Restraining Power

Most thinking about how nations should behave toward one another has been lost, and David C. Hendrickson sets out to recover it. Restraining Power traces a tradition known as the "law of nature and nations," a body of ideas that grew up to hold the violent impulses of states in check and that Hendrickson argues has been largely forgotten.

The book looks at the ethical and strategic problems that arise when sovereign states have to live side by side with no higher authority above them. Hendrickson shows that this older tradition put respect for the rights of other nations at its center, and that it offered a real safeguard for peace in a world without a common ruler.

His central claim is that every state benefits from honoring reciprocity, justice and good faith. Few, he contends, have broken those principles as often as the United States. By setting them aside, American foreign policy has drifted into a murky, destabilizing realm where force and fraud have come to seem ordinary.

Written with both rigor and style, the book is aimed at students and scholars of international relations, political philosophy and history. It speaks to anyone interested in where the moral and practical limits of power in world affairs should lie.