Power shifts, strategy, and war : declining states and international conflict /

This book investigates the conditions under which a rising power and a declining state will go to war. The central argument is that military strategy largely determines whether these rivals will experience war or not. Lee (East-West Center, Washington, DC) posits that if the declining state has a maneuver strategy to fight a war, then war with its enemy is likely. If the declining state has adopted an attrition strategy, then the competition is likely to end without war. These propositions are tested by reference to 14 major power relationships over the last two centuries; three case study chapters focus on Russo-Japanese relations, World War I, and the Pearl Harbor attack respectively. The concluding chapter includes implications for contemporary cases including the rise of China vis-a-vis the US. The results are not compelling: 9 of 14 cases fit the author's predications, but a number of the cases (confirming and disconfirming) are better understood as the diffusion of existing wars rather than original initiations. There are also problems with misspecification of preventive war, power shifts, and alternative models as well as reliance on single variable explanations. Summing Up: Not recommended. P. F. Diehl University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign