Description
Neorealists argue that all states aim to acquire power and that state cooperation can therefore only be temporary, based on a common opposition to a third country. This view condemns the world to endless conflict for the indefinite future. Based upon careful attention to actual historical outcomes, this book contends that, while some countries and leaders have demonstrated excessive power drives, others have essentially underplayed their power and sought less position and influence than their comparative strength might have justified. Featuring case studies from across the globe, History and Neorealism examines how states have actually acted. The authors conclude that leadership, domestic politics, and the domain (of gain or loss) in which they reside play an important role along with international factors in raising the possibility of a world in which conflict does not remain constant and, though not eliminated, can be progressively reduced.
Chapter
3 Domestically driven deviations: internal regimes, leaders, and realism’s power line
Foreigners’ reactions to the state
4 How international institutions affect outcomes
Institutional theory as a partial challenge to realism
Identifying anomalies in realism
Observable implications of institutional theory
Challenges to institutional theory
A realist theory of “binding”
Institutional theory and domestic politics
The endogeneity trap and the delegation escape
Endogenous, yes but epiphenomenal?
Conclusions: Institutions as endogenous and consequential
5 Not even for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: power and order in the early modern era
6 Austria-Hungary and the coming of the First World War
7 British decisions for peace and war 1938–1939: the rise and fall of realism
8 Realism and risk in 1938: German foreign policy and the Munich Crisis
9 Domestic politics, interservice impasse, and Japan’s decisions for war
A “realist” Imperial Japan?
10 Military audacity: Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and China’s adventure in Korea
Perceptions of martial prowess and foreign policy
Assessing the martial confidence of Mao and Liu
China’s adventure in Korea
The decision to intervene
Perceptions of martial prowess and the decision
11 The United States’ underuse of military power
12 The overuse of American power
Unipolarity vs. unilateralism (the overuse of power)
Dissuasion or persuasion?
Regime change or behavior change?
13 Redrawing the Soviet power line: Gorbachev and the end of the Cold War
Realistic power line and Gorbachev’s foreign policy
The Soviet Union’s declining power position
New Thinking and its alternatives
The Soviet Union and soft power
Social identity theory and the New Thinking
The Soviet Union as moral, visionary leader
Implementation of the New Thinking
14 Shared sovereignty in the European Union: Germany’s economic governance
The Schuman Plan: the first step in shared sovereignty
Germany and the Rome treaties
The European Monetary System
Toward economic and monetary union
The Maastricht Treaty and EMU
15 John Mearsheimer’s “elementary geometry of power”: Euclidean moment or an intellectual blind alley?
16 History and neorealism reconsidered
Factors that influence national position on or off the power line
2. Domestic politics and ideology
3. International leadership
4. Domains of loss or gain
The result: The interaction of leadership, international power, domain of loss/gain, and domestic politics/ideology
Arrogation of case studies: historical cases