Cooperation under Fire

Legro offers a new understanding of the dynamics of World War II and the sources of international cooperation.

Jeffrey W. Legro is Randolph P. Compton Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Rethinking the World: Great Power Strategies and International Order and coeditor of In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy after the Berlin Wall and 9/11, both from Cornell.

This is a well-written and extensively researched analysis of three kinds of restraints observed for part or all of World War II. These restraints concerned the use of submarines against merchantmen, the bombing of cities from the air, and (more enduringly) the use of poison gas. Such restraints have not been much remembered or analyzed, as survivors and scholars alike tend to remember World War II as the most unrestrained martial conflict in all history.

Legro's careful, insightful, and intriguing study shows that military preferences have a powerful influence on state policy during war. Whose preferences matter for state policy, and the origins of those preferences, remain the challenges presented by this important book.

In this impressive book, Legro argues that major strategic turning points are not simply the result of shifts in power and interests; they also involve the interplay of 'collective ideas' within states about how to relate to the outside world.... Legro reflects on the future on the Bush 'revolution' and argues that, absent further terrorist attacks, U.S. foreign policy is likely to tack back to the post-World War II mainstream.