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If you're interested in this, you are probably a political science or international relations student, which is a shame because very few general readers would pick this up, and it's those who need it the most, this really deserves to be a best-seller. I majored in biochemistry and am an indie game developer, never took a single class in political science, but on a friend's recommendation who was majoring in that I read this book, and I've re-read it several times over the years, and it's become one of my favorite books (certainly in my top 10 of nonfiction).
Basically, this book presents an overarching theory of why wars exist, one that is precise enough to allow even uninformed readers to make predictable, and historically accurate, and precise predictions about when a country will go to war (and why). Most people believe wars to happen for one of several reasons -- "human nature" (because humans just like fighting and are inherently violent or stupid or something), or perhaps the war over religion and ideology, or perhaps over resources. I'd guess that almost everyone believes war happens for one of those reasons.
This book dispels that notion very cleanly and completely. After you read it, you'll realize that nations go to war simply because they are afraid. They know that if they lose a war against a greater power, their nation is done for -- it will become occupied, or a puppet state, of a greater power, and lose whatever power they had. Nations do not want that to happen, they are terrified of being dominated by greater nations. And this is a systematic thing, no individual might consciously decide on this, but this is how all nations do seem to work: they are afraid of being conquered, so they go to war to make sure they are the one who conquer, not the one being conquered. This central notion that fear of being conquered by another nation, and not anything else, drives almost all war is the main thesis of the book, and it's argued for very convincingly, with a lot of historical examples.
So, the first way a country can be certain it's not going to be conquered by its neighbors is to become the strongest power in its major landmass -- the regional hegemon. Most nations in a position to do so will try to gain regional power -- that is what China is doing in asia, that's what the US did the Americas, and that's what various european countries (e.g. England, France, the Dutch, the Germans, the Russians) have attempted to do for europe, and so on.
By this thesis, it may seem counter-intuitive, but according to this idea, the reason Germany went to war was not because they were nationalistic or inherently violent, or because of the ideological differences between fascism, capitalism, and communism, or because wanted to purify Europe of undesirable races, or even that they were angry over the conditions imposed on them after WW1 (though that's part of it), but simply because Germany feared being conquered and wanted to become the most powerful nation in Europe to make sure they would survive.
This is a *very* different understanding of war than most people have, I want to emphasize that again. And it sounds strange at first, but this book will probably convince you of it (as evidence, Germany in WW1 had a very different ideology, but the conditions were somewhat similar, and they still went to war, for the same reason they did go to war in WW2. Sometimes WW1 is blamed on entangling alliances or the assassination of an archduke, but, in reality, according to this theory, Germany went to war in WW1 for the exact same reason they want to war in WW2, because they saw an opportunity to become local hegemon of Europe, and took that opportunity).
If you still aren't convinced, that isn't of course the job of this review, it's the job of the book; the number of examples used in the book far exceed would I could bring up here. And the author's writing is much better than mine in any case. I'm just trying to explain why I like the book: because it gives you a different opinion of war than the usual one, and does so very convincingly, through factual argument, and explains it in a simple to understand way (you don't need to have even taken a political science course to follow along with the argument).
- Paperback: 576 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 17, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 039332396X
- ISBN-13: 978-0393323962
- Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Customer Reviews: 82 customer reviews
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#378,650 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #657 in Economic Policy
- #663 in Economic Policy & Development (Books)
- #675 in National & International Security (Books)
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