civilians killed was 2,000. See Posen, “War for Kosovo,” p. 81.

66. Pape, Bombing to Win, p. 68. For a discussion of why punishment from the air usually fails, see ibid., pp. 21–27; Stephen T. Hosmer, Psychological Effects of U.S. Air Operations in Four Wars, 1941–1991: Lessons for U.S. Commanders, RAND Report MR-576-AF (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996); and Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress: Psychological Studies of Bombing and Civilian Defense (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).

67. There is also some evidence in the public domain that a decapitation strategy was employed against Yugoslavia in 1999. Specifically, it appears from some of the targets that NATO struck (TV stations, Milosevic’s house, important government buildings, party headquarters, high-level military headquarters, and the businesses of Milosevic’s close friends) that it aimed either to kill him or to precipitate a coup. There is no evidence, however, that this strategy worked.

68. See Pape, Bombing to Win, pp. 79–86.

69. See Beck, Under the Bombs; Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

70. On this general theme, see Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, chap. 7; Robert W. Komer, Maritime Strategy or Coalition Defense (Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1984); Halford J. Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” Geographical Journal 23, No. 4 (April 1904), pp. 421–37; Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt, 1919); and Martin Wight, Power Politics, eds. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), chap. 6.

71. Corbett says of the Battle of Trafalgar, “By universal assent Trafalgar is ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all the great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result. It had brought to a triumphant conclusion one of the most masterly and complex sea campaigns in history, but insofar as it was an integral part of the combined campaign its results are scarcely to be discerned. It gave to England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the Continent. So incomprehensible was its apparent sterility that to fill the void a legend grew up that it saved England from invasion.” Julian S. Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), p. 408. Also see Edward Ingram, “Illusions of Victory: The Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar Revisited,” Military Affairs 48, No. 3 (July 1984), pp. 140–43.

72. I estimate that approximately 24 million Soviets died in the fight against Nazi Germany. Of that total, 16 million were civilian and 8 million were military. Of the 8 million military deaths, 3.3 million were prisoners of war who died in captivity. The remaining 4.7 million died either in combat or from combat wounds. Among the best sources on Soviet casualties are Edwin Bacon, “Soviet Military Losses in World War II,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 6, No. 4 (December 1993), pp. 613–33; Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, “Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, No. 4 (1994), pp. 671–80; Mark Harrison, Accounting for War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1941–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 159–61; and Gerhard Hirschfeld, ed., The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), chaps. 1–2. For evidence that the ratio of German casualties between the eastern front and other fronts was probably greater than 3:1, see Jonathan R. Adelman, Prelude to the Cold War: The Tsarist, Soviet, and U.S. Armies in the Two World Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1988), pp. 128–29, 171–73; and David M. Glantz and Jonathan M. House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 284.

73. See Lincoln Li, The Japanese Army in North China, 1937–1941: Problems of Political and Economic Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).

74. See Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, chap. 19; and the works cited in Chapter 6, note 18 of this book.

75. The Reagan administration’s “Maritime Strategy” contained some schemes for using the U.S. navy to influence events on the central front, but those operations were concerned mainly with shifting the strategic nuclear balance against the Soviet Union. Of course the U.S. navy was also concerned with maintaining command of the sea in wartime, so that it could transport troops and supplies across the Atlantic Ocean. See John J. Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep: The Maritime Strategy and Deterrence in Europe,” International Security 11, No. 2 (Fall 1986), pp. 3–57; and Barry R. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chaps. 4–5.

76. This point is widely accepted by prominent naval strategists. For example, Adm. Herbert Richmond, one of Britain’s leading naval thinkers in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote, “An invasion by sea of a great modern military state may be dismissed as impracticable, even if there were no opposition at sea. The number of men which can be transported would never be sufficient to conduct an invasion in the face of the opposition of the military forces of any great power.” Herbert Richmond, Sea Power in the Modern World (London: G. Bell, 1934), p. 173.

77. The problem of projecting power across a large body of water is not simply a problem of operating over a long distance. There is a fundamental difference between moving an army over water and moving it over land. A great power separated from an adversary by a large stretch of land can conquer and occupy that land and then move its army and air force right up to the border of its rival, where it can launch a massive ground invasion. (Consider how Napoleonic France conquered the various states that separated it from Russia in the early 1800s and then invaded Russia with a huge army in 1812.) Great powers, however, cannot conquer and occupy water. The sea, as Corbett notes, “is not susceptible to ownership…. [Y]ou cannot subsist your armed forces upon it as you can upon enemy’s territory.” Corbett, Principles of Maritime Strategy, p. 93. (Napoleon could not capture the English Channel and station troops on it, which explains in part why he did not invade the United Kingdom). Therefore, navies have to move armies across the sea to strike an adversary. But navies usually cannot project large and powerful armies into enemy territory, and therefore the striking power of seaborne invasion forces is sharply limited.

78. See Piers Mackesy, “Problems of an Amphibious Power: Britain against France, 1793–1815,” Naval War College Review 30, No. 4 (Spring 1978), pp. 18–21. Also see Richard Harding, “Sailors and Gentlemen of Parade: Some Professional and Technical Problems Concerning the Conduct of Combined Operations in the Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 32, No. 1 (March 1989), pp. 35–55; and Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, p. 67.

79. Raids, on the other hand, were commonplace in great-power wars during the age of sail. For example, Great Britain launched four raids against French port cities in 1778, during the Seven Years’ War. See Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, p. 53. Although Britain had a penchant for raids, they were often unsuccessful. Looking at Lisbon (1589), Cadiz (1595 and 1626), Brest (1696), Toulon (1707), Lorient (1746), Rochefort (1757), and Walcheren (1809), Michael Howard sees “an almost unbroken record of expensive and humiliating failures.” Howard, British Way in Warfare, p. 19. Even the successful raids, however, had little effect on the balance of power.

80. For overviews of how industrialization affected navies, see Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943); Karl Lautenschlager, “Technology and the Evolution of Naval Warfare,” International Security 8, No. 2 (Fall 1983), pp. 3–51; and Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, chaps. 12, 18.

81. Quoted in Brodie, Sea Power, p. 49.

82. On the impact of railroads on war, see Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning (New York: Berg, 1991); Edwin A. Pratt, The Rise of Rail-Power in War and Conquest, 1833–1914 (London: P. S. King, 1915); Dennis E. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1975); George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails: The Strategic Place of the Railroads in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and John Westwood, Railways at War (San Diego, CA: Howell-North, 1981).

83. See Arthur Hezlet, Aircraft and Sea Power (New York: Stein and Day, 1970); and Norman Polmar, Aircraft Carriers: A Graphic History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969).

84. See USSBS, Air Campaigns of the Pacific War, Pacific War Report 71a (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1947), sec. 10.

85. I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 46–50. Also see B. B. Schofield, The Arctic Convoys (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1977); and Richard Woodman, The Arctic Convoys, 1941–1945 (London: John Murray, 1994).

86. On how submarines affect war, see Arthur Hezlet, The Submarine and Sea Power (London: Peter Davies, 1967); and Karl Lautenschlager, “The Submarine in Naval Warfare, 1901–2001,” International Security 11, No. 3 (Winter 1986–87), pp. 94–140.

87. Halpern, Naval History of World War I, p. 48.

88. For a general discussion of naval mines and how they affect the conduct of war, see Gregory K. Hartmann and Scott C. Truver, Weapons That Wait: Mine Warfare in the U.S. Navy, 2d ed. (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1991).

89. Hartmann and Truver, Weapons That Wait, p. 15.

90. See U.S. Department of Defense, Conduct of the Persian Gulf War, Final Report to Congress (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1992), chap. 7; and Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1995), pp. 292–94, 343–45, 368–69.

91. Describing British strategy against France during the Napoleonic Wars, Piers Mackesy writes, “No major landing in Western Europe could ever be contemplated unless there was an active war front in the east to hold down the major forces of the French. Mackesy, “Problems of an Amphibious Power,” p. 21.

92. Japan’s attempt to transport troop reinforcements to the Philippines in late 1944, when the United States dominated the skies over the Pacific, illustrates what happens to one’s seaborne forces when one does not have air superiority. American planes decimated the Japanese convoys. See M. Hamlin Cannon, Leyte: The Return to the Philippines (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954), pp. 92–102. Of course, the navy launching the seaborne forces must also have command of the sea. On the importance of sea control for amphibious operations, see P. H. Colomb, Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated (London: W. H. Allen, 1891), chaps. 11–18.

93. See Alfred Vagts, Landing Operations: Strategy, Psychology, Tactics, Politics, from Antiquity to 1945 (Harrisburg, PA: Military Service Publishing Company, 1946), pp. 509–16; and Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 43–45.

94. Corbett, Principles of Maritime Strategy, p. 98.

95. Quoted in Kennedy, British Naval Mastery, p. 201.

96. See Mearsheimer, “A Strategic Misstep,” pp. 25–27.

97. Describing American war plans for the period between 1945 and 1950, Steven Ross writes, “Early plans, therefore, called for a rapid retreat from Europe and contained no concept of a second Normandy. Against the might of the Red Army there was little or no prospect of success by direct attack.” Steven Ross, American War Plans, 1945–1950 (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 152–53.

98. See Piers Mackesy, Statesmen at War: The Strategy of Overthrow, 1798–1799 (New York: Longman, 1974); and A. B. Rodger, The War of the Second Coalition, 1798 to 1801: A Strategic Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964).

99. See David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War (New York: Norton, 1986), chaps. 5–7; and Michael Glover, The Peninsular War, 1807–1814: A Concise Military History (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1974), chaps. 4–6.

100. The United Kingdom kept a small contingent of troops in Portugal, which had regained its sovereignty in the wake of the British invasion. The British navy transported additional troops to friendly Portugal in April 1809, and those forces, under Lord Wellington’s command, played an important role in winning the war on the Iberian Peninsula.

101. See Piers Mackesy, British Victory in Egypt, 1801: The End of Napoleon’s Conquest (London: Routledge, 1995); Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, chap. 7; and Rodger, War of the Second Coalition, chaps. 1–9, esp. chap. 16. Britain and France also conducted a handful of small-scale amphibious operations in the West Indies during the French Revolutionary Wars. See Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar, and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War against Revolutionary France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

102. Among the best works on the Crimean War are Winfried Baumgart, The Crimean War, 1853–1856 (London: Arnold, 1999); John S. Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979); David M. Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War (New York: Longman, 1994); Andrew D. Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy, 1853–1856 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1990); Norman Rich, Why the Crimean War? A Cautionary Tale (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985); and Albert Seaton, The Crimean War: A Russian Chronicle (London: B. T. Batsford, 1977).

103. The numbers in this paragraph are from Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, p. 234; and Hew Strachan, “Soldiers, Strategy and Sebastopol,” Historical Journal 21, No. 2 (June 1978), p. 321.

104. Quoted in Vagts, Landing Operations, p. 411.

105. Among the best works on Gallipoli are C. F. Aspinall-Oglander, Military Operations: Gallipoli, 2 vols., Official British History of World War I (London: Heinemann, 1929); Robert R. James, Gallipoli (London: B. T. Batsford, 1965); and Michael Hickey, Gallipoli (London: John Murray, 1995). Also, the Russians conducted some small-scale amphibious operations against the Turks in the Black Sea region. See Halpern, Naval History of World War I, pp. 238–46.

106. Two other well-known amphibious operations in Europe were not directed against the territory of a great power. Germany invaded and conquered Norway (a minor power) in April 1940, and American troops successfully launched seaborne assaults against French-controlled North Africa in November 1942. France, which was decisively defeated by Nazi Germany in the spring of 1940, was not a sovereign state, much less a great power, in 1942. On Norway, see Jack Adams, The Doomed Expedition: The Norwegian Campaign of 1940 (London: Leo Cooper, 1989); and Maurice Harvey, Scandinavian Misadventure (Turnbridge Wells, UK: Spellmount, 1990). On North Africa, see George F. Howe, Northwest Africa: Seizing the Initiative in the West (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), pts. 1–3. Furthermore, the Germans and especially the Soviets launched numerous small-scale amphibious operations into territory controlled by the other side on the shores of the Baltic and Black Seas. See W. I. Atschkassow, “Landing Operations of the Soviet Naval Fleet during World War Two,” in Merrill L. Bartlett, ed., Assault from the Sea: Essays on the History of Amphibious Warfare (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1983), pp. 299–307; and “Baltic Sea Operations,” and “Black Sea Operations,” in Dear, ed., Oxford Companion to World War II, pp. 106–8, 135–36. One study estimates that the Soviets conducted 113 amphibious invasions between 1941 and 1945. See Atschkassow, “Landing Operations,” p. 299. Many failed, but more important, they were all minor operations that took place on the periphery of the main battlefront between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. Consequently, they had little influence on the war’s outcome. Finally, the Soviets launched two minor amphibious operations against Finnish-controlled territory in 1944, one of which failed. See Waldemar Erfurth, The Last Finnish War (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1979), p. 190.

107. On Sicily, see Albert N. Garland and Howard M. Smyth, Sicily and the Surrender of Italy (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), chaps. 1–10. On the Italian mainland, see Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), chaps. 1–9.

108. On Anzio, see Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, chaps. 17–18, 20, 22, 24.

109. On Normandy, see Gordon A. Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1951). On southern France, see Jeffrey J. Clarke and Robert R. Smith, Riviera to the Rhine (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), chaps. 1–7.

110. Italy was technically still a great power when the Allies invaded Sicily in mid-1943, and Italian as well as German troops were located on that island. But as noted, the Italian army was in tatters and incapable of putting up a serious fight against the Allies. In fact, the Wehrmacht was largely responsible for Italy’s defense at the time of the Sicily operation. Italy was out of the war when the Allies invaded the Italian mainland and Anzio.

111. See Paul Kennedy, Pacific Onslaught: 7th December 1941–7th February 1943 (New York: Ballantine, 1972); and H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1982).

112. Hezlet, Aircraft and Sea Power, chap. 8; Isely and Crowl, U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, pp. 74, 79; and Hans G. Von Lehmann, “Japanese Landing Operations in World War II,” in Bartlett, ed., Assault from the Sea, pp. 195–201.

113. “Major U.S. Amphibious Operations—World War II,” memorandum, U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, DC, December 15, 1960. Each of the fifty-two invasion forces was at least the size of a regimental combat team. Operations involving smaller units are not included. Also, the Australian military conducted three amphibious operations against Japanese forces on Borneo between May and July 1945. These mopping-up campaigns succeeded for essentially the same reasons that the American seaborne invasions gained their objective. See Peter Dennis et al., The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 109–16.

114. USSBS, Air Campaigns of the Pacific War, p. 19.

115. Guadalcanal and the Philippines are major exceptions to this rule. See George W. Garand and Truman R. Strobridge, Western Pacific Operations: History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II, vol. 4 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), pp. 320–21; and Isely and Crowl, U.S. Marines and Amphibious War, p. 588.

116. USSBS, Air Campaigns of the Pacific War, p. 61.

117. Among the best general surveys of this conflict are Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1941–1945 (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1978); Isely and Crowl, U.S. Marines and Amphibious War; Potter and Nimitz, Sea Power, chaps. 35–43; and Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985).

118. On the disparity in size between the Japanese and American economies, see Table 6.2; Adelman, Prelude, pp. 139, 202–3; and Jonathan R. Adelman, Revolution, Armies, and War: A Political History (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1985), pp. 130–31.

119. By mid-1945, there were about 2 million soldiers in Japan’s home army. Dear, ed., Oxford Companion to World War II, p. 623. At the same time, there were roughly 900,000 Japanese soldiers in China, 250,000 in Korea, 750,000 in Manchuria, and 600,000 in Southeast Asia. These numbers are from Adelman, Revolution, p. 147; Saburo Hayashi and Alvin D. Coox, Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Quantico, VA: Marine Corps Association, 1959), p. 173; and Douglas J. MacEachin, The Final Months of the War with Japan: Signals Intelligence, U.S. Invasion Planning, and the A-Bomb Decision (Langley, VA: Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, December 1998), attached document no. 4.

120. Although the invading American forces would surely have conquered Japan, they undoubtedly would also have suffered significant casualties in the process. See Frank, Downfall; and MacEachin, Final Months.

121. Insular powers, however, might be attacked over land by a rival great power if that adversary can deploy troops on the territory of a minor power in the insular state’s backyard. As will be discussed in the next chapter, insular great powers worry about this possibility and seek to ensure that it never happens.

122. See Frank J. McLynn, Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler, 1588–1945 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987); and Herbert W. Richmond, The Invasion of Britain: An Account of Plans, Attempts and Counter-measures from 1586 to 1918 (London: Methuen, 1941).

123. See Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker, The Spanish Armada (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988); Garrett Mattingly, The Armada (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); and David Howarth, The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story (New York: Viking, 1981).

124. On Napoleon, see Richard Glover, Britain at Bay: Defence against Bonaparte, 1803–14 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973); J. Holland Rose and A. M. Broadley, Dumouriez and the Defence of England against Napoleon (New York: John Lane, 1909); and H.F.B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley, Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror (New York: John Lane, 1908). On Hitler, see Frank Davis, “Sea Lion: The German Plan to Invade Britain, 1940,” in Bartlett, ed., Assault from the Sea, pp. 228–35; Egber Kieser, Hitler on the Doorstep, Operation ‘Sea Lion’: The German Plan to Invade Britain, 1940, trans. Helmut Bogler (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1997); and Peter Schenk, Invasion of England 1940: The Planning of Operation Sealion, trans. Kathleen Bunten (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1990).

125. Gen. Hans von Seeckt, a prominent German officer, noted in 1916 that “America cannot be attacked by us, and until technology provides us with totally new weapons, England itself neither.” Quoted in Vagts, Landing Operations, p. 506.

126. The United Kingdom prepared plans for invading the United States until the late 1890s but then gave up on the idea. See Aaron Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 162–65.

127. As noted, the Allies invaded northwestern France in June 1944 and southern France in August 1944. But France was not a sovereign state at that point; it was part of the Nazi empire.

128. One noteworthy case is left out of this analysis. In the final year of World War I, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States inserted troops into the newly established Soviet Union at Archangel (August 2, 1918), Baku (August 4, 1918), Murmansk (March 6 and June 23, 1918), and Vladivostok (April 5 and August 3, 1918). Those troops eventually fought some battles against the Bolsheviks. This case is not relevant, however, because the Allies’ entrance into the Soviet Union was not an invasion in any meaningful sense of that term. The Soviet Union had just been decisively defeated by Germany and was in the midst of a civil war. Consequently, the Bolshevik army did not oppose the coming of Allied forces. In fact, the Allies were welcomed into Baku and Archangel. See John Swettenham, Allied Intervention in Russia, 1918–1919 (Toronto: Ryerson, 1967); and Richard H. Ullman, Intervention and the War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).

129. See William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank von Hippel, “The Consequences of ‘Limited’ Nuclear Attacks on the United States,” International Security 10, No. 4 (Spring 1986), pp. 3–45; and Arthur M. Katz, Life after Nuclear War: The Economic and Social Impacts of Nuclear Attacks on the United States (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1982).

130. After listening to a Strategic Air Command (SAC) briefing on March 18, 1954, a U.S. navy captain used these words to describe what SAC planned to do to the Soviet Union in the event of war. David Alan Rosenberg, “’A Smoking Radiating Ruin at the End of Two Hours’: Documents on American Plans for Nuclear War with the Soviet Union, 1954–1955,” International Security 6, No. 3 (Winter 1981–82), pp. 11, 25.

131. Herman Kahn coined the phrase “splendid first strike,” which is synonymous with a disarming first strike. See Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War: Three Lectures and Several Suggestions, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 36–37.

132. See Charles L. Glaser, Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), chap. 5.

133. See Benjamin Frankel, “The Brooding Shadow: Systemic Incentives and Nuclear Weapons Proliferation,” Security Studies 2, Nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1993), pp. 37–78; and Bradley A. Thayer, “The Causes of Nuclear Proliferation and the Utility of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime,” Security Studies 4, No. 3 (Spring 1995), pp. 463–519.

134. See Harry R. Borowski, A Hollow Threat: Strategic Air Power and Containment before Korea (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982); David A. Rosenberg, “The Origins of Overkill: Nuclear Weapons and American Strategy, 1945–1960,” International Security 7, No. 4 (Spring 1983), pp. 14–18; and Ross, American War Plans, passim, esp. pp. 12–15. A yearly inventory of the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals for the entire Cold War can be found in Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, “Nuclear Notebook: Estimated U.S. and Soviet/Russian Nuclear Stockpile, 1945–94,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 50, No. 6 (November–December 1994), p. 59. Also see Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, “Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945–2000,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 56, No. 2 (March–April 2000), p. 79.

135. During the Cold War, some experts argued that it is possible to achieve nuclear superiority even in a MAD world. Specifically, they claimed that it was possible for the superpowers to fight a limited nuclear war with their counterforce weapons (nuclear weapons designed to destroy other nuclear weapons, rather than cities), while leaving each other’s assured destruction capability intact. Each superpower would also try to minimize civilian deaths on the other side. The superpower that emerged from this limited nuclear exchange with an advantage in counterforce weapons would be the winner, having gained significant coercive leverage over the loser. See Colin S. Gray, “Nuclear Strategy: A Case for a Theory of Victory,” International Security 4, No. 1 (Summer 1979), pp. 54–87; and Paul Nitze, “Deterring Our Deterrent,” Foreign Policy, No. 25 (Winter 1976–77), pp. 195–210. The case for limited nuclear options, however, is flawed for two reasons. First, it is not likely that such a war would remain limited. The destruction to each side’s society would be enormous, making it difficult to distinguish a limited counterforce strike from an all-out attack. Furthermore, we do not know much about escalation dynamics in a nuclear war, especially regarding how command-and-control systems would perform in a nuclear attack. Second, even if it were possible to fight a limited nuclear war and minimize casualties, the side with a counterforce advantage would not win a meaningful victory, as the following example illustrates. Assume that the Soviets won a counterforce exchange between the superpowers; they were left with 500 counterforce warheads, the United States had none. In the process, both sides suffered 500,000 casualties, and their assured destruction capabilities remained intact. The Soviets are purportedly the victors because they have a counterforce advantage of 500:0. In fact, that advantage is meaningless, because there are no targets left in the United States that the Soviets can use their 500 counterforce weapons against, unless they want to strike at America’s cities or its assured destruction capability and get annihilated in the process. In short, the result of this limited nuclear war is that both sides suffer equal casualties, both sides have their assured destruction capabilities intact, and the Soviet Union has 500 counterforce weapons that it cannot use in any meaningful military way. That is a hollow victory. Among the best works criticizing limited nuclear options are Glaser, Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy, chap. 7; and Robert Jervis, “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter,” Political Science Quarterly 94, No. 4 (Winter 1979–80), pp. 617–33.

136. Robert S. McNamara, “The Military Role of Nuclear Weapons: Perceptions and Misperceptions,” Foreign Affairs 62, No. 1 (Fall 1983), p. 79.

137. The idea that robust stability at the nuclear level allows for instability at the conventional level is often called the “stability-instability paradox.” See GlennH. Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Paul Seabury, ed., Balance of Power (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), pp. 184–201. Also see Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 19–22.

138. On accidental nuclear escalation, see Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993); and Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). On inadvertent nuclear escalation, see Posen, Inadvertent Escalation. On purposeful nuclear escalation, see Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1968); and Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), chaps. 2–3. The best book on the general phenomenon of escalation is Richard Smoke, War: Controlling Escalation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), although it says little about escalation from the conventional to the nuclear level, or about escalation in a nuclear war.

139. Robert Jervis is probably the most articulate proponent of this perspective. He writes, “The implications of mutual second-strike capability are many and far-reaching. If nuclear weapons have had the influence that the nuclear-revolution theory indicates they should have, then there will be peace between the superpowers, crises will be rare, neither side will be eager to press bargaining advantages to the limit, the status quo will be relatively easy to maintain, and political outcomes will not be closely related to either the nuclear or the conventional balance. Although the evidence is ambiguous, it generally confirms these propositions.” Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, p. 45. Also see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York: Random House, 1988).

140. Assume, for example, that Mexico becomes a great power with a survivable nuclear deterrent. Also assume that Mexico becomes interested in conquering a large expanse of territory in the southwestern United States, but otherwise has no interest in conquering American territory. Mexican policymakers might conclude that they could achieve their limited aims without causing the United States to start a nuclear war. In the event, they probably would prove correct. American policymakers, however, would be much more likely to use nuclear weapons if Mexico tried to inflict a decisive defeat on the United States. Shai Feldman makes essentially the same point regarding the decision by Egypt and Syria to attack a nuclear-armed Israel in 1973. Arab policymakers, he argues, thought that Israel would not use its nuclear weapons, because the Arab armies were not bent on conquering Israel but were merely aiming to recapture territory lost to Israel in the 1967 war. Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence: A Strategy for the 1980s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), chap. 3. But as Feldman points out, the state that loses a slice of its territory is likely to think that the victor will want to take another slice, and then another slice, and that such “salami tactics” will ultimately lead to its destruction. Ibid., pp. 111–12. The best way to avoid this predicament is to have powerful conventional forces that can deter the initial attack; this once again highlights the importance of the balance of land power.

141. For example, the United States spent roughly five times more money on conventional forces than on nuclear forces during the early 1980s, and about four times as much by the mid-1980s. See Harold Brown, Department of Defense Annual Report for Fiscal Year 1982 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, January 19, 1981), pp. C-4, C-5; and William W. Kaufmann, A Reasonable Defense (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1986), pp. 21, 27. Over the course of the entire Cold War, roughly 25 percent of American defense spending went to the nuclear forces. See Steven M. Kosiak, The Lifecycle Costs of Nuclear Forces: A Preliminary Assessment (Washington, DC: Defense Budget Project, October 1994), p. ii. Another study estimates that about 29 percent of defense spending from 1940 to 1996 went toward nuclear weapons. See Stephen I. Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), p. 3. For evidence of the relative importance of U.S. conventional forces in Europe, consider how the fiscal year 1986 U.S. defense budget, which totaled $313.7 billion, was apportioned: roughly $133 billion went to conventional defense of Europe, $54.7 billion went to nuclear forces, $34.6 billion went to conventional defense in the Pacific, $20.9 billion went to conventional defense of the Persian Gulf, and $16.2 billion went to conventional defense of Panama and the U.S. homeland. These figures are from Kaufmann, Reasonable Defense, p. 14. Also see the works cited in Chapter 6, note 177, of this book.

142. See Feldman, Israeli Nuclear Deterrence, pp. 106–12, esp. p. 109.

143. See Thomas W. Robinson, “The Sino-Soviet Border Conflict,” in Stephen S. Kaplan, ed., Diplomacy of Power: Soviet Armed Forces as a Political Instrument (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1981), pp. 265–313; Harrison E. Salisbury, War between Russia and China (New York: Norton, 1969); and Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics: A Study of Political Change and Communication (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), chaps. 6, 9.

144. See Sumantra Bose, “Kashmir: Sources of Conflict, Dimensions of Peace,” Survival 41, No. 3 (Autumn 1999), pp. 149–71; Sumit Ganguly, The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Devin T. Hagerty, “Nuclear Deterrence in South Asia: The 1990 Indo-Pakistani Crisis,” International Security 20, No. 3 (Winter 1995–96), pp. 79–114.

145. As noted in Chapter 3, note 11, full-scale net assessments require more than just measuring the size and quality of the opposing forces. It is also necessary to consider the strategy that both sides would employ and what is likely to happen when the rival forces collide.

146. See Mako, U.S. Ground Forces, pp. 108–26; and Weapons Effectiveness Indices/Weighted Unit Values III (WEI/WUV III) (Bethesda, MD: U.S. Army Concepts Analysis Agency, November 1979). Also see Phillip A. Karber et al., Assessing the Correlation of Forces: France 1940, Report No. BDM/W-79-560-TR (McLean, VA: BDM Corporation, June 18, 1979), which uses this methodology to assess the balance of forces between Germany and the Allies in the spring of 1940.

147. Posen, “Measuring the European Conventional Balance,” pp. 51–54, 66–70.

148. For examples of how one might do this kind of analysis, see Joshua Epstein, Measuring Military Power: The Soviet Air Threat to Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); and Posen, Inadvertent Escalation, pp. 101–6.

149. The prospects for peace would also be enhanced if each of those states had an ethnically homogeneous population, because then there would be no ethnic civil wars.

CHAPTER FIVE

1. I remind readers that the term “aggressor” is used throughout this book to denote great powers that have both the motive and the wherewithal to use force to gain additional power. As emphasized in Chapter 2, all great powers have aggressive intentions, but not all states have the capability to act aggressively.

2. See Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). Also see Robert Powell, In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), chap. 5, which emphasizes the distinction between bandwagoning and balancing, but unlike Walt and Waltz, argues that threatened states are more likely to bandwagon than balance against their adversaries.

3. For evidence that supports my point, see the debate between Robert Kaufman and Stephen Walt over Allied policy toward Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Their debate is framed explicitly in terms of the dichotomy between balancing and bandwagoning, a contrast that Walt helped make famous. A close reading of the debate, however, makes it clear that, the authors’ rhetoric notwithstanding, the real choice facing the Allies was between balancing and buck-passing, not balancing and bandwagoning. See Robert G. Kaufman, “To Balance or to Bandwagon? Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe,” Security Studies 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 417–47; and Stephen M. Walt, “Alliances, Threats, and U.S. Grand Strategy: A Reply to Kaufman and Labs,” Security Studies 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 448–82.

4. See Steven J. Valone, “’Weakness Offers Temptation’: Seward and the Reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine,” Diplomatic History 19, No. 4 (Fall 1995), pp. 583–99. As discussed in Chapter 7, the United States has worried throughout its history about the threat of distant great powers forming alliances with other states in the Western Hemisphere. Also see Alan Dowty, The Limits of American Isolation: The United States and the Crimean War (New York: New York University Press, 1971); and J. Fred Rippy, America and the Strife of Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), esp. chaps. 6–8.

5. These words are not Weber’s, but Wolfgang J. Mommsen’s synopsis of Weber’s views. See Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920, trans. Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 39.

6. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1980), chaps. 16, 20.

7. See Stephen Van Evera, “Why Europe Matters, Why the Third World Doesn’t: American Grand Strategy after the Cold War,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13, No. 2 (June 1990), pp. 1–51; and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Finite Containment: Analyzing U.S. Grand Strategy,” International Security 14, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 5–49. For an argument that areas with little intrinsic wealth are sometimes strategically important, see Michael C. Desch, When the Third World Matters: Latin America and United States Grand Strategy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Also see Steven R. David, “Why the Third World Matters,” International Security 14, No. 1 (Summer 1989), pp. 50–85; and Steven R. David, “Why the Third World Still Matters,” International Security 17, No. 3 (Winter 1992–93), pp. 127–59.

8. See Barry R. Posen and Stephen Van Evera, “Defense Policy and the Reagan Administration: Departure from Containment,” International Security 8, No. 1 (Summer 1983), pp. 3–45.

9. Charles L. Glaser, Analyzing Strategic Nuclear Policy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospects of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 8.

10. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage, 3d rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Putnam, 1912). Also see Norman Angell, The Great Illusion 1933 (New York: Putnam, 1933). For an early critique of Angell, see J. H. Jones, The Economics of War and Conquest: An Examination of Mr. Norman Angell’s Economic Doctrines (London: P. S. King, 1915).

11. See Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).

12. For example, see Klaus Knorr, On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 21–34; Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 34–37; and Van Evera, Causes of War, chap. 5.

13. Van Evera makes this argument in Causes of War, p. 115.

14. See Ethan B. Kapstein, The Political Economy of National Security: A Global Perspective (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 42–52.

15. See the sources cited in Chapter 3, note 57.

16. For example, a number of studies argue that the Soviet Union’s system of rigid centralized control of the economy was the main culprit for stifling innovation and growth. See Tatyana Zaslavskaya, “The Novosibirsk Report,” Survey 28, No. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 88–108; Abel Aganbegyan, The Economic Challenge of Perestroika, trans. Pauline M. Tiffen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Padma Desai, Perestroika in Perspective: The Design and Dilemmas of Soviet Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Anders Aslund, Gorbachev’s Struggle for Economic Reform, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Also see Peter Rutland, Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), which blames the Soviet Union’s economic woes on the Communist Party.

17. See Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Peter Liberman, “The Spoils of Conquest,” International Security 18, No. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 125–53. Also see David Kaiser, Politics and War: European Conflict from Philip II to Hitler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 219–22, 246–55; and Alan S. Milward, War, Economy, and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), chap. 5.

18. These quotes are from Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? p. 28; and Lieberman, “Spoils of Conquest,” p. 126. On the Orwellian dimension of information technologies, see Jeffrey Rosen, The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America (New York: Random House, 2000). In a recent article assessing whether conquest pays, Stephen Brooks concludes that Liberman’s claim that repressive conquerors can deal effectively with popular resistance as well as the subversive potential of information technologies is persuasive. Stephen G. Brooks, “The Globalization of Production and the Changing Benefits of Conquest,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, No. 5 (October 1999), pp. 646–70. Brooks argues, however, that conquest is not likely to pay significant dividends, because of “changes in the globalization of production” (p. 653). This argument, which I find unconvincing, is basically the liberal theory that economic interdependence causes peace, updated to take account of globalization. I deal with it briefly in Chapter 10.

19. Liberman, “Spoils of Conquest,” p. 139.

20. See Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Also see Liberman, Does Conquest Pay? chap. 7.

21. See Joshua M. Epstein, Strategy and Force Planning: The Case of the Persian Gulf (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1987); Charles A. Kupchan, The Persian Gulf and the West: The Dilemmas of Security (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); and Thomas L. McNaugher, Arms and Oil: U.S. Military Strategy and the Persian Gulf (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1985).

22. See John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (New York: Norton, 1971); and Milward, War, Economy, and Society, chap. 8.

23. Clive Emsley, Napoleonic Europe (New York: Longman, 1993), p. 146.

24. David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 754–56.

25. George H. Stein, The Waffen SS: Hitler’s Elite Guard at War, 1939–1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 137.

26. Edward Homze, “Nazi Germany’s Forced Labor Program,” in Michael Berenbaum, ed., A Mosaic of Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 37–38. Also see Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany under the Third Reich, trans. William Templer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

27. See Jere C. King, Foch versus Clemenceau: France and German Dismemberment, 1918–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960); Walter A. McDougall, France’s Rhineland Diplomacy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978); and David Stevenson, French War Aims against Germany, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

28. Max Jakobson, The Diplomacy of the Winter War: An Account of the Russo-Finnish War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pts. 1–3; Anthony F. Upton, Finland, 1939–1940 (London: Davis-Poynter, 1974), chaps. 1–2; and Carl Van Dyke, The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 1939–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), chap. 1.

29. On Carthage, see Serge Lancel, Carthage: A History, trans. Antonia Nevill (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995), esp. pp. 412–27. On Poland, see Jan T. Gross, Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); and Richard C. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986). On the Soviet Union, see Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: Macmillan, 1957). Also see David Weigall and Peter Stirk, eds., The Origins and Development of the European Community (London: Leicester University Press, 1992), pp. 27–28.

30. Michael Handel writes, “The basic assumption underlying the Israeli political-military doctrine is the understanding that the central aim of Arab countries is to destroy the state of Israel whenever they feel able to do so, while doing everything to harass and disturb its peaceful life.” Handel, Israel’s Political-Military Doctrine, Occasional Paper No. 30 (Cambridge, MA: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, July 1973), p. 64 [emphasis in original]. Also see Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Strategies and Israel’s Response (New York: Free Press, 1977); Yehoshafat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes to Israel, trans. Misha Louvish (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972); and Asher Arian, Israeli Public Opinion on National Security, 2000, Memorandum No. 56 (Tel Aviv: Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, July 2000), pp. 13–16.

31. Poland was partitioned in 1772, 1793, and 1795 by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and in 1939 by Germany and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, at the end of World War II, Stalin took the eastern third of Poland and incorporated it into the Soviet Union. One author notes that, “Contrary to conventional wisdom, state death has occurred quite frequently over the last two centuries; 69 of 210 states (about 30%) have died, and most [51 out of those 69] have died violently.” Most of the victims were small states that either became an integral part of a great power or part of a great power’s empire. Some of the victims eventually came back from the dead and became independent states again. Tanisha M. Fazal, “Born to Lose and Doomed to Survive: State Death and Survival in the International System,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, August 31–September 3, 2000, pp. 15–16.

32. Wilfried Loth, “Stalin’s Plans for Post-War Germany,” in Francesca Gori and Silvio Pons, eds., The Soviet Union and Europe in the Cold War, 1943–53 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), pp. 23–36; Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945–1963 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 57–60, 129–30; and Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 46–53.

33. See Warren F. Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976); and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Germany Is Our Problem (New York: Harper, 1945).

34. A brief word on the terms “coercion” and “blackmail.” Coercion involves either the use of force or the threat of force to get an adversary to change its behavior. I used the term “coercion” in Chapter 4 to describe the actual use of force (naval blockade and strategic bombing) to cause an opponent to quit a war before it was conquered. To avoid possible confusion, I use the term “blackmail” to describe threats of force to alter state behavior. Nevertheless, blackmail is generally synonymous with coercion. On coercion see Daniel Ellsberg, “Theory and Practice of Blackmail,” RAND Paper P-3883 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1968); Alexander L. George, William E. Simons, and David K. Hall, Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971); Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); and Thomas Schelling, Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

35. Regarding the pre–World War I crises, see Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, vol. I, European Relations from the Congress of Berlin to the Eve of the Sarajevo Murder, ed. and trans. Isabella M. Massey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), chaps. 3–10; Imanuel Geiss, German Foreign Policy, 1871–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), chaps. 8–17; David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and L.C.F. Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: Norton, 1970).

36. See Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy, 1898–1905 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1968), chap. 5; Darrell Bates, The Fashoda Incident: Encounter on the Nile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Roger G. Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered: The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in Africa, 1893–1898 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).

37. Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War: Three Lectures and Several Suggestions, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1960), p. 231; and Henry S. Rowen, “Catalytic Nuclear War,” in Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., eds., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: Norton, 1985), pp. 148–63.

38. Quoted in T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (London: Longman, 1986), p. 186. There is some evidence that in 1908 Austria-Hungary’s foreign minister considered trying to bait Serbia and Bulgaria into a war, so that Austria-Hungary could take advantage of a weakened Serbia in the Balkans. However, the idea was not put into practice. Edmond Taylor, The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order, 1905–1922 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 128–29. Also, some argue that Stalin baited Nazi Germany and the Allies into starting World War II. But as discussed in Chapter 8, there is not sufficient evidence to support that claim.

39. See Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. 164; and Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion: A Biography, trans. Peretz Kidron (New York: Delacorte, 1978), pp. 209–16.

40. Quoted in David McCullough, Truman (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 262.

41. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk, pp. 189–90, 385–91.

42. See Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994), pp. xviii, 9, 64–65, 100–101, 116–19, 151–53. Also see Robert P. Hager, Jr., and David A. Lake, “Balancing Empires: Competitive Decolonization in International Politics,” Security Studies 9, No. 3 (Spring 2000), pp. 108–48.

43. On balancing, see Robert Jervis and Jack Snyder, eds., Dominoes and Bandwagons: Strategic Beliefs and Great Power Competition in the Eurasian Rimland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Walt, Origins of Alliances; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Some scholars define balancing behavior as a joint effort by the great powers to preserve each other’s independence. States have “a conception of a common destiny,” writes Edward Vose Gulick in Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (New York: Norton, 1955), p. 10. Every major power aims to make sure that no rival is eliminated from the system, because that is the best way for each state to guarantee its own survival. “Group-consciousness and group action,” so the argument goes, are “the best way of preserving the individual state.” Ibid., p. 297. States are not wedded to defending the status quo in this theory; changes in the distribution of power are acceptable, as long as no great power is driven from the system. Indeed, states can be expected to go to war to gain power at the expense of other states. But states fight only limited wars, because they recognize that although it is permissible to alter the balance of power, the independence of all the major powers must be preserved. Thus, states will often demonstrate “restraint, abnegation, and the denial of immediate self-interest.” Ibid., p. 33. States will “stop fighting rather than eliminate an essential national actor,” because they are motivated by “a theory of the general good.” Morton A. Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley, 1957), p. 23; and Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance, p. 45. The result of all this “attention to group interest” is a fluid but stable equilibrium. Ibid., p. 31. Although this theory focuses on the balance of power and allows for limited wars of aggression, it is not a realist theory, because in it states are concerned mainly with preserving a particular version of world order, not the pursuit of power. For further discussion of this theory, see Inis L. Claude, Jr., Power and International Relations (New York: Random House, 1962), chap. 2; Ernst B. Haas, “The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept, or Propaganda?” World Politics 5, No. 4 (July 1953), pp. 442–77; Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 5th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1973), chap. 11; and Quincy Wright, A Study of War, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), chap. 20.

44. The examples of balancing and buck-passing mentioned in this section are discussed in detail in Chapter 8.

45. The terms “external” and “internal” balancing were introduced by Waltz in Theory of International Politics, pp. 118, 163.

46. Quoted in “Preface” to Keith Neilson and Roy A. Prete, eds., Coalition Warfare: An Uneasy Accord (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), p. vii. Napoleon’s views on the matter are reflected in a comment he made to an Austrian diplomat: “How many allies do you have? Five? Ten? Twenty? The more you have, the better it is for me.” Quoted in Karl A. Roider, Jr., Baron Thugut and Austria’s Response to the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 327. Also see Gordon A. Craig, “Problems of Coalition Warfare: The Military Alliance against Napoleon, 1813–14,” in Gordon A. Craig, War, Politics, and Diplomacy: Selected Essays (New York: Praeger, 1966), pp. 22–45; and Neilson and Prete, Coalition Warfare, passim.

47. On buck-passing, see Mancur Olson, Jr., The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Mancur Olson and Richard Zeckhauser, “An Economic Theory of Alliances,” Review of Economics and Statistics 48, No. 3 (August 1966), pp. 266–79; and Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 63, 74, 232.

48. Thomas J. Christensen and Jack Snyder refer to this as the “chain ganging” problem in “Chain Gangs and Passed Bucks: Predicting Alliance Patterns in Multipolarity,” International Organization 44, No. 2 (Spring 1990), pp. 137–68.

49. See David French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914–1916 (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 24–25; and David French, “The Meaning of Attrition, 1914–1916,” English Historical Review 103, No. 407 (April 1988), pp. 385–405.

50. States are also deeply interested in avoiding the terrible costs of war, for reasons unrelated to the balance of power.

51. As noted in Chapter 4 (note 72), roughly 24 million Soviets died in the war against Nazi Germany. The United Kingdom and the United States together suffered about 650,000 deaths in all theaters combined. That figure includes roughly 300,000 U.S. battle deaths, 300,000 British battle deaths, and 50,000 British civilian deaths. See I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 290; and Robert Goralski, World War II Almanac: 1931–1945 (New York: Putnam, 1981), pp. 425–26, 428.

52. Winston Churchill appears to have been committed to a buck-passing strategy. He did not want the Allies to invade France even in the summer of 1944, and agreed to the D-Day invasion only because of intense American pressure. He preferred to allow the Red Army to crush the Wehrmacht’s main forces, while the British and American armies remained on the periphery of Europe, engaging relatively small contingents of German forces. See Mark A. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning and Diplomacy in Coalition Warfare, 1941–1943 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977).

53. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 478–80; and John Erickson, “Stalin, Soviet Strategy and the Grand Alliance,” in Ann Lane and Howard Temperley, eds., The Rise and Fall of the Grand Alliance, 1941–45 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), pp. 140–41. Recalling his experience as the the Soviet ambassador to the United Kingdom during World War II, Ivan Maisky writes, “From Churchill’s point of view, it would be ideal if both Germany and the [Soviet Union] emerged from the war greatly battered, bled white and, for at any rate a whole generation, would be struggling along on crutches, while Britain arrived at the finish line with a minimum of losses and in good form as a European boxer.” Ivan Maisky, Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: The War, 1939–1943, trans. Andrew Rothstein (London: Hutchinson, 1967), p. 271. Similarly, the Italian ambassador to Turkey during World War II remarked, “The Turkish ideal is that the last German soldier should fall upon the last Russian corpse.” Selim Deringil, Turkish Foreign Policy during the Second World War: An “Active” Neutrality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 134–35.

54. The key works on bandwagoning include Eric J. Labs, “Do Weak States Bandwagon?” Security Studies 1, No. 3 (Spring 1992), pp. 383–416; Randall L. Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In,” International Security 19, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 72–107; Walt, Origins of Alliances; and Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Schweller’s definition of bandwagoning, however, is fundamentally different from the one used by almost all other international relations scholars, including me (Schweller, “Bandwagoning for Profit,” pp. 80–83). According to the conventional definition, bandwagoning is a strategy that threatened states employ against their adversaries, and it involves asymmetrical concessions to the aggressor. Bandwagoning in Schweller’s lexicon is explicitly not a strategy employed by threatened states but one employed by states looking for opportunities to gain profit through aggression. Specifically, according to Schweller, bandwagoning is where an opportunistic state joins forces with another aggressor to take advantage of a third state, the way the Soviet Union joined forces with Nazi Germany in 1939 to dismember Poland. This kind of behavior, which does not contradict balance-of-power logic, fits squarely under the strategy of war described above.

55. Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), p. 352.

56. After studying balancing and bandwagoning behavior in the Middle East, Walt concludes that “balancing was far more common than bandwagoning, and bandwagoning was almost always confined to especially weak and isolated states.” Walt, Origins of Alliances, p. 263. Also see ibid., pp. 29–33; and Labs, “Weak States.”

57. See Elizabeth Wiskemann, “The Subjugation of South-Eastern Europe, June 1940 to June 1941,” in Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee, eds., Survey of International Affairs, 1939–46: The Initial Triumph of the Axis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 319–36; and Sidney Lowery, “Rumania” and “Bulgaria,” in Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee, eds., Survey of International Affairs, 1939–46: The Realignment of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), pp. 285–90, 301–6.

58. This definition of appeasement is found in most dictionaries and is widely employed by historians and political scientists. For example, see Gilpin, War and Change, pp. 193–94; and Bradford A. Lee, Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1939: A Study in the Dilemmas of British Decline (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), pp. vii–viii. Nevertheless, some scholars employ a different definition of appeasement. They describe it as a policy designed to reduce tensions with a dangerous adversary by eliminating the cause of conflict between them. See Stephen R. Rock, Appeasement in International Politics (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 10–12. That definition of appeasement certainly allows for conceding power to a rival state but does not mandate it. My definition, on the other hand, requires that the appeaser allow the balance of power to shift against it.

59. See Chapter 7.

60. See Chapter 8.

61. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 127–28. Also see ibid., pp. 74–77; Kenneth Waltz, “A Response to My Critics,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 330–32; and Colin Elman, “The Logic of Emulation: The Diffusion of Military Practices in the International System,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1999.

62. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 127–28.

63. For example, President George Bush said on November 8, 1990, that “Iraq’s aggression is not just a challenge to the security of Kuwait and other Gulf nations, but to the better world that we have all hoped to build in the wake of the Cold War. And therefore, we and our allies cannot and will not shirk our responsibilities. The state of Kuwait must be restored, or no nation will be safe, and the promising future we anticipate will indeed be jeopardized.” George Bush, “The Need for an Offensive Military Option,” in Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Books, 1991), p. 229. Also see Thomas L. Friedman, “Washington’s ‘Vital Interests,’” in ibid., pp. 205–6. There is also the possibility that states will bandwagon (in Schweller’s sense of the term) with successful aggressors and cause more war.

64. See Matthew Evangelista, Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Posen, Sources of Military Doctrine, pp. 29–33, 54–57, 224–26; and Stephen P. Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

65. See Richard K. Betts, Surprise Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1983).

66. See Michael I. Handel, War, Strategy, and Intelligence (London: Frank Cass, 1989), chaps. 3–8; and Dan Reiter, Crucible of Beliefs: Learning, Alliances, and World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).