Customer Reviews

The Global Politics of Arms Sales

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I just watched the Nicolas Cage film (Lord of War) on arms dealers, and decided to google this book, which introduced me to the issue of arms sales. I was astonished that no one has reviewed this book, but then, it is pre-Amazon.

While dated, of course, as it covers the international politics of 1982 (a great boon as I was a student of IR then, at what is now viewed as the tail end of the Cold War), this systematically addressed one of the great issues in international politics: to whom we sell arms and why. As Pierre wrote, arms sales are "politics writ large." Pierre went into the field in nearly every locale, to find out what people bought them and why. He did not shrink from asking why the great powers sold their killing devices, which he subjected to a fascinating analysis. It is a truly dazzling portrait of international politics at the time, a snapshot, if you will. And Pierre was a beautiful and perceptive writer, from his perch in the Council on Foreign Relations, which is sometimes criticized as a staid maintainer of the status quo. (I even met him while searching for my first professional job, though he advised me to go back to grad school, which was not what I wanted to hear while I was looking for a job!)

I suppose the age of this book makes it of historical interest. Whatever, I maintain it is of a quality so high as to make it a classic that will be studied in another era as a window in the times, much as the greatest historians were from the past.