Calculated Risks: Why Statesmen Let It Ride

Abstract

Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery. By Jeffrey W. Taliaferro. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. 336 pp., $39.95 (ISBN: 0-8014-4221-4). In Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery , Jeffrey W. Taliaferro makes a substantial contribution to our knowledge of international politics in the realist tradition. He explains why great powers intervene in regions that are peripheral to their security interests and why they tend to escalate these commitments even if their actions prompt threats to their core security concerns. He does this through a marriage of defensive realism and prospect theory, thus joining the growing ranks of international relations scholars who have foregone the blithe assumption of instrumental rationality and examined the impact that different theories of rational decision making have upon our expectations of foreign policy behavior. The product is elegant, empirically supported, and applicable to a wider domain of foreign policy behaviors. Defensive realism holds that the primary goal of states is security and that the anarchic structure of the international system and the distribution of material capabilities provide weak incentives for aggression and conflict. This proposition poses a dilemma for defensive realism in that it does not locate the reasons for security seeking in either the will to power of classical realism or the systemic imperatives of offensive realism. Taliaferro argues that the perceptions, forecasts, and calculations of statesmen regarding the dynamic nature of the distribution of capabilities are the key sources of conflict …