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By Jack Snyder. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. x + 330 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8014-2532-8.)
Myths of Empire joins other recent studies, such as those by Paul Kennedy, Robert Gilpin, Michael Doyle, and Phillip Darby, in using comparative history to work out broad theories about what Jack Snyder terms the "overexpansion" of great powers.
Why, at certain times, do nations fall victim to the idea that national security can be achieved only through expansion, even when such a course becomes clearly self-destructive? Snyder answers this question by applying "tests of covariation" to the histories of five industrial powers--Germany, Japan, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. A theory of "coalition politics," he concludes, explains overexpansion better than standard realist and cognitive theories.
Snyder postulates that myths of security through expansion originate as justifications for policies that directly benefit...