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There is a widespread belief, among both political scientists and government policymakers, that \"democracies don't fight each other.\" Here Joanne Gowa challenges that belief. In a thorough, systematic critique, she shows that, while democracies were less likely than other states to engage each other in armed conflicts between 1945 and 1980, they were just as likely to do so as were other states before 1914. Thus, no reason exists to believe that a democratic peace will survive the end of the Cold War. Since U.S. foreign policy is currently directed toward promoting democracy abroad, Gowa's findings are especially timely and worrisome. Those who assert that a democratic peace exists typically examine the 1815-1980 period as a whole. In doing so, they conflate two very different historical periods: the pre-World War I and post-World War II years. Examining these periods separately, Gowa shows that a democratic peace prevailed only during the later period. Given the collapse of the Cold War world, her research calls into question both the conclusions of previous researchers and the wisdom of present U.S. foreign policy initiatives. By re-examining the arguments and data that have been used to support beliefs about a democratic peace, Joanne Gowa has produced a thought-provoking book that is sure to be controversial.

Why do democracies win wars? This is a critical question in the study of international relations, as a traditional view--expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville--has been that democracies are inferior in crafting foreign policy and fighting wars. In Democracies at War, the first major study of its kind, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam come to a very different conclusion. Democracies tend to win the wars they fight--specifically, about eighty percent of the time.

The question of what causes war has concerned statesmen since the time of Thucydides.The Steps to Warutilizes new data on militarized interstate disputes from 1816 to 2001 to identify the factors that increase the probability that a crisis will escalate to war. In this book, Paul Senese and John Vasquez test one of the major behavioral explanations of war--the steps to war--by identifying the various factors that put two states at risk for war. Focusing on the era of classic international politics from 1816 to 1945, the Cold War, and the post-Cold War period, they look at the roles of territorial disputes, alliances, rivalry, and arms races and show how the likelihood of war increases significantly as these risk factors are combined. Senese and Vasquez argue that war is more likely in the presence of these factors because they increase threat perception and put both sides into a security dilemma. The Steps to Warcalls into question certain prevailing realist beliefs, like peace through strength, demonstrating how threatening to use force and engaging in power politics is more likely to lead to war than to peace.

The book description for \"Political Process and Foreign Policy\" is currently unavailable.

This chapter talks about United States' relationship with China and Taiwan during Eisenhower's tenure. The earliest study of Sino‐American relations since 1949 to devote extensive coverage to the Eisenhower years was Foster Rhea Dulles's American Foreign Policy toward Communist China. According to Dulles, the Eisenhower administration continued its predecessor's policies of pressuring the People's Republic of China (PRC) and defending Taiwan. The foreign policy Eisenhower and Dulles developed was one they called the New Look. The centerpiece of the New Look, known as 'massive retaliation', emphasized the use of the nuclear deterrent to stop communist aggression. Materials from China suggest a desire to muster domestic support for the Great Leap Forward and a wish to counter US activities in the Middle East both played a role in the second offshore islands crisis. The Eisenhower administration's determination to use coercive measures against China did not sit well with US allies.

He called on Nicaragua to ''desist from the armed aggression we have heard about in great detail'' after several Central American nations leveled charges against Nicaragua.

After World War II, the US-led international security order exhibited substantial regional variation. Explaining this variation has been central to the debate over why is there no nato in Asia. But this debate overlooks the emergence of multilateral security arrangements between the United States and Latin American countries during the same critical juncture. These inter-American institutions are puzzling considering the three factors most commonly used to explain divergence between nato and Asia: burden-sharing, external threats, and collective identity. These conditions fail to explain contemporaneous emergence of inter-American security multilateralism. Although the postwar inter-American system has been characterized as the solidification of US dominance, at the time of its framing, Latin American leaders judged the inter-American system as their best bet for maintaining beneficial US involvement in the Western Hemisphere while reinforcing voice opportunities for weaker states and imposing institutional constraints on US unilateralism. Drawing on multinational archival research, the author advances a historical institutionalist account. Shared historical antecedents of regionalism shaped the range of choices for Latin American and US leaders regarding the desirability and nature of new regional institutions while facilitating institutional change through mechanisms of layering and conversion during this critical juncture.

Evidence suggests that leaders of democratic states experience high costs from violating past commitments. We argue that because democratic leaders foresee the costs of violation, they are careful to design agreements they expect to have a high probability of fulfilling. This may cause democratic leaders to prefer flexible or limited commitments. We evaluate our argument by analyzing the design of alliance treaties signed by countries of the world between 1815 and 2003. We find that alliances formed among democratic states are more likely to include obligations for future consultation rather than precommitting leaders to active conflict, and defense pacts formed among democratic states are more likely to specify limits to the conditions under which member states must join their partners in conflict. This research suggests that separating screening effects and constraining effects of international agreements is even more difficult than previously believed. States with the greatest likelihood of being constrained are more carefully screened.

Introduced in 2009, the debt brake instantly became a defining element of the German Fundamental Law. During the Eurozone fiscal crisis, it grew into the main constitutional export of the Merkel/Schäuble government, an executive remembered by its imposing austerity policies to ‘save’ the Eurozone. In what comes close to a U turn, Friedrich Merz, the German Chancellor in pectore , promoted in the early days of March 2025 an amendment to the Fundamental Law which, in less than a month, resulted in a radical recalibration of the debt brake. This editorial considers the very idiosyncratic procedure of reform followed in Germany, including the rather exceptional rulings produced by the German Federal Constitutional Court. I conclude by considering whether, politically and morally, it is wise for Germany to partially dismantle the break without some serious reconsideration of the effects that the previous “Germanisation” of the Eurozone had, and without some form of consultation with its European peers. Before that, I reconstruct how Germany shifted from debt brake enthusiasm to debt brake disenchantment.

This study explores the evolution of Czechoslovak Military Intelligence cooperation within the framework of the Warsaw Pact, utilizing Jennifer E. Sims’ intelligence liaison model as a theoretical lens. The analysis reveals that early cooperation was bilateral, progressing toward a structured multilateral framework by the 1960s. A significant milestone occurred in 1964 with the institutionalization of annual conferences for military intelligence chiefs, facilitating exchanges of intelligence across multiple domains. Collaboration included sharing intelligence data, operational experiences, education, and joint exercises. While relations with East Germany, Poland, and Hungary were largely symmetrical, cooperation with Bulgaria was notably asymmetric. The hierarchical relationship with Soviet military intelligence, characterized by imbalanced information flows, underscores the influence of geopolitical dynamics. By the 1980s, intelligence cooperation was increasingly standardized and supported by automated processes. This research highlights the transition from bilateral to multilateral cooperation, demonstrating how political and strategic factors shaped intelligence interactions within the Warsaw Pact.