Paul D. Miller offers a tough minded critique of recent trends in American grand strategy. He rejects retrenchment but also the excesses of liberal internationalism. He prescribes a conservative internationalist grand strategy to preserve the American security and leadership in the world while avoiding overstretch.

Originally written before the 2016 US presidential election, this first paperback edition contains a new preface that repositions the book’s argument for the Trump era. Miller explains why President Trump’s nationalist vision for American grand strategy damages US interests and world order. Miller blends academic rigor with his experiences as former member of the National Security Council and intelligence community to offer prescriptions for US grand strategy. He advocates for narrowing regional priorities and focusing on five strategic objectives: balancing against the nuclear autocracies, championing liberalism to maintain a favorable balance of power, thwarting the transnational jihadist movement, investing in governance in weak and failed states, and strengthening homeland security. 

This book is a must read for scholars and students of international affairs and for anyone who is concerned about America’s role in the world. 

This new textbook gathers an international roster of top security studies scholars to provide an overview of Asia-Pacific’s international relations and pressing contemporary security issues. It is a suitable introduction for undergraduate and masters students' use in international relations and security studies courses. Merging a strong theoretical component with rich contemporary and historical empirical examples, Asia-Pacific Security examines the region's key players and challenges as well as a spectrum of proposed solutions for improving regional stability. Major topics include in-depth looks at the United States' relationship with China; Security concerns presented by small and microstates, the region's largest group of nations; threats posed by terrorism and insurgency; the region's accelerating arms race and the potential for an Asian war; the possible roles of multilateralism, security communities, and human security as part of solutions to regional problems.

The first in a series exploring the elements of a national strategy for U.S. foreign policy, this book examines the most critical decisions likely to face the next president. The book covers global and regional issues and spotlights the long-term policy issues and organizational, financial, and diplomatic challenges that will confront senior U.S. officials in 2017 and beyond.

More than ever, international security and economic prosperity depend upon safe access to the shared domains that make up the global commons: maritime, air, space, and cyberspace. Together these domains serve as essential conduits through which international commerce, communication, and governance prosper. However, the global commons are congested, contested, and competitive. In the January 2012 defense strategic guidance, the United States confirmed its commitment “to continue to lead global efforts with capable allies and partners to assure access to and use of the global commons, both by strengthening international norms of responsible behavior and by maintaining relevant and interoperable military capabilities.”

In the face of persistent threats, some hybrid in nature, and their consequences, Conflict and Cooperation in the Global Commons provides a forum where contributors identify ways to strengthen and maintain responsible use of the global commons. The result is a comprehensive approach that will enhance, align, and unify commercial industry, civil agency, and military perspectives and actions.

The Indian Ocean region has rapidly emerged as a hinge point in the changing global balance of power and the geographic nexus of economic and security issues with vital global consequences. The security of energy supplies, persistent poverty and its contribution to political extremism, piracy, and related threats to seaborne trade, competing nuclear powers, and possibly the scene of future clashes between rising great powers India and China—all are dangers in the waters or in the littoral states of the Indian Ocean region.

This volume, one of the first attempts to treat the Indian Ocean Region in a coherent fashion, captures the spectrum of cooperation and competition in the Indian Ocean Region. Contributors discuss points of cooperation and competition in a region that stretches from East Africa, to Singapore, to Australia, and assess the regional interests of China, India, Pakistan, and the United States. Chapters review possible “red lines” for Chinese security in the region, India’s naval ambitions, Pakistan’s maritime security, and threats from non-state actors—terrorists, pirates, and criminal groups—who challenge security on the ocean for all states.

This volume will interest academics, professionals, and researchers with interests in international relations, Asian security, and maritime studies.

Contemporary world history has highlighted militarization in many ways, from the global Cold War and numerous regional conflicts to the general assumption that nationhood implies a significant and growing military. Yet the twentieth century also offers notable examples of large-scale demilitarization, both imposed and voluntary. Demilitarization in the Contemporary World fills a key gap in current historical understanding by examining demilitarization programs in Germany, Japan, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica.

In nine insightful chapters, this volume's contributors outline each nation's demilitarization choices and how they were made. They investigate factors such as military defeat, border security risks, economic pressures, and the development of strong peace cultures among citizenry. Also at center stage is the influence of the United States, which fills a paradoxical role as both an enabler of demilitarization and a leader in steadily accelerating militarization.

Bookended by Peter N. Stearns' thought-provoking historical introduction and forward-looking conclusion, the chapters in this volume explore what true demilitarization means and how it impacts a society at all levels, military and civilian, political and private. The examples chosen reveal that successful demilitarization must go beyond mere troop demobilization or arms reduction to generate significant political and even psychological shifts in the culture at large. Exemplifying the political difficulties of demilitarization in both its failures and successes, Demilitarization in the Contemporary World provides a possible roadmap for future policies and practices.

A number of nations, conspicuously Israel and the United States, have been increasingly attracted to the use of strategic barriers to promote national defense. In Do Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?, defense analyst Brent Sterling examines the historical use of strategic defenses such as walls or fortifications to evaluate their effectiveness and consider their implications for modern security.

Sterling studies six famous defenses spanning 2,500 years, representing both democratic and authoritarian regimes: the Long Walls of Athens, Hadrian’s Wall in Roman Britain, the Ming Great Wall of China, Louis XIV’s Pré Carré, France’s Maginot Line, and Israel’s Bar Lev Line. Although many of these barriers were effective in the short term, they also affected the states that created them in terms of cost, strategic outlook, military readiness, and relations with neighbors. Sterling assesses how modern barriers against ground and air threats could influence threat perceptions, alter the military balance, and influence the builder’s subsequent policy choices.

Advocates and critics of strategic defenses often bolster their arguments by selectively distorting history. Sterling emphasizes the need for an impartial examination of what past experience can teach us. His study yields nuanced lessons about strategic barriers and international security and yields findings that are relevant for security scholars and compelling to general readers.

During the Cold War, many believed that the superpowers shared a conception of strategic stability, a coexistence where both sides would compete for global influence but would be deterred from using nuclear weapons. In actuality, both sides understood strategic stability and deterrence quite differently. Today’s international system is further complicated by more nuclear powers, regional rivalries, and nonstate actors who punch above their weight, but the United States and other nuclear powers still cling to old conceptions of strategic stability.

The purpose of this book is to unpack and examine how different states in different regions view strategic stability, the use or non-use of nuclear weapons, and whether or not strategic stability is still a prevailing concept. The contributors to this volume explore policies of current and potential nuclear powers including the United States, Russia, China, India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. This volume makes an important contribution toward understanding how nuclear weapons will impact the international system in the twenty-first century and will be useful to students, scholars, and practitioners of nuclear weapons policy.

A critical look at the relationship between environmental degradation and international relations. Since the end of the Cold War, environmental matters--especially the international implications of environmental degradation--have figured prominently in debates about rethinking security. But do the assumptions underlying such discussions hold up under close scrutiny? In this first treatment of environmental security from a truly critical perspective, Simon Dalby shows how attempts to explain contemporary insecurity falter over unexamined notions of both environment and security. Adding environmental history, aboriginal perspectives, and geopolitics to the analysis explicitly suggests that the growing disruptions caused by a carbon-fueled and expanding modernity are at the root of contemporary difficulties. Environmental Security argues that rethinking security means revisiting questions of how we conceive identities as endangered and how we perceive threats to these identities. The book clearly demonstrates that the conceptual basis for critical security studies requires an extended engagement with political theory and with the assumptions of the modern subject as progressive political agent. Viewed thus on a global scale, the environmental security discourse raises profoundly troubling political questions as to who we are and what kind of world we are collectively making in our efforts to be secure. Simon Dalby is professor of geography and political economy at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Given U.S. focus on the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is easy to miss that the military does much more than engage in combat. On any given day, military engineers dig wells in East Africa, medical personnel provide vaccinations in Latin America, and special forces mentor militaries in southeast Asia.

To address today's security challenges, the military partners with civilian agencies, NGOs, and the private sector both at home and abroad. By doing so, the United States seeks to improve its international image, strengthen the state sovereignty system by training and equipping partners’ security forces, prevent localized violence from escalating into regional crises, and protect U.S. national security by addressing underlying conditions that inspire and sustain violent extremism.

In Exporting Security, Derek Reveron provides a comprehensive analysis of the shift in U.S. foreign policy from coercive diplomacy to cooperative military engagement, examines how and why the U.S. military is an effective tool of foreign policy, and explores the methods used to reduce security deficits around the world.

Are NATO’s mutual security commitments strong enough today to deter all adversaries? Is the nuclear umbrella as credible as it was during the Cold War? Backed by the full range of US and allied military capabilities, NATO’s mutual defense treaty has been enormously successful, but today’s commitments are strained by military budget cuts and antinuclear sentiment. The United States has also shifted its focus away from European security during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and more recently with the Asia rebalance. Will a resurgent Russia change this?

The Future of Extended Deterrence brings together experts and scholars from the policy and academic worlds to provide a theoretically rich and detailed analysis of post–Cold War nuclear weapons policy, nuclear deterrence, alliance commitments, nonproliferation, and missile defense in NATO but with implications far beyond. The contributors analyze not only American policy and ideas but also the ways NATO members interpret their own continued political and strategic role in the alliance.

In-depth and multifaceted, The Future of Extended Deterrence is an essential resource for policy practitioners and scholars of nuclear deterrence, arms control, missile defense, and the NATO alliance.

With lessons learned from COVID-19, a world-leading expert on pandemic preparedness proposes a pragmatic plan urgently needed for the future of global health security.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how unprepared the world was for such an event, as even the most sophisticated public health systems failed to cope. We must have far more investment and preparation, along with better detection, warning, and coordination within and across national boundaries. In an age of global pandemics, no country can achieve public health on its own. Health security planning is paramount.

Lawrence O. Gostin has spent three decades designing resilient health systems and governance that take account of our interconnected world, as a close advisor to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many public health agencies globally. Global Health Security addresses the borderless dangers societies now face, including infectious diseases and bioterrorism, and examines the political, environmental, and socioeconomic factors exacerbating these threats. Weak governance, ineffective health systems, and lack of preparedness are key sources of risk, and all of them came to the fore during the COVID-19 crisis, even—sometimes especially—in wealthy countries like the United States. But the solution is not just to improve national health policy, which can only react after the threat is realized at home. Gostin further proposes robust international institutions, tools for effective cross-border risk communication and action, and research programs targeting the global dimension of public health.

Creating these systems will require not only sustained financial investment but also shared values of cooperation, collective responsibility, and equity. Gostin has witnessed the triumph of these values in national and international forums and has a clear plan to tackle the challenges ahead. Global Health Security therefore offers pragmatic solutions that address the failures of the recent past, while looking toward what we know is coming. Nothing could be more important to the future health of nations.

According to security elites, revolutions in information, transport, and weapons technologies have shrunk the world, leaving the United States and its allies more vulnerable than ever to violent threats like terrorism or cyberwar. As a result, they practice responses driven by fear: theories of falling dominoes, hysteria in place of sober debate, and an embrace of preemptive war to tame a chaotic world.

Patrick Porter challenges these ideas. In The Global Village Myth, he disputes globalism's claims and the outcomes that so often waste blood and treasure in the pursuit of an unattainable "total" security. Porter reexamines the notion of the endangered global village by examining Al-Qaeda's global guerilla movement, military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and drones and cyberwar, two technologies often used by globalists to support their views. His critique exposes the folly of disastrous wars and the loss of civil liberties resulting from the globalist enterprise. Showing that technology expands rather than shrinks strategic space, Porter offers an alternative outlook to lead policymakers toward more sensible responses—and a wiser, more sustainable grand strategy.

American foreign policy is the subject of extensive debate. Many look to domestic factors as the driving forces of bad policies. Benjamin Miller instead seeks to account for changes in US international strategy by developing a theory of grand strategy that captures the key security approaches available to US decision-makers in times of war and peace.

Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of competing grand strategies that accounts for objectives and means of security policy. Miller puts forward a model that is widely applicable, based on empirical evidence from post-WWII to today, and shows that external factors—rather than internal concerns—are the most determinative.

The optimism that arrived at the end of the cold war and marked the turn of the Millennium was shattered by September 11. In the aftermath of that event it is not unwarranted pessimism that lines the pages of Grave New World, it is unavoidable reality. Terrorism is but one aspect of many other wider concerns for national and international security, and the contributors to this volume not only warn us, but reward us as well with the clarity of their views into—and possible solutions for—a difficult, complicated future. They speak convincingly of the numerous military and non-military challenges that create security problems—whether those are interstate, intrastate, or transnational—many of which are being dangerously overlooked in public policy debates.

The challenges and complexities might seem insurmountable but the first step in solving problems is recognizing that they exist. Grave New World provides an eye-opening assessment of the prospects for peace and security in the 21st century.

Michael E. Brown frames these issues in his Introduction, "Security Challenges in the 21st Century;" and in his summation, "Security Problems and Security Policy in a Grave New World."

The proliferation of “minilateral” summits is reshaping how international security problems are addressed, yet these summits remain a poorly understood phenomenon. In this groundbreaking work, Kjell Engelbrekt contrasts the most important minilateral summits—the G7 (formerly G8) and G20—with the older and more formal UN Security Council to assess where the diplomacy of international security is taking place and whether these institutions complement or compete with each other.

Engelbrekt’s research in primary-source documents of the G7, G8, G20, and UN Security Council provides unique insight into how these institutions deliberate on three policy areas: conflict management, counterterrorism cooperation, and climate change mitigation. Relatively informal and flexible, GX diplomacy invites more countries to take a seat at the table and allows nontraditional security threats to be placed on the agenda. Engelbrekt concludes, however, that there is a continuing need for institutions like the UN to address traditional security problems.

High-Table Diplomacy will provoke discussion and further research on the role of minilateral summits among scholars of international relations, security studies, and international organizations.

The decade of the 1990s witnessed enormous changes in the international environment. The Cold War conclusively ended. Biotechnology and communications technology made rapid advances. Barriers to international trade and investment declined. Taken together, these developments created many opportunities for peace and prosperity.

At the same time, with the end of superpower domination, ethnically based intranational conflicts brought on widespread suffering. And while globalization expanded opportunity, growth, and incomes, it increased inequality of incomes and decreased human security. Moreover, as countries have become more closely linked, insecurity in one country has affected security in other countries.

This report examines the implications of the proliferation of hypersonic missiles and possible measures to hinder it. This report first explores some of the potential strategic implications of the proliferation of hypersonic missile technology beyond the three major powers, the United States, Russia, and China. It then examines the process of such proliferation. And finally, it discusses possible means for hindering such proliferation.

When Losing Control was first published a decade ago it was years ahead of its time. Its argument was simple - the real causes of global insecurity were the widening socio-economic divide, global marginalisation and environmental limitations, especially climate change and conflict over energy resources.

Paul Rogers, one of the most original thinkers on international security, pointed to a world in which irregular warfare from the margins would prevent powerful states from maintaining their position. He even predicted accurately how the United States would respond to a catastrophic attack.

The new edition brings the whole analysis right up to date, arguing persuasively that the world’s elite cannot maintain control and that a far more emancipatory and sustainable approach to global security has to be developed.

This report examines potential transformations that could alter Russia’s current cooperative stance in the Arctic. It analyzes current security challenges related to climate and geography, economy, territorial claims, and military power, suggests some ways in which these could undermine Arctic cooperation, and offers recommendations for the U.S. government to manage the risks to cooperation.

Taken for granted as the natural order of things, peace at sea is in fact an immense and recent achievement—but also an enormous strategic challenge if it is to be maintained in the future. In Maritime Strategy and Global Order, an international roster of top scholars offers historical perspectives and contemporary analysis to explore the role of naval power and maritime trade in creating the international system.

The book begins in the early days of the industrial revolution with the foundational role of maritime strategy in building the British Empire. It continues into the era of naval disorder surrounding the two world wars, through the passing of the Pax Britannica and the rise of the Pax Americana, and then examines present-day regional security in hot spots like the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean. Additional chapters engage with important related topics such as maritime law, resource competition, warship evolution since the end of the Cold War, and naval intelligence.

A first-of-its-kind collection, Maritime Strategy and Global Order offers scholars, practitioners, students, and others with an interest in maritime history and strategic issues an absorbing long view of the role of the sea in creating the world we know.

As the NATO Alliance enters its seventh decade, it finds itself involved in an array of military missions ranging from Afghanistan to Kosovo to Sudan. It also stands at the center of a host of regional and global partnerships. Yet, NATO has still to articulate a grand strategic vision designed to determine how, when, and where its capabilities should be used, the values underpinning its new missions, and its relationship to other international actors such as the European Union and the United Nations.

The drafting of a new strategic concept, begun during NATO’s 60th anniversary summit, presents an opportunity to shape a new transatlantic vision that is anchored in the liberal democratic principles so crucial to NATO’s successes during its Cold War years. Furthermore, that vision should be focused on equipping the Alliance to anticipate and address the increasingly global and less predictable threats of the post-9/11 world.

This volume brings together scholars and policy experts from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the key issues that NATO must address in formulating a new strategic vision. With thoughtful and reasoned analysis, it offers both an assessment of NATO’s recent evolution and an analysis of where the Alliance must go if it is to remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept officially broadened the alliance’s mission beyond collective defense, reflecting a peaceful Europe and changes in alliance activities. NATO had become an international security facilitator, a crisis-manager even outside Europe, and a liberal democratic club as much as a mutual-defense organization. However, Russia’s re-entry into great power politics has changed NATO’s strategic calculus.

Russia’s aggressive annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its ongoing military support for Ukrainian separatists dramatically altered the strategic environment and called into question the liberal European security order. States bordering Russia, many of which are now NATO members, are worried, and the alliance is divided over assessments of Russia’s behavior.  Against the backdrop of Russia’s new assertiveness, an international group of scholars examines a broad range of issues in the interest of not only explaining recent alliance developments but also making recommendations about critical choices confronting the NATO allies. While a renewed emphasis on collective defense is clearly a priority, this volume’s contributors caution against an overcorrection, which would leave the alliance too inwardly focused, play into Russia’s hand, and exacerbate regional fault lines always just below the surface at NATO. This volume places rapid-fire events in theoretical perspective and will be useful to foreign policy students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

Trends in the number and scope of peace operations since 2000 evidence heightened international appreciation for their value in crisis-response and regional stabilization. Peace Operations: Trends, Progress, and Prospects addresses national and institutional capacities to undertake such operations, by going beyond what is available in previously published literature.

Part one focuses on developments across regions and countries. It builds on data- gathering projects undertaken at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS), the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the Folke Bernadotte Academy (FBA) that offer new information about national contributions to operations and about the organizations through which they make those contributions. The information provides the bases for arriving at unique insights about the characteristics of contributors and about the division of labor between the United Nations and other international entities.

Part two looks to trends and prospects within regions and nations. Unlike other studies that focus only on regions with well-established track records—specifically Europe and Africa—this book also looks to the other major areas of the world and poses two questions concerning them: If little or nothing has been done institutionally in a region, why not? What should be expected?

This groundbreaking volume will help policymakers and academics understand better the regional and national factors shaping the prospects for peace operations into the next decade.

"Joseph's book is especially valuable and distinctive for its freshly mapped avenues into the sometimes dense field of international relations. His sophisticated analysis of 20th century U.S. peace movements is richly textured and analytically revealing." --Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, and author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases The end of the Cold War promises a new era of global peace in which domestic reform could be achieved. Yet armed conflict persists throughout the world. Economic inequality, declining public services, environmental degradation, and other forms of domestic decay threaten the quality of life in the U.S. In Peace Politics, Paul Joseph develops a systematic comparison of the "old" and "new" world orders that links foreign and domestic affairs. By examining the issues that are central to any realignment of American politics, he offers a sweeping account of the possibilities and obstacles for progressive change over the 1990s. Acknowledging that all nations and people have a right to security, he argues for a global attack against a broad range of shared threats, including human rights violations, nuclear devastation, poverty and despair, politically repressive governments, and environmental threats. Joseph also addresses the links between the militarism in the U.S. and deforestation of the Amazon, the uncertain victory of the Gulf War, the effect of public opinion on security issues, the impact of peace movements, nuclear weapons policy, and the need for a peace dividend. Linking war and peace issues with environmental renewal, stronger democracy, economic justice, and citizen activism, Peace Politics is a rallying cry for rationality, genuine security, and mutual survival. "Paul Joseph offers a much needed, coherent, progressive U.S. foreign policy, based on an analysis of the emerging world and the realities of American society." --Louis Kriesberg, Director, Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts, Syracuse University "Peace Politics is the first book that I have found that fully and systematically explores the implications of the dramatic shift in the international system that we have witnessed in the past few years." --William A. Gamson, Professor of Sociology, Boston College "This book is a tour de force. Joseph has packed an enormous amount of material and thoughtful analyses in a very readable presentation. The book is comprehensive, balanced, and wise." --S.M. Miller, Visiting Professor, Boston College and Senior Fellow, Commonwealth Institute

This sweeping history of the development of professional, institutionalized intelligence examines the implications of the fall of the state monopoly on espionage today and beyond.

During the Cold War, only the alliances clustered around the two superpowers maintained viable intelligence endeavors, whereas a century ago, many states could aspire to be competitive at these dark arts. Today, larger states have lost their monopoly on intelligence skills and capabilities as technological and sociopolitical changes have made it possible for private organizations and even individuals to unearth secrets and influence global events.

Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s. Throughout, the book examines how states and other entities use intelligence to create, exploit, and protect secret advantages against others, and emphasizes how technological advancement and ideological competition drive intelligence, improving its techniques and creating a need for intelligence and counterintelligence activities to serve and protect policymakers and commanders.

The world changes intelligence and intelligence changes the world. This sweeping history of espionage and intelligence will be a welcomed by practitioners, students, and scholars of security studies, international affairs, and intelligence, as well as general audiences interested in the evolution of espionage and technology.

Given Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continued aggression in eastern Ukraine, Europe must reassess its approach to a regional security environment previously thought to be stable and relatively benign. This report analyzes the vulnerability of European states to possible forms of Russian influence, pressure, and intimidation and examines four areas of potential European vulnerability: military, trade and investment, energy, and politics.

In this report, RAND researchers analyze Russian core interests and views of the international order. The authors find that Russia sees the current international order as dominated by the United States and as a threat to some of Russia’s interests. For several areas, U.S. and Russian interests overlap and cooperation is feasible. In other areas, U.S. and Russian interests conflict, and this report offers options for U.S. policy going forward.

Among the most momentous decisions that leaders of a state are called upon to make is whether or not to initiate warfare. How their military will fare against the opponent may be the first consideration, but not far behind are concerns about domestic political response and the reaction of the international community.

            
Securing Approval makes clear the relationship between these two seemingly distinct concerns, demonstrating how multilateral security organizations like the UN influence foreign policy through public opinion without ever exercising direct enforcement power. While UN approval of a proposed action often bolsters public support, its refusal of endorsement may conversely send a strong signal to domestic audiences that the action will be exceedingly costly or overly aggressive. With a cogent theoretical and empirical argument, Terrence L. Chapman provides new evidence for how multilateral organizations matter in security affairs as well as a new way of thinking about the design and function of these institutions.

Security and development matter: they often involve issues of life and death and they determine the allocation of truly staggering amounts of the world’s resources. Particularly since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there has been momentum in policy circles to merge the issues of security and development to attempt to end conflicts, create durable peace, strengthen failing states, and promote the conditions necessary for people to lead healthier and more prosperous lives.

In many ways this blending of security and development agendas seems admirable and designed to produce positive outcomes all around. However, it is often the case that the two concepts in combination do not receive equal weight, with security issues getting priority over development concerns. This is not desirable and actually undermines security in the longer term. Moreover, there are major challenges in practice when security practitioners and development practitioners are asked to agree on priorities and work together.

Security and Development in Global Politics illuminates the common points of interest but also the significant differences between security and development agendas and approaches to problem solving. With insightful chapter pairings—each written by a development expert and a security analyst—the book explores seven core international issues: aid, humanitarian assistance, governance, health, poverty, trade and resources, and demography. Using this comparative structure, the book effectively assesses the extent to which there really is a nexus between security and development and, most importantly, whether the link should be encouraged or resisted.

Shaper Nations provides illuminating perspectives on the national strategies of eight emerging and established countries that are shaping global politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The volume’s authors offer a unique viewpoint: they live and work primarily in the country about which they write, bringing an insider’s feel for national debates and politics.

The conventional wisdom on national strategy suggests that these states have clear central authority, coherently connect means to ends, and focus on their geopolitical environment. These essays suggest a different conclusion. In seven key countries—Brazil, China, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, and Turkey—strategy is dominated by nonstate threats, domestic politics, the distorting effect of history and national identity, economic development concerns, and the sheer difficulty, in the face of many powerful internal and external constraints, of pursuing an effective national strategy.

The shapers represent a new trend in the international arena with important consequences. Among them is a more uncertain world in which countries concentrate on their own development rather than on shared problems that might divert precious resources, and attend more to regional than to global order. In responding to these shaper states, the United States must understand the sources of their national strategies in determining its own role on the global stage.

A “second nuclear age” has begun in the post-Cold War world. Created by the expansion of nuclear arsenals and new proliferation in Asia, it has changed the familiar nuclear geometry of the Cold War. Increasing potency of nuclear arsenals in China, India, and Pakistan, the nuclear breakout in North Korea, and the potential for more states to cross the nuclear-weapons threshold from Iran to Japan suggest that the second nuclear age of many competing nuclear powers has the potential to be even less stable than the first.

Strategy in the Second Nuclear Age assembles a group of distinguished scholars to grapple with the matter of how the United States, its allies, and its friends must size up the strategies, doctrines, and force structures currently taking shape if they are to design responses that reinforce deterrence amid vastly more complex strategic circumstances. By focusing sharply on strategy—that is, on how states use doomsday weaponry for political gain—the book distinguishes itself from familiar net assessments emphasizing quantifiable factors like hardware, technical characteristics, and manpower. While the emphasis varies from chapter to chapter, contributors pay special heed to the logistical, technological, and social dimensions of strategy alongside the specifics of force structure and operations. They never lose sight of the human factor—the pivotal factor in diplomacy, strategy, and war.

Since 9/11, Russia, China, and Iran have successfully exploited or stretched U.S. thresholds for high-order war in order to further their strategic ends and, in the process, undermine U.S. interests. Each of these countries has made expert use of some combination of measures short of war to enact its strategies. This report describes those measures and how these nation-states use them and explains why U.S. notions of thresholds might be outdated.

Before military action, and even before mobilization, the decision on whether to go to war is debated by politicians, pundits, and the public. As they address the right or wrong of such action, it is also a time when, in the language of the just war tradition, the wise would deeply investigate their true claim to jus ad bellum (“the right of war”). Wars have negative consequences, not the least impinging on human life, and offer infrequent and uncertain benefits, yet war is part of the human condition.

James G. Murphy’s insightful analysis of the jus ad bellum criteria—competent authority, just cause, right intention, probability of success, last resort, and proportionality—is grounded in a variety of contemporary examples from World War I through Vietnam, the "soccer war" between Honduras and El Salvador, Afghanistan, and the Middle East conflict. Murphy argues persuasively that understanding jus ad bellum requires a primary focus on the international common good and the good of peace. Only secondarily should the argument about going to war hinge on the right of self-defense; in fact, pursuing the common good requires political action, given that peace is not simply the absence of violence. He moves on to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the jus ad bellum criteria, contending that some criteria depend logically on others—and that competent authority, not just cause, is ultimately the most significant criterion in an analysis of going to war. This timely study will be of special interest to scholars and students in ethics, war and peace, and international affairs.

The challenge of deterring territorial aggression is taking on renewed importance, yet discussion of it has lagged in U.S. military and strategy circles. The authors aim to provide a fresh look, with two primary purposes: to review established concepts about deterrence, and to provide a framework for evaluating the strength of deterrent relationships. They focus on a specific type of deterrence: extended deterrence of interstate aggression.

On November 10, 2017, Pope Francis became the first pontiff in the nuclear era to take a complete stand against nuclear weapons, even as a form of deterrence. At a Vatican conference of leaders in the field of disarmament, he made it clear that the possession of the bomb itself was immoral. A World Free from Nuclear Weapons presents the pope’s address and original testimony from Nobel Peace Prize laureates, religious leaders, diplomats, and civil society activists.

These luminaries, which include the pope and a Hiroshima survivor, make the moral case against possessing, manufacturing, and deploying nuclear arms. Drew Christiansen, a member of the Holy See delegation to the 2017 United Nations conference that negotiated the Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, helps readers to understand this conference in its historical context.

A World Free from Nuclear Weapons is a critical companion for scholars of modern Catholicism, moral theology, and peace studies, as well as policymakers working on effective disarmament. It shows how the Church’s revised position presents an opportunity for global leaders to connect disarmament to larger movements for peace, pointing toward future action.