Looking at interwar France, Britain, and Germany, Posen challenges each theory to explain the German Blitzkrieg, the British air defense system, and the French Army's defensive doctrine often associated with the Maginot Line. This rigorous comparative study, in which the balance of power theory emerges as the more useful, not only allows us to discover important implications for the study of national strategy today, but also serves to sharpen our understanding of the origins of World War II.
Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the Security Studies Program at MIT. He is the author of Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany between the World Wars (winner of the Furniss Award and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award) and Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks, all from Cornell.