Pushing Restraint.

• Author: Roberts, J.M.
• Position: Review

G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint and the Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 203 pp., $55.

TO JUDGE from the accolades of his peers quoted on the cover of his new book, G. John Ikenberry is a distinguished political scientist who has written a distinguished book. In it, he has sought to draw on the resources both of his own discipline and of history--though one hopes it was not his decision to use Delacroix's splendid picture of the entry of the Crusaders to Constantinople in 1204 for its cover, for it has nothing to do with his subject matter, even if someone in the publisher's design department thought it did. That disaster was hardly a sequel to a victory and was institutionally wholly negative. It inflicted a mortal wound on the eastern empire, the shield of Christendom and order in the Middle East, and embodied neither strategic restraint nor strategic common sense. But a blunder by a distinguished press [1] would hardly be worth comment did it not awake a vague misgiving about more than thoughtlessness on the production side. It may be, though, that there will be among his readers others who (like this reviewer) know little of the idiom of political science and do not understand easily and clearly just what Ikenberry is trying to combine, and how these elements should be related.

Ikenberry sets out his material clearly. The first three chapters are written in heavily theoretical language, though this hardly seems necessary. [2] They address the "Problem of International Order", some of the varieties in which order in that sphere emerges, and, finally, an "Institutional Theory of Order Formation." Four more chapters then consider the reordering of Europe after 1815, the peace settlement of 1919, stabilization after 1945, and, most recently, what has followed the end of the Cold War. These are presented as case studies not of the process of peacemaking but of priorities discerned in them. "The Vienna settlement of 1815 and the world war settlements of 1919 and 1945 are notable for the new use of binding institutions to limit and restrain the exercise of power", says Ikenberry. It is an unexceptionable statement, phrased with admirable caution. But does it say very much?

The central and articulating idea running through these examples takes us back to a political science emphasis and a generalized argument that "leading" states in these settlements--except in 1815, that means the United States-- increasingly showed an awareness that it was beneficial not to throw their weight about even at such seemingly favorable junctures. They even voluntarily submitted to formal constraints by...