ملخص الجهاز:
Zakaria utilizes the US case study to demonstrate that the pattern of American foreign policy from the end of the Civil War to the close of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency (1901-1908) actually conformed to the assumptions and predictions of statecentered realism.
According to the "state-centered realism" hypothesis, Zakaria argues, statesmen will expand their nation's political interests abroad when they perceive a relative increase in state power, not national power, depending on the fraction of the latter that the former can extract.
Despite the tremendous resources at its disposal and its almost meteoric economic and industrial growth from the end of the Civil War until the 1890s, it became evident to major European actors that the United States was not actually translating its rising power into political activism abroad (p.
In Chapter 4, Zakaria traces the changing structure of American politics in light of the relative shifts of state power.
The significance of such elaboration rests on the idea that state structures affect policy outcomes, an intellectual contribution which "lies at the heart of the renaissance in scholarship that has 120 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 17.
Chapter 5 expands on the above theme and surveys the historical and aggressive expansion of American interests in tandem with that country's rise in state and national power during the period 1889-1908.
Yet it was the will for parsimony that seems to have induced Zakaria to play down the combined effects of the Civil War, economic conditions, and organizational aspects on the American policy of nonexpansion.