How Wars End . By Dan Reiter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. Paths to Peace: Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War . By Elizabeth A. Stanley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 408p. $60.00 cloth.

the so-called good war in Afghanistan. The overarching message of the book is a policy prescription: Come Home, America. As the subtitle of the book suggests, America’s strength is its Achilles heel. To support this claim, Chris- topher A. Preble peppers the book with eye-opening num- bers and threads it with a convincing logic: The United States spends two times as much on its military than its NATO allies combined, 74 times what Iran spends, and 24 times India’s military spending. These exorbitant Pent- agon expenditures—which represent 93% of all American spending on foreign affairs—go toward high personnel costs, obsolete technologies in the F-22 fighter plane, and the maintenance of an oversized nuclear arsenal. The prob- lem is not simply the costs, although it is that, too, espe- cially in tight economic times. The problem is one of technological determinism. Once the United States has a large, well-equipped military, it feels compelled to use it. In other words, having equipped itself with a fancy ham- mer, everything is bound to look like a nail. The result is that the United States becomes overextended and its need- less interventions provoke counterbalancing efforts that threaten American interests. Who is the villain in this story? Preble cites Congress as a primary one. The defense industry has strategically placed its facilities in every congressional district, making the preservation of major weapon systems a bipartisan affair. Killing the V-22 Osprey aircraft, for example, was struc- turally impossible, since doing so would effectively kill jobs in representatives’ home districts, which would amount to political suicide. What are the answers to this conundrum of how power becomes a predicament? First and paradoxically, Congress is not just the problem but one of the solutions. While it has helped finance the large, unwieldy military, it is also, in principle, the institution that can constrain its use. The problem is that in practice, the motivation for Congress to appear hawkish typically mirrors that of the executive. According to a number of accounts, including Cramer’s in the previous volume, norms of militarized patriotism in the United States caused Democratic members of Con- gress to vote in favor of the Iraq war in order to appear strong on national security after 9/11. If indeed these militarized norms are present, then Congress is unlikely to play the moderating role that Preble hopes. A second answer to the problem of a large and over- reaching military is public scrutiny. As Preble notes, the current strategy—and by “current” he means the Bush Doctrine—of preventive and expansive war “doesn’t align with the wishes of the American people” (p. 167). That the public’s support should be a sine qua non for the use of force seems consistent with democratic principles but is potentially unwise in practice. It assumes that the public is enlightened and informed. It assumes that the public is more restrained in its preferences on force than the exec- utive, when public opinion data often tell a different story. After all, the public actually supported the Iraq war (albeit generally favoring a multilateral approach) before the administration began making the case for war and has continued to support operations in Afghanistan despite a number of qualified observers who now refer to those operations as a war of choice. According to public opinion polls taken in 2009–10, a strong majority of the Ameri- can public has indicated a willingness to use force to pre- vent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Such enthusiasm suggests that attending to public opinion could actually encourage intervention when the executive might other- wise be more restrained. A third answer is to exhaust diplomatic and economic instruments before using force, and to use only force to defend the American way of life, as Preble puts it. As the edited volume cautions us, however, elite framing can have a strong influence on whether the public, Congress, and the media ultimately come to support a particular use of force. As Trevor A. Thrall points out with the case of the Iraq war, support tended not to be contingent solely on the facts but on framing. Elites can probably frame almost any use of force as a mission to defend American values. Thus, the criterion that an intervention only be under- taken on this principle is indeterminate at best, easily manipulated at worst. Although some of these criteria for the use of force might be difficult to adhere to in practice, they certainly appear persuasive in a world of vast American budget deficits and open-ended wars. Indeed, the message of retrenchment finds support from an unlikely advocate: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. That Gates would go against all theories of bureaucratic politics to support reduced defense spending suggests that Preble is very much onto something. How Wars End. By Dan Reiter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 320p. $65.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. Paths to Peace: Domestic Coalition Shifts, War Termination and the Korean War. By Elizabeth A. Stanley. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 408p. $60.00 cloth. doi:10.1017/S1537592711001368 — Branislav L. Slantchev, University of California, San Diego What causes wars to end? Many years ago, Geoffrey Blainey (see The Causes of War, 1973) argued that if wars begin because states disagree about relative power and their inflated war expectations prevent them from finding a mutually acceptable deal that would preserve the peace, then wars end because combat provides the “stinging ice of reality” that corrects their estimates and opens up the road to agree- ment. Since this pioneering work, studies of crisis bargain- ing have proliferated, while the question of war termination has been relatively neglected. The two books under review are among the very few attempts to fill that glaring hole. What is especially intriguing is that whereas both studies June 2011 | Vol. 9/No. 2 493