From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role

From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role. By Fareed Zakaria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. x, 199 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-691-04496-1.)

This book is designed as a contribution to a debate in political science. The issue, as lucidly expounded in a substantial first chapter, is between "classical realists" who hold that states enlarge their foreign policy goals as their power increases and "defensive realists" who maintain that they only respond to threats to their security: "For the classical realist, states expand because they can; for the defensive realist, states expand because they must." As Fareed Zakaria points out, the purchase of the latter theory is diminished by the subjective nature of "security" and the malleability of the concept of "threat"; on any objective definition of these terms, defensive realism fails to explain...