| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

David A. Lake. Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in Its Century. (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics.) Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 332. Cloth $60.00, paper $17.95.

"This book is an exercise in theory driven history" (p. 71), says David A. Lake. Employing an economic theory of "relational contracting" that was first applied to analyses of business firm behavior, Lake looks at the ways in which "polities" structure their security relationships. He argues that security cooperation, in particular, has been woefully neglected in a social science literature obsessed with conflict. To shift the emphasis away from threats and violence, he wants to show that "policy was shaped in important ways by the benefits and costs for the United States of alternative security relationships with its partners" (p. 4). 1

As Lake conceives of them, security relations cover a spectrum from unilateralism at one extreme to various kinds of "cooperative" relationships, ranging from the anarchical (traditional alliances) to progressively more hierarchical relations like spheres of influence, protectorates, informal empire, and outright imperialism. The kind of security relationship selected depends on the weighing of three interrelated factors: joint production economies available from cooperation (economies of scale, positive externalities, and a more efficient division of labor); the likelihood of opportunism (abandonment, entrapment, or exploitation) by one's partners under varying conditions of hierarchy; and governance costs under different circumstances. . . .

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