Top Highlights

• Much of American domestic policy, and almost all of US foreign policy, is determined by elites who are only somewhat constrained by voter preferences and decisions.
• Dominant powers do not decline because they lack the resources to fulfill their geopolitical and economic ambitions. Rather, decline is the result of internal political dynamics that are specific to each great power and that can be understood and explained only if we trace the ways in which elites seek and attain the capacity to protect their own p...
• It is the variability in how international geopolitical and economic power has been built, and the variability in how elites have fortified themselves against the interests of non-elites and rival elites, that render universal theories of decline inadequate to the tasks of explanation and prediction. However, the struggle over resources and powers ...
• Elites make empires, and empires create new elites and change the structure of relations among old and new elites.
• An elite is a group of rulers who inhabit a distinct organizational apparatus with the capacity to appropriate resources from non-elites.