Timothy W. Crawford's The Power to Divide examines the use of wedge strategies, a form of divisive statecraft designed to isolate adversaries from allies and potential supporters to gain key advantages. With a multidimensional argument about the power of accommodation in competition, and a survey of alliance diplomacy around both World Wars, The Power to Divide artfully analyzes the past and future performance of wedge strategy in great power politics. Crawford argues that nations attempting to use wedge strategy do best when they credibly accommodate likely or established allies of their enemies. He also argues that a divider's own alliances can pose obstacles to success and explains the conditions that help dividers overcome them. He advances these claims in eight focused studies of alliance diplomacy surrounding the World Wars, derived from published official documents and secondary histories. Through those narratives, Crawford adeptly assesses the record of countries that tried an accommodative wedge strategy, and why ultimately, they succeeded or failed. These calculated actions often became turning points, desired or not, in a nation's established power. For policymakers today facing threats to power from great power competitors, Crawford argues that a deeper historical and theoretical grasp of the role of these wedge strategies in alliance politics and grand strategy is necessary. Crawford drives home the contemporary relevance of the analysis with a survey of China's potential to use such strategies to divide India from the US, and the United States' potential to use them to forestall a China-Russia alliance, and closes with a review of key theoretical insights for policy.

International Politics: Enduring Concepts and Contemporary Issues has been helping students effectively understand the dynamics of international relations for almost fifty years. Readings by leading scholars on essential topics illustrate fundamental debates and differing points of view for a comprehensive and engaging overview of the discipline, while introducing readers to the major forces shaping the world today. The fourteenth edition continues the book's cornerstone approach of combining foundational theoretical works with recent perspectives on current problems, including a wealth of new material spread across each of the book's four parts. The foundational material is organized to highlight the concept of anarchy in international relations and how matters of security, power, military force, international political economy, and strategic interactions influence patterns of cooperation and conflict. In additional to a focus on basic security and strategic problems, the politics of international commerce, and challenges facing the global economy, this edition also covers critical contemporary issues, including human rights, civil wars, intervention and peacekeeping, migration, cyber conflict, great power competition, climate change, energy transition, nuclear weapons, pandemic diplomacy, and changes in the political shape of the system writ large. Features: -60 expertly edited readings from scholarly sources, with 30 new to this edition -A four-part organization to cover anarchy, the use of force, international political economy, and contemporary issues, with an in-depth editor introduction to each Part -An entirely new chapter on the return of great power politics -- ever-more important after Russia's invasion of Ukraine -Learning objectives and discussion questions to focus student learning

As the preponderant world power, the United States is a potential arbiter of war and peace between such feuding rivals as India and Pakistan, Turkey and Greece, China and Taiwan. How can it deter them from going to war and impel them to accept compromise without firmly choosing sides? This age-old strategic dilemma, which Timothy W. Crawford calls "pivotal deterrence," has become a central challenge of international security in today's unipolar world.Crawford explains the political dynamics of pivotal deterrence and the conditions under which it is likely to succeed, while examining some of its most impressive feats and failures. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's agile approach to the 1870s Eastern Crisis, which prevented war between Russia and Austria-Hungary, is contrasted with Britain's ambiguous and ill-fated maneuvers to deter Germany and France in July 1914. Shifting to the 1960s Cold War, Crawford explores the successes and setbacks in U.S. efforts to prevent NATO allies Greece and Turkey from fighting over Cyprus and to defuse the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. Capping the analysis is a rich look at similar U.S. efforts in the 1990s in South Asia, the Aegean, the Balkans, and East Asia. Crawford concludes with an assessment of the prospects for American pivotal deterrence in the years ahead and its implications for international relations theory.