Reviewing, comparing, and contrasting models of foreign policy, this volume focuses on the cognitive vs rational debate about decisionmaking on war and peace. It provides alternative models of foreign policy choice and identifies when one strategy is more appropriate than another.

This book uncovers Thucydides’ decision making schemata and his thinking on how people decide, particularly when in power or war. Based on these ideas, the author interprets the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war and the Sicilian expedition, and shows that they were a result of decision making and, thus, not inevitable.

Gives play to the personalities involved, from Felix Houphouet-Boigny, 'The Ram', who managed Ivorian politics for the country's first 33 years of independence, to the contemporary First Lady Simone Gbagbo. This book's analysis is of the dynamics in place that give certain predictability to the actions of each of the key figures in the drama.

Two fundamental strategies are necessary to create lasting peace in the world: facilitating the spread of democracy and maintaining comprehensive deterrence mechanisms targeted at individual world leaders. Sharp surveys conventional approaches to avoiding war and presents evidence to validate the democratic peace principle (the notion that democracies are inherently more peaceful than non-democracies) and the incentive theory of war avoidance, formulated by John Norton Moore. Sharp proposes a mathematical formula that can be used to predict the probability of peace for a given nation. Comprehensive tables collate data from multiple sources on freedom and human development in nations around the world.

“If you want peace, prepare for war.” “A buildup of offensive weapons can be purely defensive.” “The worst road may be the best route to battle.” Strategy is made of such seemingly self-contradictory propositions, Edward Luttwak shows—they exemplify the paradoxical logic that pervades the entire realm of conflict.In this widely acclaimed work, now revised and expanded, Luttwak unveils the peculiar logic of strategy level by level, from grand strategy down to combat tactics. Having participated in its planning, Luttwak examines the role of air power in the 1991 Gulf War, then detects the emergence of “post-heroic” war in Kosovo in 1999—an American war in which not a single American soldier was killed.In the tradition of Carl von Clausewitz, Strategy goes beyond paradox to expose the dynamics of reversal at work in the crucible of conflict. As victory is turned into defeat by over-extension, as war brings peace by exhaustion, ordinary linear logic is overthrown. Citing examples from ancient Rome to our own days, from Barbarossa and Pearl Harbor down to minor combat affrays, from the strategy of peace to the latest operational methods of war, this book by one of the world’s foremost authorities reveals the ultimate logic of military failure and success, of war and peace.