Overview

This strategy of forming ad hoc coalitions and working within the prevailing international consensus of goals and foreign policy has become more established. On a more general scale, the text tackles the general theory of security relationships. The author arrays the variety of possible security relationships on a continuum from anarchy to hierarchy, and explains actual relations as a function of three key variables: the benefits from pooling security resources and efforts with others, the expected costs of opportunistic behaviour by partners, and governance costs. He applies this theory to each of the defining moments of twentieth-century American foreign policy and develops its broader implications for the study of international relations.

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9780691059907

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An innovative approach to understanding how and why polities choose to structure their relations with one another. . . . Lake has some interesting ideas, which he presents clearly and intelligently.--Choice This is the most ambitious, most successful attempt yet to bring under a single, conceptual framework the strategic choices available to a state seeking to enhance its security: empire, alliance, and unilateralism. This is a major contribution to the field of international politics. --Jack Snyder, Columbia University Entangling Relations raises an important question-what accounts for the variation in the institutional structure of security relationships?-and helps us begin to think about this problem more clearly by drawing on work in relational contracting and organizational theory in economics. --Robert Powell, UC-Berkeley David Lake works masterfully at the intersection of highly revealing political science theories and recent important findings in the history of U.S. foreign relations. Lake opens fresh, instructive perspectives on the so-called American Century--not least by finally destroying (one hopes once and for all), the myth of American isolationism, and demonstrating how the battle over U.S. foreign policy has been, and continues to be, between whose who wish to deal with the world unilaterally and those he rightly calls internationalist. --Walter LaFeber, Cornell University

An innovative approach to understanding how and why polities choose to structure their relations with one another. . . . Lake has some interesting ideas, which he presents clearly and intelligently.

An innovative approach to understanding how and why polities choose to structure their relations with one another. . . . Lake has some interesting ideas, which he presents clearly and intelligently. -- Choice

Author Information

David A. Lake is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, and coeditor of the journal International Organization. He has published widely in the field of international relations and has, most recently, coedited The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and Escalation and Strategic Choice and International Relations, both available from Princeton University Press.

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