Kirshner may be right that domestic politics does matter, but he does not tell us how to understand domestic politics. How are we, for instance, to understand domestic cohesion? How are we to understand national purpose? More important, what is the impact of nuclear weapons? Do these weapons obliterate all past information about power? Are nuclear weapons all that matter? Is it possible to fight a limited nuclear war? Is North Korea as strong as the United States? Such questions have (...) been around since the 1950s. Kirshner does not help us to answer them. (shrink)

Krasner considers the decline of the global economic power the United States enjoyed from the 1940s through the 1960s and prescribes a policy of repricocity to restore the country's postwar position, allowing it to compete effectively in an emerging and changing economic climate.