His historiography offers penetratingoften pessimisticinsights into the psychology of power politics, blending straightforward descriptions of events, moral lessons, and tightly focused dramatic accounts.
The proximate cause of war is the use of power politics, such as alliances and arms races, that leaders are told to use by the dominant realist folklore.
Marketplace democracies thus share common foreign policy interests in the supremacyand predictabilityof international law over brute power politics, and equal and open global trade over closed trade and imperial preferences.