Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy: Foreign Economic Policies as Strategic Instruments. By Lars S. Skålnes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 272p. $54.50

Brian M. Pollins

American Political Science Review, 2002, vol. 96, issue 2, 476-477

Abstract: To date, the main body of research on the economic dimensions of foreign policy has focused on narrow, tactical considerations alone. Are sanctions effective tools of diplomacy? Do governments try to sway the nation's trade away from enemies and toward allies due to relative gains concerns? Does foreign aid win compliance? Lars Skålnes's new book refocuses the attention of the field greatly by asking us to consider foreign economic policy as a core component of great-power grand strategy. The purposeful manipulation of foreign economic ties by national leaders, he argues, is not merely an ancillary instrument in the diplomatic kit of foreign policy elites. Indeed there may be times in which it is the central tool used by powers to secure their strategic objectives. Moreover, Skålnes's framework seeks to identify the specific political–strategic conditions that make it more likely or less likely that great powers will build their grand strategies around such policy. This idea should not seem strange to us when we recall initiatives over the past 30 years such as Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, Henry Kissinger's notion of détente with the Soviet Union, and current American attempts to moderate Chinese behavior by integrating that emerging power more fully into the global economy. While these examples are not treated in the book (Skålnes examines German, French, British, and American cases over different years between 1879 and 1967), they stand as additional instances that might be understood in new ways. Politics, Markets, and Grand Strategy makes a persuasive argument for permanently removing the “low politics” label from foreign economic policy and viewing it instead as coequal with military strategy in the realm of “high politics.”

Date: 2002
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