What is the best way to restore or uphold deterrence when an existing deterrent is perceived to have decayed? One common answer is that deterrers should simply add more of the ingredients that generally make for strong deterrents: more certainty that threats will be carried out, more capabilities to inflict severe punishments upon an adversary, and greater capacity to carry out threats with celerity (speed). This answer draws upon an intuitive quantitative logic that more is always better when it comes to dissuading an adversary from taking unwanted actions. In this article, however, we explain how following this quantitative logic can have the unintended consequence of worsening security relations and provoking war, especially under conditions of shifting power. Using proposals for the United States to provide 'strategic clarity' regarding its intentions to defend Taiwan against Chinese aggression as a case-study, we show how efforts to maximize the certainty, severity and celerity of threats can backfire in practice. In general terms, our conclusion is that scholars and policy practitioners must assess the viability of deterrents from a qualitative perspective. With specific reference to Taiwan, we find that strategic clarity would be unlikely to strengthen deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.

What is the driving motivation behind a state’s political goals and territorial claims? And how might leaders’ risk tolerance fluctuate? This review article uses Thucydides’ tripartite division of motives—fear, honor, and interest—to organize insights from four recent books. It suggests that contemporary China’s understanding of interest is starkly different from that of previous rising powers—such as Imperial Japan—and that fear consequently operates in a different manner. Because East Asia’s territorial disputes create windows of risk, there is a real danger a crisis could escalate before such windows can be closed (in a moment, perhaps, of “punctuated equilibrium”). Consequently, attempting to understand the varying risk tolerance of China’s leaders is a necessary, albeit only a temporary, solution to the problem of peace in East Asia.

The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume I: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Edited by Garrett G. Fagan, Linda Fibiger, Mark Hudson, and Matthew Trundle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 756 pp., |${\$}$|155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107120129). The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume II: 500–1500 CE. Edited by Matthew S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper, and Harriet Zurndorfer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 722 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107156388). The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume III: 1500–1800 CE. Edited by Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 732 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107119116). The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume IV: 1800 to the Present CE. Edited by Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 694 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107151567). Criticizing Steven Pinker's best-selling history about the decline of...

: Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This article joins cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy.

Building on Ernest Gellner’s theory of the nation-state and drawing on insights from John Lukacs and George Kennan, this article contends that the major powers of the contemporary Indo-Pacific are characterized by conflicting nationalisms. Homogenizing nationalism seeks to form China—a former multiethnic empire—into a unitary nation-state. Budding fascism endeavors to transform India—founded as a secular state—into a Hindu nation in which there is little place for the ‘other.’ And in the USA, truculent exceptionalism readily acknowledges that coexistence with China is no longer possible in the long run. All three powers have an alternative that they might embrace: toleration. But civility, in both domestic and international politics, is increasingly rare. The future of world order in the Indo-Pacific does not look bright.

Since the agricultural revolution, which created surpluses of food and enabled hoarding, societal elites have been highly adept at maximizing their share of resources, thereby generating inequality. The precise form of this activity—plunder, slavery, religious dictums, or economic rents—has appeared in various combinations throughout history, but it has consistently created stratified structures. In the modern era, an epochal shift—in which makers (i.e., those who generate wealth) also got to be keepers—elevated an alternative path to prosperity (Balch 2014). This powered the economic growth of our era, but it also re-erected massive divisions in wealth. In The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel, an expert in Roman history, tells the story of how breakers—forces of violence and disruption—eliminate or reduce the social hierarchies created principally by predatory takers and occasionally by industrious makers. Scheidel's big idea is that breakers, or (in his nomenclature) the Four Horsemen of Leveling—total war, transformative revolution, state collapse, and plague—are the only factors that significantly reduce inequality throughout history. International relations (IR) scholars might engage Scheidel's study for three main reasons: (a) his argument, which indicates that inequality cannot be significantly reduced though normal political processes, suggests the problem is much bigger than otherwise thought; (b) it has implications for the “decline of violence” thesis; and (c) its methodology will stimulate new approaches in our own discipline.

This article challenges the increasingly dominant narrative of an inevitable quest for supremacy in contemporary East Asia. It argues that the narrative rests on a foundation of power transition theory that is conceptually and historically flawed, and that it risks an unnecessary war. The article contends that strategists should instead start thinking about constructing a system in which power and privileges in East Asia are held in equilibrium in a manner conceptually similar to the associative balance/shared hegemony of the Long Nineteenth Century. In such a system, Asia would not be “America’s,” but neither would it be “China’s.”