MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Walter avoids...polemic and overstatement ... Because Walter relies so heavily on this metric [by the Polity Project], some of the conclusions she draws remain suspect ... At the worst, such books leave their readers either in a state of paralysed fatalism or prepping for the coming catastrophe ... Walter’s concluding proposals...in principle sound attractive ... But the circular problem is that the fractured state of current American politics makes such reforms impossible. Were the country capable of adopting the reforms Walter advocates, it would not find itself in the dangerous state she otherwise convincingly describes. Most persuasively, Walter reminds us of the power of leaders to act either as instruments of destruction or renewal.
Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro
MixedHarper's...a five-hundred-page attempt to portray Kellogg-Briand as ‘among the most transformative events in human history’ … The Allies did not go to war against Hitler to enforce the rules of the New World Order established by the Kellogg-Briand Pact. They fought Hitler because he broke all the rules. Hathaway and Shapiro’s account of how the Allies reckoned with the war after its end — in the courtroom in Nuremberg — is no less problematic … If wars of aggression have indeed become less common since 1945 — and Hathaway and Shapiro marshal an impressive range of data to support this claim — it is not because would-be aggressors have feared being hauled before an international court. Rather, the ban on aggression has been enforced by what the authors call outcasting — isolating transgressing states through economic sanctions and the withholding of international trade … Only at the end of The Internationalists do the authors consider the fragility of the ban on war.
