Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of “Change We Can Believe In.” One of the biggest changes many anticipated with his election was a dramatic break with the previous administration's counterterror policy. There were good reasons for thinking that this would be the case. George W. Bush was a Republican who took his cues from the most conservative elements of his party, including neoconservatives, the religious right, and other proponents of an assertive stance of U.S. global primacy and a forward-leaning posture in the war on terror. Conversely, Barack Obama is a liberal Democrat who opposed the Iraq War and seeks to “reset” America's relations with other countries around the world by recommitting the United States to a more moderate approach to waging the war against al-Qaeda, including measures such as adopting a more multilateral foreign policy, closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, ending the practices of extraordinary rendition and enhanced interrogation, and showing a greater respect for civil liberties domestically.

Deterrence. By Lawrence Freedman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2004. 160p. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The concept of deterrence—the effort to make an adversary's costs and risks of going to war greater than the political incentives pushing in that direction—was the centerpiece of academic national security studies and the core policy concern of Western governments throughout much of the Cold War. Today, in the post-9/11 world, deterrence has taken a back seat to a different set of strategic concepts: preemption and prevention. Both involve destroying an enemy's capabilities before he can harm you, the former when the threat is imminent, the latter when it is potential (pp. 85–89). In his timely and useful book, Lawrence Freedman offers a compelling account of the decline of deterrence and creatively seeks to revitalize it as a subject of scholarly inquiry and as a viable policy in the post-9/11 world.

‘No one loves a political realist’, Robert Gilpin once lamented. A major reason for this hostility towards realism is its sceptical view of the role of ethical norms (principled beliefs about state action) in international relations. Some critics dislike realism because they think it leads to an immoral international order. Thucydides' famous adage that the ‘strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ is widely interpreted as evidence that one of realism's founding fathers was an advocate of an immoral approach to statecraft. Niccoló Machiavelli's well-known advice to his Prince that it is politics that determines ethics, not vice versa, reinforces these widely-held views of realism's amorality. The fact that modern realism has been influenced by unsavoury individuals like the German theorist Carl Schmitt, whose indisputable intellectual brilliance was tainted by his overly close association with the Third Reich, leads many to see a continuing link between realpolitik and evil in the international system. Thus, Richard Ashley spoke for many when he concluded that

For most of the twentieth century, international politics were dominated by World Wars I and II and by the cold war. This period of intense international security competition clearly strengthened states, increasing their scope and cohesion. However, the end of the cold war may represent a “threat trough”—a period of significantly reduced international security competition. If so, the scope and cohesion of many states may likewise change. Although this change will not be so great as to end the state or the states system, the state as we know it surely will change. Some states will disintegrate, many will cease growing in scope and may even shrink a little, and few will remain unaffected.