Journal ArticleDOI
Preventing Enemy Coalitions: How Wedge Strategies Shape Power Politics
TLDR
The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation (concessions, compensations, and other inducements) to detach and neutralize potential adversaries.Abstract:
States use wedge strategies to prevent hostile alliances from forming or to disperse those that have formed. These strategies can cause power alignments that are otherwise unlikely to occur, and thus have significant consequences for international politics. How do such strategies work and what conditions promote their success? The wedge strategies that are likely to have significant effects use selective accommodation—concessions, compensations, and other inducements—to detach and neutralize potential adversaries. These kinds of strategies play important roles in the statecraft of both defensive and offensive powers. Defenders use selective accommodation to balance against a primary threat by neutralizing lesser ones that might ally with it. Expansionists use selective accommodation to prevent or break up blocking coalitions, which isolates opposing states by inducing potential balancers to buck-pass, bandwagon, or hide. Two cases—Great Britain's defensive attempts to accommodate Italy in the late 1930s a...read more
Citations
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Theories of War and Peace
TL;DR: The course on theories of war and peace as discussed by the authors is the logical continuation of the course "International Relations Theories. An Introduction". As such it presupposes that students master the general discipline of IR.
Journal ArticleDOI
Revising order or challenging the balance of military power? An alternative typology of revisionist and status-quo states
TL;DR: This article propose a two-dimensional property space that generates four ideal types of revisionist actors: status-quo actors, reformist actors, positionalist actors and revolutionary actors, who want to overturn both international order and the distribution of capabilities.
Dissertation
Dilemmas of decline, risks of rise : the systemic and military sources of rising state strategy towards declining great powers
Itzkowitz Shifrinson,Joshua R +1 more
TL;DR: Posen et al. as mentioned in this paper developed and tested a theory of state strategy vis-a-vis declining great powers, termed Realist Decline Theory, which argues that states debating the strategies to adopt towards a declining peer are forced to consider the costs and benefits of either preying on the declining state, or supporting the decliner and helping it maintain its place within the great power ranks.
Promises under Pressure: Reassurance and Burden-Sharing in Asymmetric Alliances
TL;DR: Blankenship et al. as discussed by the authors studied the relationship between reassurance and burden sharing in asymmetric alliances and found that reassurance serves the purpose of discouraging allies from leaving the alliance; the more credible allies' threats of exit, the more reassurance they will receive.
Book ChapterDOI
Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939: Soviet Russian assertiveness: February 1936–July 1937
TL;DR: The decision not to offer Soviet Russia a loan (and, by extension, not to prepare the way for a possible political arrangement between the two states) did not end the choices facing those who made British policy as discussed by the authors.
References
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Book
The Strategy of Conflict
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a theory of interdependent decision based on the Retarded Science of International Strategy (RSIS) for non-cooperative games and a solution concept for "noncooperative" games.
Book
Politics among nations;: The struggle for power and peace
TL;DR: In this paper, a theory of international politics, describes the struggle for political power, and discusses balance of power, international law, disarmament, and diplomacy. But this theory does not consider the role of women in international politics.
Journal ArticleDOI
Rationalist explanations for war
TL;DR: The authors show that there will exist negotiated settlements that rational states would mutually prefer to a risky and costly fight under very broad conditions, under the assumption that states have both private information about capabilities and resolve and the incentive to misrepresent it.