The Use of Force: Military Power and International Politics

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Because no authoritative agency can be called on to resolve international disputes, leaders often find it convenient, and sometimes necessary, to threaten the use of force or actually to employ it. Military power brings some order out of chaos and helps to make and enforce the rules of the game.

Because force is so important internationally, the editors of the fourth edition of this popular standard work, originally published in 1971 by Little, Brown, treat the subject by organizing the articles into four major divisions:
• strategies for the use of force;
• case studies in the twentieth-century use of force;
• the nuclear revolution;
• military issues in the post-Cold War era.

The book contains 18 new selections dealing with such topical events as the post-Cold War goals of American foreign policy, Iraq's military strategies, how Kuwait was won, the pros and cons of deploying limited defenses against ballistic missile attack, and the U.N. as a true international collective security agency.

Contributors: Robert Art, Barry Posen, Robert Jervis, Bernard Brodie, Samuel Huntington, Stephen Van Evera, Frederic J. Brown, Edward Katzenbach, Jr., Sir George Sansom, Louis Morton, Morton Halperin, James Blight, David Welch, Bruce Allyn, John Lewis Gaddis, Barry Blechman, Douglas M. Hart, Lawrence Freedman, Efraim Karsh, Kenneth Waltz, Glenn Snyder, John Foster Dulles, Nikita Khrushchev, Robert S. McNamara, James Schlesinger, Harold Brown, Andrei Kokoshin, John H. Mueller, McGeorge Bundy, Jean-Louis Gergorin, Robert W. Tucker, Lewis Dunn, Steve Fetter, Michael Krepon, Matthew Bunn, Thomas Schelling, and Sir Brian Urquhart.