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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
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국제정치이론 = Theory of international politics
Kenneth Neal Waltz,건영 박 +1 more
TL;DR: The seeker after the truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather, one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deformation as mentioned in this paper.
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The sources of military doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the world wars
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The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis
TL;DR: In this article, the authors call for a research program focused on the dynamics of global power politics, rather than linking realpolitik to structural-realist theoretical frameworks or the putatively anarchical character of world politics, they treat power politics as an object of analysis in its own right.
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The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present
TL;DR: The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the present by Christopher Layne as discussed by the authors is a collection of influential articles on the history of the United States' foreign policy.
Protection States Trust?: Major Power Patronage, Nuclear Behavior, and Alliance Dynamics
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose an alliance compensation theory to explain why some states that receive a nuclear security guarantee move towards, and sometimes back away from, nuclear weapons, and argue that allies become more likely to engage in nuclear behavior when they doubt the reliability of the security guarantees they receive from their major power patrons.
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Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on the British pivotal deterrence policy during the July crisis and the effects it had on the behavior of the major European powers (France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia).
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Extending Offensive Realism: The Louisiana Purchase and America's Rise to Regional Hegemony
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use property space techniques to develop an extended version of offensive realism that clarifies why states will sometimes prefer not to block a hegemonic bid, and test their argument by process tracing the U.S. purchase of Louisiana and show that France's decision to sell is best explained by its own territorial ambitions.
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Who “Won” Libya? The Force-Diplomacy Debate and Its Implications for Theory and Policy
TL;DR: The debate over credit for Libya's shift away from "rogue state" policies, most especially by settling the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie terrorism case and abandoning its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, is lively politically and challenging analytically.
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“To Balance or To Bandwagon?” Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe
TL;DR: (1992). “To Balance or To Bandwagon?” Alignment Decisions in 1930s Europe.