The National Interest
Summer 2001

Pushing Restraint

by J.M. Roberts

 

. . . Ever since Aristotle launched the profession of political science, its practitioners have been prone to chase the will-of-the-wisp of generalization. Ikenberry the political scientist seems to be searching in his chosen historical episodes for recurrences that sustained a system more productive of "order"-which seems to mean a greater degree of predictability in international affairs-than earlier efforts had been. If we are seeking to tease out by induction from the facts some sort of general rule, though, then history must be broadly conceived if it is to provide the information required. One does not gather from these pages what the shaping of the UN Charter before 1945 owed to the Soviet Union, or the cramping effect of strategic decisions taken by American soldiers and officials long before 1945 about colonialism or, say, China-a country that, incidentally, hardly figures in this book's account of the world's rearrangements after the Cold War, and is not mentioned in the index. . .