Current Projects

I am working on a book project about the construction of the European Union (EU).  The conventional wisdom is that the creation of the EU resulted from the abandonment of balance of power politics.  I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong—the EU emerged as a direct result of balance of power calculations.  Simply put, the Europeans built the EU in order to balance the power of the USSR while simultaneously preventing any one of them from gaining a power advantage over the others.  My larger claim is that the balance of power matters when it comes to international institutions; states establish institutions in order to maintain or increase their share of world power and the setup of those institutions reflects the wishes of their most powerful members.

I am also working on a series of pieces about American foreign policy with respect to Europe during the Cold War.  My basic argument is that far from balancing against the Soviet Union, as most analysts claim, the United States actually worked hard to buck-pass responsibility for dealing with the Russians to the West Europeans between 1945 and 1953.  This finding has implications for international relations theory as well as for contemporary issues of American foreign policy (What is an appropriate grand strategy for the U.S. today?  How should we think about the international reaction to American primacy?)

 

 

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