The Fate Of Nations: The Search For National Security In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries

The author's central thesis is that a nation's security policy is conditioned primarily by the international environment. Thus, two states with differing domestic systems will tend to pursue similar fundamental foreign policy. There are six essays: insightful, well crafted and including the United States from 1945 to 1980 but (mercifully) not the Soviet Union. The two most intriguing essays are on France between the wars and Israel since 1949: both middle-level powers that faced external threats but chose different options with decisively different results.