Description

This volume is a collection of the best essays of Professor Benjamin Miller on the subjects of international and regional security.

The book analyses the interrelationships between international politics and regional and national security, with a special focus on the sources of international conflict and collaboration and the causes of war and peace. More specifically, it explains the sources of intended and unintended great-power conflict and collaboration. The book also accounts for the sources of regional war and peace by developing the concept of the state-to-nation balance. Thus the volume is able to explain the variations in the outcomes of great power interventions and the differences in the level and type of war and peace in different eras and various parts of the world. For example, the book’s model can account for recent outcomes such as the effects of the 2003 American intervention in Iraq, the post-2011 Arab Spring and the conflicts between Russia and Ukraine. The book also provides a model for explaining the changes in American grand strategy with a special focus on accounting for the causes of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Finally, the book addresses the debate on the future of war and peace in the 21st century.

This book will be essential reading for students of international security, regional security, Middle Eastern politics, foreign policy and IR.

Reviews

'In this timely book, Benjamin Miller, a leading world scholar of regions and peace has compiled his three decades long scholarly articles on war, peace and regional and international order with updates and additional materials. A valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the challenging questions of our times.' -- T.V. Paul, McGill University, Canada

'International and Regional Security provides easy access to Benjamin Miller’s most influential articles on great power conflict and cooperation, international/regional/domestic sources of regional conflict, and interventionist grand strategies. This excellent and well-organized collection belongs on the bookshelf of all serious scholars of peace and security.' -- Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University, USA

'This collection of first-rate essays by Benjamin Miller should be widely read among students of international politics. He not only offers fascinating insights on the causes of cooperation and conflict among states, but few scholars are as adept as Miller at making causal arguments that synthesize both domestic and international factors in sophisticated and interesting ways.' -- John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago, USA

'Benjamin Miller's continuing stress on regional analysis is a great antidote for all of the people promoting universal generalizations and behavior. To this prescription, add Miller's consistent stress on multi-level explanations (from intervening hegemons to ethno-nationalist groups) and theory building to account for variations in war and peace and you come away with a winning combination.' -- William R. Thompson, Indiana University, USA

'Benjamin Miller’s pioneering work integrating global and regional causes of war and peace is crucially relevant for understanding current developments from Ukraine to Syria to the South China Sea. This volume presents some of Miller’s signature works, bookended new essays that frame his research project and push it toward new frontiers. Readers looking for a rich yet rigorous framework for making sense of a complex and challenging new array of inter and intra-state conflicts should reach for this excellent collection.' -- William C. Wohlforth, Dartmouth College, USA

This volume examines mechanisms for regional peacemaking and conflict management in Europe and the Middle East.

To date little research has been devoted to uncovering the conditions for peace, and the factors that contribute to stabilizing the state of peace. This volume assesses the factors that contribute to regional pacification, the incentives that motivate states in establishing peaceful relations, and most importantly, how regions become peaceful. It discusses the conditions under which various types of ‘peace’ might emerge on a regional level and the factors most likely to determine the outcome. The book takes an innovative approach through a systematic comparison of two regions that are particularly prominent and important for the subject of regional pacification: Europe and the Middle East.

While many believe that the European case is the indispensable model for peacemaking, others believe that these two regions are too different for Europe to be a useful framework for the Middle East. This volume occupies a middle ground between these two extreme positions. It argues that while a mindless copying of European models will not lead to peace in the Middle East, important insights can be gained from the most successful case of regional peacemaking to date.

This work will be of much interest to students of regional security, peacemaking, conflict management, Middle East politics, European security and IR in general.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carmela Lutmar is a lecturer in the Division of International Relations at the School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel, and has a PhD from New York University, USA.

Benjamin Miller is Professor of International Relations at the School of Political Sciences, the University of Haifa. Among his publications are When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Collaboration in World Politics (2002) and States, Nations and Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (2007).

American foreign policy is the subject of extensive debate. Many look to domestic factors as the driving forces of bad policies. Benjamin Miller instead seeks to account for changes in US international strategy by developing a theory of grand strategy that captures the key security approaches available to US decision-makers in times of war and peace.

Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of competing grand strategies that accounts for objectives and means of security policy. Miller puts forward a model that is widely applicable, based on empirical evidence from post-WWII to today, and shows that external factors—rather than internal concerns—are the most determinative.

POLITICAL SCIENCE

“Miller and Rubinovitz take US grand strategy seriously and offer in this landmark study an original, provocative, and engaging explanation for how and why it has evolved over the last 75 years.”—Peter Feaver, Duke University

“No scholar is more adept than Miller at combining domestic and systemic factors to explain the workings of the international system. His formidable skills are on full display in his new book, where he tells a fascinating story about the evolution of American grand strategy.”—John J. Mearsheimer, University of Chicago

“This book provides a powerful explanation for the significant, consequential, and often puzzling changes in American foreign policy since World War II. International relations theorists, historians, and policy analysts will all want to engage Miller and Rubinovitz’s provocative argument, which combines innovative theorizing and detailed historical analysis.”—Jack S. Levy, Rutgers University

“Integrating broad strands of international relations theory and tackling the gigantic literature on American foreign policy writ large, Miller and Rubinovitz propose and evaluate a sweeping and ambitious explanation of shifts in US grand strategy since WWII. Empirically rich and theoretically savvy, this is a signal contribution to scholarship on topics of enormous real-world importance.”—William C. Wohlforth, Dartmouth College

“This bold and provocative account of US foreign policy marries conceptual innovation to a parsimonious realist theoretical framework to empirics of impressive sweep. Even skeptics will have to concede that Miller’s rigorous focus on the distribution of international power and on the level of international threat generates powerful insights into the changing emphases of US foreign policy over the decades. A welcome, major addition to the burgeoning literature on grand strategy.”—Ronald R. Krebs, University of Minnesota

“With a carefully wrought synthetic theory and a sweeping historical narrative, Miller and Rubinovitz advance a new explanation for great-power grand strategies. They argue that whether the US follows a realist or liberal foreign policy, and whether it does so in offensive or defensive fashion, it is responding to changes in the international balance of power and level of threat. It’s a realist answer, one that many leading realists have long resisted.”—John Owen, University of Virginia

“Grand Strategy from Truman to Trump asks one of the most consequential questions of our day: what leads great powers to shift their strategy? The authors answer it by laying out a novel theory and applying it to the US since WWII. The result is an important book that ought to be read by all those interested in the US role in the world.”—Nuno P. Monteiro, Yale University

Benjamin Miller is full professor of international relations and the head of the National Security Center at the University of Haifa. Ziv Rubinovitz is an Israel Institute Teaching Fellow at Sonoma State University.