Pfundstein Chamberlain draws on an original dataset on US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and case studies of Cuba (1962), Iraq (1991), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011) to explain the conundrum. She argues that the United States' model of inexpensive warmaking allows it to casually threaten force and carry out frequent short-term military campaigns.

Why do weak states resist threats of force from the United States, especially when history shows that this superpower carries out its ultimatums? Cheap Threats upends conventional notions of power politics and challenges assumptions about the use of compellent military threats in international politics. Drawing on an original dataset of US compellence from 1945 to 2007 and four in-depth case studies—the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 2011 confrontation with Libya, and the 1991 and 2003 showdowns with Iraq—Dianne Pfundstein Chamberlain finds that US compellent threats often fail because threatening and using force became comparatively “cheap” for the United States after the Cold War. Becoming the world’s only superpower and adopting a new light-footprint model of war, which relied heavily on airpower and now drones, have reduced the political, economic, and human costs that US policymakers face when they go to war. Paradoxically, this lower-cost model of war has cheapened US threats and fails to signal to opponents that the United States is resolved to bear the high costs of a protracted conflict. The result: small states gamble, often unwisely, that the United States will move on to a new target before achieving its goals. Cheap Threats resets the bar for scholars and planners grappling with questions of state resolve, hegemonic stability, effective coercion, and other issues pertinent in this new era of US warfighting and diplomacy.

This book examines coercive diplomacy and presents a theory of 'emotional choice' to analyse how affect enters into decision-making.

"While veto threats have a long history, presidents have come to be more reliant on this bargaining tool in the last few decades. Veto Rhetoric therefore serves as a nice companion to Sam Kernell′s classic study, Going Public, which documented a similar trend with regards to presidential public appeals. Kernell′s current study will no doubt once again lead presidential scholars to rethink how they understand and conceptualizing presidential-congressional relations." - Joel Sievert, Texas Tech University In Veto Rhetoric, Samuel Kernell offers a fresh, more sanguine perspective to understanding national policy making in this era of divided government. Contrary to the standard "separation of powers" representation of the veto which deals presidents a weak "take it or leave it" hand, Kernell shows that veto rhetoric forces Congress to pay careful heed of the president’s objections early in deliberations as legislation is forming. Moreover, the book introduces original statistical analysis to test the argument and extends previously reported analyses to include the Biden presidency. Veto Rhetoric will change the way students of Congress and the presidency assess their respective roles in making national policy.

Technology has always played a central role in international politics; it shapes the ways states fight during wartime and compete during peacetime. Today, rapid advancements have contributed to a widespread sense that the world is again on the precipice of a new technological era. Emerging technologies have inspired much speculative commentary, but academic scholarship can improve the discussion with disciplined theory-building and rigorous empirics. This book aims to contribute to the debate by exploring the role of technology – both military and non-military – in shaping international security. Specifically, the contributors to this edited volume aim to generate new theoretical insights into the relationship between technology and strategic stability, test them with sound empirical methods, and derive their implications for the coming technological age. This book is very novel in its approach. It covers a wide range of technologies, both old and new, rather than emphasizing a single technology. Furthermore, this volume looks at how new technologies might affect the broader dynamics of the international system rather than limiting the focus to a stability. The contributions to this volume walk readers through the likely effects of emerging technologies at each phase of the conflict process. The chapters begin with competition in peacetime, move to deterrence and coercion, and then explore the dynamics of crises, the outbreak of conflict, and war escalation in an environment of emerging technologies. The chapters in this book, except for the Introduction and the Conclusion, were originally published in the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Documents governmental and political corruption in the Deep South through the story of a daughter who seeks justice when her parents are slain in Mississippi.

Alex and his lover, Peter, are guilted into volunteering for the Senate campaign of a progressive politician. Then Chicago politics turn deadly when the candidate's office is bombed.

Requiring no more than basic arithmetic, this book provides a careful and accessible introduction to the basic pillars of Game Theory, tracing its intellectual origins and philosophical premises.