Top Highlights

• An historical pattern can be identified. Beginning with the 1815 settlement and increasingly after 1919 and 1945, the leading state has resorted to institutional strategies as mechanisms to establish restraints on indiscriminate and arbitrary state power and "lock in" a favorable and durable postwar order. The postwar order-building agendas pursued...
• THE CENTRAL question of this book is: What do states that have just won major wars do with their newly acquired power? My answer is that states in this situation have sought to hold onto that power and make it last, and that this has led these states, paradoxically, to find ways to set limits on their power and make it acceptable to other states.
• institutions after wars to "lock in" a favorable postwar position and to establish sufficient "strategic restraint" on their own power as to gain the acquiescence of weaker and secondary states.
• to fixed and predictable policy orientations and leave themselves…
• some measure of credible and institutionalized restraint on its own exercise of power. The type of order that emerges after great wars hinges on the ability of states to restrain power…