Well-Oiled Diplomacy: Strategic Manipulation and Russia's Energy Statecraft in Eurasia (Suny Series in Global Politics)
As a window into understanding the relationship between  globalization and the pursuit of national security, Adam N. Stulberg  examines Russia's mixed success at leveraging energy advantages in Eurasia  from 1992 to 2002. Stulberg supplements traditional analyses of statecraft  by highlighting indirect market and regulatory mechanisms for altering the  behavior of foreign and subnational actors, as well as by demonstrating the  usability of "soft power" and global networks. The power of this new theory  of "strategic manipulation" is illustrated in several case studies,  including Russia's successful natural gas diplomacy toward Turkmenistan and  Kazakhstan, Russia's troubled oil diplomacy toward Azerbaijan and  Kazakhstan, and Russia's mixed success with commercial nuclear diplomacy  toward Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan."This superb new study goes beyond explanations of statecraft that rely  exclusively on market position, domestic institutional structure, and/or  coercive manipulation of hard power. Not only doesWell-Oiled  Diplomacyrefine our understanding of how and why each of these factors  matters, but it also enlarges our theoretical sophistication by elucidating  the importance of framing alternative options and manipulating the distance  between them. In this way, too, it augments formal (rationalist) models of  strategic interaction by incorporating risk alongside standard variables of  information symmetry and cost-benefit calculations of expected utility. And  finally, by identifying the critical role of discrete regulatory capacity,  it strengthens our knowledge of the relationship between domestic structure  and international politics. Scholars will be deeply indebted to Stulberg  for all of these reasons." -- Doug Blum, Providence College